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. And, of course, it’s all about the children.

Read it. Well, no, it doesn’t matter, but it is entertaining.

Read it. This is fascinating. Even with a tofu-brained beauty contestant, we have the technology.

Read it. I’ll bet you didn’t know that there were “ketchup economists”.

Read it. AlGore is not alone.

Read it. Boy, I’m sure surprised. Aren’t you surprised?

Read it. Star Wars missile defense here we come.

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

Tyler Cowan has his own take on it.

Read it. No surprises, but it’s still disappointing.

Read it. White & nerdy.

Read it. In case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it. So if we hire the Lebanese Army to take over in Iraq….

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

Read it. I guess we can’t say that progs don’t have any historical memory — their ability to hang on to a grudge exceeds that of a pit bull.

Read it. Some good news for a change.

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

Read it. This stuff is getting seriously astonishing.

Read it. Now this is downright clever.

Read it. Part three of an economist in foodie land.

Read it. More and more useful things are becoming solar-powered.

Read it. I knew it — AlGore is trying to kill poor people in order to make life easier for him and his rich friends.

Read it. Think anybody will count this as a win for the Bush administration? If so, I’ve got a used bridge in Minneapolis I’d like to sell you. Note the headlines it’s getting in the major media.

Read it. An interesting development, potentially of great value.

Read it. I can see multiple garage-studio versions of “Lord of the Rings” in my future.

Read it. Sometimes the Law of Unintended Consequences works in your favor.

Read it. Dartmouth is a poster child for what is happening to our educational system.

One of the more momentous cases in Supreme Court history, Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), involved an attempt by the state of New Hampshire to wrest control of the privately chartered school from its board of trustees. But a corporate charter like Dartmouth’s, the Marshall Court ruled, is the same as a private contract; the state could not simply annex the school.

Nowadays, of course, it wouldn’t be a problem — they’d just say they wanted to use it for something more socially useful, like low-income housing.

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

Read it. Be prepared to laugh.

A new and interesting blog, of possible interest to at least one person who reads here.

Read it. Tyler Cowan is not afraid to ask the hard questions:

What does it really mean if some part of your brain lights up?  Who really knows?

Who indeed?

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

Read it. Have you ever noticed that rodents get all of the good meds?

Read it. I can see AlGore as an “early adopter” of this technology.

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?

Read it. Only an idiot would believe that being left-wing will lead to being denied anything at any college these days. Unfortunately, we have many idiot judges, so there’s no telling where this will lead.

Read it. And the hits just keep on comin’.

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. Useless people, when exposed to useful people, feel bad, and share.

Read it. The applet itself is pretty entertaining. I like the little picture of me with a fairly accurate representation of my spare tire. Bryan’s right, though — actuarial predictions based on current data are like CBO estimates: they’re static rather than dynamic, and therefore systematically biased.

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

Read it. Using the term loosely, of course.

You’re a liberal. You’ve identified a problem — the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States; a net loss of 4.6 million jobs over the last 20 years. You’ve even done a decent job of identifying the causes of the problem: “Companies lose market share to foreign low-cost producers . . . or move their operations overseas in search of lower wages . . . or apply production techniques that require fewer workers.”

So, what’s your solution? Measures like reducing taxes and regulation to make U.S. manufacturers more competitive, perhaps? Of course not! Remember, you’re a liberal. No, your solution is what you yourself describe as a “massive” new welfare program for affected workers and communities that will contribute to making U.S. manufacturers even less competitive and destroy even more jobs!

Read it. And rightly so — a clear case of prosecutorial misconduct. As we saw in the Nifong case, prosecutors have a lot of leeway in the cases they bring and far too often abuse it.

Napoleon Bonaparte.

Charlemagne.

Julius Caesar.

Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Ronald Reagan.

Karl Marx.

Mother Theresa.

etc.

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”.)

Safire pursues the latest buzzwords into the underbrush.

Cringely always has good stuff, but I’m not sure about the applicability of this for the home; it would appear not to be cost-effective. But, of course, as we all know, what’s not cost-effective today may be dirt cheap and in everyone’s pocket in five years. So we’ll see.

I’ve long thought that we now have the technology available to us to do sort of semi-telecommuting, where a company has, instead of a lot of people in one central location, a bunch of small offices spotted around a metropolitan area (like DFW?) more central to where employees are likely to live.

Say a company has employees who live in Plano, Irving, Carrollton, and Arlington; have four small offices in each city in the little office complexes that are everywhere these days, and people just go to the nearest one as their work site.

Everybody uses e-mail and IM and conference calls these days anyway; in a high-tech company it’s just as easy to ship bytes across town as down the hall. Not only would this dramatically reduce commute times (making the employees happier and the environmentalists happier), but it would reduce the prospects of some disaster like a fire or a hurricane or a power outage killing the entire company’s productivity.