Met a man the other day who said his son had rung up a fortune in dental bills during an amphetamine habit; something I’d never heard of before. Now why wasn’t that mentioned in hi-skool “health” propaganda class? It’s scarier than most of what was.
Tim Worstall: Bad, Bad Minimum Wage. Guess what: a price floor reduces demand! In real life, even!
Sean Corrigan: We Shoulda Seen it Coming! Since the effects of loose money are well known to economists, why can’t business adjust for them?
Check Point Nullification Project; Road Block Registry
cultured bone wedding rings; reported in New Scientist
Patrick J. Buchanan: The Anti-Conservatives
electrodes against depression — me next!
The Smaller Picture: you help design a bitmap font
Selwyn Duke, a suspiciously white male, comments on the diversity police:
It’s a bit like insisting that every can of paint contain equal amounts of every color, so as to ensure that every color has a place in every can. This certainly would increase the constituent elements in every can, but the end result is that you would be left with only one color of paint in the world. Trying to make the constitution of every unit of society uniformly diverse does not yield true diversity, for it serves to make every unit the same.
Other links du jour — the jour in question being February 16-17, up to which I have caught in reading Rational Review News Digest:
Dave Kopel: The Klan’s Favorite Law
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Real Social Security Reform
Tim Worstall: The Money Is In the Long Tail
Those who are committed to these leftish values of both a statist economy and a redistributive tax system need to make a choice, which of those do you actually want?
Robin Hanson reports:
I just produced the following draft (PDF), which tries a new statistical approach on the question of which side is “right” in a media controversy. I applied it to the coverage of PAM, but it might also apply it to other controversies.
The Informed Press Favored the Policy Analysis Market
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known as “terrorism futures,” burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 28, 2003, and was canceled the next day. We look the impression given of PAM by 396 media articles, and how that impression varies with six indicators of article information: mentioning someone with firsthand knowledge, time since the firestorm, article length, a news versus an opinion style, and periodical prestige and period. All six indicators significantly and substantially predict more favorable impressions of PAM. A multiple regression predicts that a two thousand word news article in a prestigious monthly publication one hundred days later that mentioned an insider would give a solidly favorable impression of PAM.
Wodehouse, the next generation: a fan’s delightful movie concept
Bryan Caplan: The Idea Trap: why bad economic policy is so rarely repealed
Institute for Justice: The 25 Best Friends of Property Rights: amicus briefs in support of petitioners in Kelo v. New London
Rusin’s disco ball  |
golden angles  |
Saff & Kuijlaars  |
Examples of three algorithms for distributing nodes fairly evenly over a sphere. Those on the middle and right slice the sphere into parallel bands of equal area (much narrower than the white discs), and put one node (center of a disc) somewhere in each band. Saff & Kuijlaars place the nodes along a spiral path across the bands, keeping the distance between turns of the spiral roughly constant. Failing to grok how their rule does that, I approach it from another angle.
( . . more . . )
. . . I consider the right of property to consist in the freedom to dispose first of one’s person, then of one’s labor, and finally, of the products of one’s labor — which proves, incidentally, that, from a certain point of view, freedom and the right to property are indistinguishable from each other.
Frédéric Bastiat (1849): Protectionism and Communism. Cited in FFF Email Update.