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Men, of course, don’t have any comparable “love affair” with neckties. I suppose there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

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Lots of taxpayers would like to get the deal UAW workers still get.

As would I. If I had gone to work in an auto factory right out of high school, I’d be better off financially than I am right now, with three degrees (one from Yale).

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

In Japan, “nationalist economics” is a serious, well-thought out philosophy that entails short run sacrifices for the long run general welfare. In the West, our elites have been trained to scoff at nationalist economics as mere mindless populism, but the best minds in Japan have developed an economic culture that’s perhaps too sophisticated for American economists and their fellow travelers in the punditry to understand.

The Chinese, in contrast, have followed the Taiwanese model of manufacturing anonymously under contract to Japanese and American brand names. They churn out stuff and let other countries’ companies sell it as their own. For the Chinese, it’s all about meeting minimum quality and cost parameters to get the next deal, not to build a reputation with the public for high quality. How many recognizable brand names have the Chinese created so far? There’s Lenovo, and then there’s …

Megan McArdle considers the President’s plan.

Well, the obvious point is that it represents a massive transfer to borrowers from lenders and the rest of us.  As far as I can tell, there is no penalty for having borrowed more than you could realistically afford to repay–not so much as a speck of dirt on the credit report.  The administration’s release talks a lot about “responsible homeowners”, but very few responsible homeowners have payments that amount to 43% of their monthly income.  There are exceptions, of course, such as people who have just lost their jobs, but most of the people being helped are, nearly definitionally, people who bought more house than they could afford in the belief that prices would keep rising indefinitely and they would make big bucks.  It was leveraged investing, just like a hedge fund, and often at the same kind of leverage ratios.

But I bet they all vote Democrat.

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How useful and constructive.

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I’m curious to see whether they will cut her hand off. Muslims do that sort of thing, you know.

Megan McArdle prods our collective memory.

Our memories are distorted by two things:  first, the tendency of all cultures to focus on their own outliers (many fewer people work for silicon valley startups in real life than in either our entertainment, or the popular imagination), and second, the fact that the people who have written about the period are abnormally likely to have come from successful families who pushed them through an education.  Their memory of a well-appointed blue-collar childhood in a nice suburb on Dad’s generous steelworker wages endures; few memories of a straggling blue-collar childhood as the child of a factory janitor do, because those kids were less likely to go to college and become people of letters.  The successful and educated are disproportionately likely to be represented in all parts of our written and spoken culture, from man on the street interviews to letters to the editor.  History really is written by the winners.

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No word on whether he was a Party member.

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Whatever their formal nationality, these people are Americans where it counts.

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Slow news day.

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At a weekend meeting in Istanbul, 200 religious scholars and clerics met senior Hamas officials to plot a new jihad centred on Gaza.

Isn’t that special.

Steve Sailer delves into one of the burning questions of our day.

Read it.

It’s sad to watch. The Golden State — which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world — has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation — worse even than Louisiana’s. It also has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

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Well, that appears to depend on whose talking. And sometimes not even then.

Cringely is, oddly enough, talking about Microsoft, not Walmart.

He has some suggestions.

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Saturn goes the way of all flesh, and Pontiac is not far behind it.

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I am not making this up.

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Liberals shoot the wounded….

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And peole will pay money for this.

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Apparently she has decided to sue search engines because searches on her name lead to malware and porn. (Her husband is a lawyer, which may explain the lawsuit but probably hasn’t got anything to do with the results of the searches. Probably.)

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And about time, too.

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I am not making this up.

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Hong Kong director Derek Yee considered toning down the violence in “Shinjuku Incident” so it could pass censorship rules, but decided not to because he thought it would hurt the integrity of the movie.

Of course.

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Those scientists are sure a talkative bunch.

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Now that the giant terrorist rabbit was killed by those mean Israelis, Hamas has found a replacement.

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It appears that no errors have been found in Zalmai’s translation: the objection of Muslim clerics is that the Dari translation does not appear alongside the original Arabic text.

I feel much the same way about translations of the Bible that don’t contain the Greek text. But that’s me.

Lucky for Zalmai and Ahmad that Afghanistan now has a democratic government controlled by moderate Muslims rather than the Taliban and other members of the tiny minority of intolerant extremists, hunh?

My thought exactly.

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The problem is, there’s one group that did not assume the risks of the individual autonomy boom.  Children are not benefited by the unstable new co-habiting options that adults are devising for themselves.  Adults are merely rationalizing their own preferences when they intone that children are better off raised by separated parents than in an unhappy marriage.  Hogwash.  Most children would far prefer two unhappy married parents to two happier divorced or never-married parents enjoying their new freedom or new spouses.  Perhaps eventually, if any expectation that a procreative union is permanent is abolished, children will adjust, but I doubt it.  The preview afforded by the black community is not reassuring (though I admit that inner-city Milwaukee is not readily comparable to Lyons or Stockholm).

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For years, we’ve been among those pointing out that the really important thing in economic growth isn’t invention, but innovation. It’s the process of actually taking an idea and successfully bringing it to market in a way that people want that matters in the long run. Coming up with new ideas is only a small part of the process. That’s why we often have so much trouble with the way the patent system works. It greatly enhances the role of simply coming up with the new idea, and then makes the important part — the innovation — a lot more expensive.

Preach it, brother.

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Children coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s were born into families that, on average, enjoyed the greatest material prosperity and the best housing the world had ever known. The security offered by an enormously expanded and comfortable middle class allowed these children to crusade on behalf of various causes. Those who called themselves “progressive” pushed to expand individual civil rights, sometimes at the expense of what others perceived as community rights or duties, but at the same time they were often deeply suspicious of capitalism and markets and for this reason pushed to restrict the rights of private property owners in order to expand on their own notions of community rights.

Take the case of the Bay Area, where land prices were on par with urban areas elsewhere in the country up until 1970. Then, as the area pioneered in land use regulations of every kind, house prices started a steep climb. Where the rule of thumb had long been that the average American family in any given urban market would expect to pay about three times its annual salary for an average house, by the early years of the 21st century it had reached the point where that average house in the Bay Area would be the equivalent of ten, eleven or even twelve years of the average family’s income. At the same time, however, in lightly regulated urban areas, even extremely dynamic ones like those of Atlanta, Houston or Phoenix, house prices registered no comparable rise against incomes.

An excellent analysis. The people who whine most tediously about the effects of the current crisis are the very ones who created it in the first place with their short-sighted and elitist policies.

Bryan Caplan asks an interesting question and finds an even more interesting answer.

Alexander Pope said “For forms of government, let fools contest / That which is best administered is best.”

If the government provides services efficiently and doesn’t steal too much of your money, do you really care whether it’s democratic. I don’t. People forget that democracy is a means, not an end.

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The affidavit was Burris’s third attempt to describe his contacts with the Blagojevich team during the months before his surprise appointment. It differed on several key points from the testimony he gave under oath to an Illinois House of Representatives impeachment committee.

Now that he’s safely in the Senate, Burris feels comfortable revealing that he’s a serial liar. Isn’t that special.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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I am not making this up.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Try finding something this interesting in an American newspaper. Go ahead — I dare you.

More here.

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Anything to avoid exercise.

David Friedman is always worth reading.

In an earlier post I proposed an economics course built around World of Warcraft. I have much less experience teaching statistics than teaching economics and I suspect the game is less suited for the former than the latter purpose. But it does occur to me that it provides quite a lot of opportunities for observing data and trying to infer patterns from it and so could be used to both explain and apply statistical inference. And I suspect that, as in the case of economics, application to a world with which the student was familiar and involved and to problems of actual interest to him would have a significant positive effect on attention and understanding.

Read it.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

Steve Sailer isn’t afraid to point to things at which some would rather not have people pointing.

For a couple of years, I’ve been pointing out that because African-American culture has become so narrow and inward-looking, it’s now having a harder time producing high achievers outside of Officially Black fields such as basketball, football, and some forms of entertainment. Thus, the black race is increasingly represented at the top of many categories by half-black individuals (typically raised by white mothers or white maternal grandparents). Barack Obama is only the most obvious example of the rise of this New Mulatto Elite. (In contrast, the Old Mulatto Elite, such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, generally had white ancestors in the paternal line.)

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Obama proclaims his stimulus bill is earmark-free, but that claim is a bit Clintonian. Turns out, it depends on what the meaning of the word earmark is. What if a provision in the bill doesn’t name one specific project, but is written so narrowly that only one project is eligible?

Sure, that doesn’t name one powerplant, and it leaves open the idea of funding multiple powerplants, but there’s plenty of evidence that this line was intended as—and will function as—an earmark for the FutureGen coal gasification powerplant in Mattoon, Illinois. “There’s no other plant that would be eligible,” says John Hart, spokesman for Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK.  Durbin’s office, the Mattoon project’s champion, didn’t return calls for comment.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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So much for the energy crisis. Now – on to Global Warming!

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More evidence that Wal-Mart isn’t Auschwitz after all.

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A new guide for journalists warns against using terms which discriminate against people of a certain age.

Oh, for crying out loud. This is just absurd. Terms don’t discriminate. Using terms doesn’t discriminate. People discriminate. Old people are old people. They aren’t going to get any younger by not being called old people. Sheesh.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Florida.

Read it.

Actually, if it’s only 10 grand, they’ll probably pay it just to get rid of her. An American would have sued for 10 million.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have ridden on that ride without untoward result, Disney ought to counter sue the girl and her mother for “negligence in her design and operation”.

And claiming that a fairground ride makes Disney a “common carrier” is absurd when talking about a mechanism that delivers you right back to the point where you started. If she had been on the monorail, or even a golf cart, she’d have a case. But not a roller coaster.

And anybody who gets on a ride named “The Tower of Terror” really deserves whatever she gets.

If I were Disney, I’d have her whacked. It wouldn’t cost all that much more, and it would remove her from the gene pool. In fact, have her mother whacked too; venality probably runs in the family.

Read it.

A House committee held an important hearing Thursday morning on the issue of “libel tourism.” That’s the practice of bringing libel suits against American authors in other nations, particularly the United Kingdom, where First Amendment protections do not apply and where the burden of proof is placed on the defendant rather than on the plaintiff.