Got a junk call (from 214-279-0990) just now on my mobile telephone. I think it’s my first ever in seven years.

In unrelated news, the humidity that was just barely unpleasant earlier today is now coming down as a very fine drizzle, a pleasant change, and very unusual for June. Mom tells me California has been getting rain that normally goes to Cascadia.

I’ve heard that Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) started thinking about spontaneous order because of an incident in the Great War. Austrian forces were routed in a battle in Italy, and fled leaderless through the mountains; and far more of them got home safely than were expected to.

This says thousands of people at the WTC survived because they ignored advice from on high.

Reading an account of oral arguments in Ashcroft Gonzales v. Raich, a couple of months ago, gave me a sinking feeling: the Court was clearly hostile and the good guys were failing to make what I considered obvious points.

Guess what, folks, the Court’s flirtation with federalism was no more serious than you’d expect it to be in a body appointed by the Potomac Regime. (See also. The view hypothetically attributed to Scalia, a dissenter in Lawrence v. Texas, is explicitly echoed by O’Connor’s dissent in Raich.)

When Netflix sends me a movie, up to now it has usually told me to expect the disc in two days — longer if the nearest copy is somewhere other than San Jose (I’m in an adjacent county). In a year and a half, I’ve come to expect the disc to appear in my mailbox the day before Netflix tells me to expect it. Now, for the first time, Netflix tells me to expect today’s shipments tomorrow. “Good shooting, kid, now don’t get cocky.”

Once upon a time, probably 1983, I had an idea to maximize diversity in a representative assembly. You vote for more than one candidate. The ballots are counted once for each seat. On each count one winner is chosen, and if you voted for that winner your ballot is discarded. A few years later (in an article by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Republic‘s special on the bicentennial of the present Constitution, 1987) I read about the Single Transferable Vote, a much more elegant idea: don’t throw out the winning ballots, discount them so that their aggregate value is lessened by the number of votes needed to win one seat.

Once upon an other time, namely 1993, asked how to build a straight road without eminent domain and without being held up for extortionate prices by opportunistic holdouts, I suggested buying options on land until the optioned parcels include a useful path; holdouts would see offers decline rather than rising. A few months ago I read (was it in The Freeman?) that this is standard practice for pipelines. (2017: But how straight does a pipeline need to be?)

And once upon yet another time, circa 1984–7, I proposed funding public goods by conditional donations: by contract, the donors arrange to pay a specified fraction of the budget if and only if enough others make similar arrangements. Now I learn from Mike Linksvayer that this concept has a name – assurance contracts – and an improvement by Alex Tabarrok, dominant assurance contracts.

. . Speaking of voting, I see that a voting reform bill has been introduced in Congress. It would restore the States’ discretion (denied since 1967) to elect Representatives by proportional representation in multimember districts; likely some states will do so to reduce the decennial hassle of gerrymandering. The bill also requires the States to run “instant runoff” elections for federal offices; though instant runoff is fairer than plurality election (even with a conventional runoff), it is also onerous, and I don’t think it’s within the authority of Congress to require it – and thereby forbid approval voting which I like better still, partly because it is much simpler to operate.

Adventures of Mr Coo, a wacky bit of Flash animation from Basque-land. (Cited by JoAnne Schmitz.)

At Languagehat, some interesting brief remarks on the Belgian aristocracy’s efforts to seem less alien to Flanders.

Warren Meyer on why libertarians write blogs (cited by Arnold Kling)