Freunde Garthnaks

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	November 2008
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It's SO TRUE!

source

http://angry-economist.russnelson.com/and-a-pony.html

The whole "health care reform" thing totally baffles me. Where do all these idiots (and yes, you ARE idiots) who support health care reform think the money is going to come from for all these improvements? Cost savings?? Sorry, idiots, but if savings were already available, insurance companies would have already gotten them, and kept them for themselves. Is that not completely obvious? It's GONNA cost more, and it's GONNA cover less.

There is a way to get more for less, but it requires that people understand and accept that free markets actually work. And yet there are so many people who are convinced that somehoww health care is some kind of magic market where the laws of economics don't fly, where pigs do fly, and where everyone can get all the health care they want for almost no money.

And a pony.

( Day 74 - Slow day on the freeway )

Tags: 365 project 2009-2010
Current Mood: sleepy

An associate of mine is selling brand new in the box STAG Arms lowers. They are $110 each plus $8 shipping to your ffl. Sequential serial numbers are available. Multiple orders to same address pay same $8 shiping charge. Insurance extra. Send me message for specifics.

“But instead of working toward the elimination of for-profit insurance, H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers. This inevitably will lead to even more costs, more subsidies, and higher profits for insurance companies — a bailout under a blue cross.
Congressman Dennis Kucinich

Is he actually admitting that health care is currently not really a free market?

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/steinbrenner_u.html

Inside Higher Ed reports,

A small number of colleges have become much more competitive over recent decades, according to Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford University. But her study -- published by the National Bureau of Economic Research -- finds that as many as half of colleges have become substantially less competitive over time.

Tyler Cowen finds a link to the new paper.

I am not sure that I buy Hoxby's explanation for the phenomenon, which is that high school graduates nowadays are willing to travel farther to go to college. I suspect that high school graduates nowadays are the product of assortive mating, and college has become the ultimate status good for their parents. Affluent parents want their children to attend the colleges that the children of other affluent parents attend. This creates a highly skewed equilibrium.

Think of Harvard as like the Yankees. Enough money to buy whatever it needs to be a contender every year. Think of the typical college as like the Orioles or the Blue Jays. If they are fortunate, they can groom a few stars, but they will have too many weaknesses to be able to compete with the Yankees. Harvard's advantages are actually more durable than the Yankees'. One can imagine the O's or the Jays winning it all one of these years. Not so with Rutgers or George Mason.

By the way, in this metaphor, the analogue to Sabathia and Teixeira is not necessarily the faculty (even though you probably think this song is about you). I am thinking more about students. Steinbrenner U has a much larger share of outstanding students than outstanding faculty. If you have a Ph.D and want an academic position where you can encounter highly intelligent colleagues, you can go to any of at least three hundred institutions. But if you want to teach high-ability undergraduates, do not sink below the 40 most selective institutions. And if you want high-potential graduate students, do not sink below the top 10 graduate schools in your field.

http://www.objectivechance.com/automatic_insurrection

Randomly generates insurrectionary manifestos. Read. Lulz. Cilck "Again" at the bottom. Lulz. Repeat.

Current Mood: amused

Vaporizing THC, hot tub/rock band/cuddling seemed like, and were, a great, relaxing way to spend my Friday night. But the slack seems to have spilled over and destroyed my Saturday productivity :(. I've been lying around reading Less Wrong etc, when I had lots of home organization I wanted to get done. Feeling tired and unmotivated...well, I guess tired captures all of it.

Oh well, time to go run a work errand, that's productive at least.

great article, via Less Wrong:

The yelling isn't just disproportionate to the behavior, it has nothing to do with the behavior. She's angry about other things, but she's yelling about the milk.

The kid has learned nothing about good and bad behavior. In fact, they've learned that "bad behaviors" merit only calm discussion, while things that annoy Mom or Dad are met with wrath.

Watch your kid: are they more terrified of your reaction when they are caught in a lie, or when they accidentally knock over a glass?

The natural thing to do would be to yell about bad behavior ("did you push that boy on the playground?!?!") and be calmly annoyed when they spill milk. But.

But that doesn't happen, because the parent isn't being honest.

Tags: parenting

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/a_child_underst.html

As Bryan has mentioned, Monday, November 9 will be the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Chapter 3 of my book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist's Odyssey, I tell that story and integrate it with my recollections of explaining my excitement back then to my 4-year-old daughter, Karen.

I wrote most of the book between 1998 and 2001 and, for the passage about Karen, went from memory. But a year ago, while cleaning out stuff in my home office, I found a diary I kept occasionally about Karen when she was younger. I had written this passage on November 29, 1989, when my memory of what had happened earlier that month was much fresher. Here it is:

On Friday morning, November 10, I came into Karen's room while Rena [my wife] was waking her up and told her [Rena] all excitedly about the Berlin Wall coming down.
A couple of days later, when the new Newsweek came out with a cover story on the Wall, I decided to try to explain to her [Karen] what was going on. It was one of those significant events I really wanted her to understand, and I thought I could do so without prejudicing her but simply by telling her the facts.

I told her that the Wall was built to prevent people from leaving a certain area and that it was built when I was a young kid. If people tried to climb over it without permission, I told her, the men who built it shot them and tried to kill them. "That's not nice," said Karen. "That's rude."

But, I told her, the people who built it decided that it was wrong to stop people from leaving. And now I'm excited, I said, because they can leave. Then I showed my excitement. I said, "Now they can do things that they've always wanted to do like, like . . ." "Go to Disneyland!" said Karen. "That's right," I said. "And they can go to stores and buy neat things they haven't been able to buy like . . ." "Candy!" shouted Karen excitedly. "That's right!" I said. "Oh, boy!" [My notes don't make clear who said "Oh, boy!"] We got all excited together.

I think the two things she focused on are things that the Berliners really would think of first. (The media reported a few days later that the candy shops in West Berlin had sold out.) And by putting it in her terms, Karen understood a lot of the excitement and importance of the event.

Had no idea until just now that an unusual house Heinlein designed w/ his wife, and built himself, was to be found in Scotts Valley. It's the round one on this Google Map. Here are pictures of the house.

If you feel like giving away some money, The Heinlein Society has a program to re-introduce RAH's juveniles to public libraries. Seems like a good idea to me - I know I was influenced by reading him growing up.

Tags: sf

http://www.lewrockwell.com/grigg/grigg-w115.html

IMHO, the article doesn't go far enough discussing all the people who are harmed by basic arrest tactics, how much money is made by issuing tickets (though there are several settled legal cases learned about in law school) resulting in people who have to hire attorneys and how much it costs the state to imprison people who are then never-charged or get off when they've paid said attorney to remind the state they are innocent... but yet have the fingerprints forever on a DB.

and for those who don't know, the Las Vegas PD have killed two other folks in the inside of a week - death grip and another w/ taser. yes both had health problems but the entire situations are suddenly obfiscated. today's missive from Peter McFarlane at Q Bytes regales the UK police en-masse raiding secure lock boxes at various banks. "But we are not here to scare you. At Q Wealth we believe in presenting practical solutions for your freedom, wealth and privacy. What lessons can we learn from this fiasco?

In my view, the UK and the USA are probably the countries with the most out-of-control governments in the whole world. The expectation of privacy, and being considered innocent until proven guilty, seem to be things of the past in those countries. Others, in particular Australia, are playing catch up very fast. These are the kinds of places where raids like this could be expected again in the future."

Well, not really, but apparently his popularization of the concept prevented the inventor of the modern waterbed from getting a patent! Le Wik:

A form of waterbed was invented in the early 1800s by the Scottish physician Neil Arnott...Dr. William Hooper of Portsmouth, England, patented a waterbed in 1883. He devised it to relieve bed sore pains in his patients. Unable to contain the water and control its temperature, his invention was a market failure.

The modern waterbed was created by Charles Hall in 1968, while he was a design student at San Francisco State University in California. Fellow SFSU students Paul Heckel and Evan Fawkes also contributed to the concept. Hall originally wanted to make an innovative chair. His first prototype was a vinyl bag with 300 pounds (136 kg) of cornstarch, but the result was uncomfortable. He next attempted to fill it with Jell-O, but this too was a failure.[citation needed] Ultimately, he abandoned working on a chair, and settled on perfecting a bed. However, because a waterbed is described in the novels Beyond This Horizon (1942), Double Star (1956), and Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) by Robert A. Heinlein, Hall was unable to obtain a patent on his creation.

Tags: sf

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/if_all_goes_wel.html

If all goes well this link will take you to an article (with cool charts!) where I make an empirical case for telling the Recalculation story rather than pretending that we have the same economy that existed in the 1930's when John Maynard Keynes developed his model.

I'm scheduling this post to appear on Saturday, when the article itself is scheduled to appear. I hope that the link is correct.

NY Times: She Ran to Gunfire, and Ended It: Highly Trained Sergeant Brought Down Gunman at Fort Hood.

Pretty solid article (and commendable actions), though the NYT made it repeatedly clear that this was a Highly Trained Professional.*

* Do not try this as at home, leave it to the pros.**

**

phanatic makes an excellent point in the comments about "active shooter protocol", so I shouldn't have been so quick to dismiss the author's phrasing.

http://cafehayek.com/2009/11/keynes-on-mises-and-on-himself.html

http://cafehayek.com/?p=7182

Here’s a letter that I sent this morning to the Wall Street Journal:

Kudos to Mark Spitznagel for drawing attention to the important but neglected work of the late Ludwig von Mises (”The Man Who Predicted the Depression,” Nov. 7).

But while Mr. Spitznagel is correct that Keynesians ignored Mises’s 1912 book, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (and its 1934 English-language translation, The Theory of Money and Credit), Keynes himself did not ignore it – and therein lays a revealing tale.

When Mises’s German-language book first appeared in 1912, Keynes reviewed it in the prestigious Economic Journal, dismissing it as being unoriginal. Seems pretty damning, until we learn that Keynes himself, in his 1930 book Treatise on Money, confessed that “in German, I can only clearly understand what I already know – so that new ideas are apt to be veiled from me by the difficulties of the language.”

Keynes’s influential dismissal of Mises’s work was based not on anything as lofty as informed disagreement; it was based instead on incomprehension.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/119551.html

I am very pleased to announce the release of my latest book project, The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America: From H.P. Lovecraft to Leslie Marmon Silko.

A number of contemporary Native American authors incorporate elements of fantasy into their fiction, while several non-Native fantasy authors utilize elements of Native America in their storytelling. Nevertheless, few experts on fantasy consider American Indian works, and few experts on Native American studies explore the fantastic in literature. Now an international, multi-ethnic, and cross-disciplinary group of scholars investigates the meaningful ways in which fantasy and Native America intersect, examining classics by American Indian authors such as Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and Leslie Marmon Silko, as well as non-Native fantasists such as H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling. Thus these essayists pioneer new ways of thinking about fantasy texts by Native and non-Native authors, and challenge other academics, writers, and readers to do the same.

Praise for Intersection of Fantasy and Native America:

The essays in Sturgis and Oberhelman’s The Intersection of Fantasy and Native America open our eyes to the kinship between families of literature hitherto seen as separate-fantasy and Native American fiction-showing their interconnections in subject matter, in techniques of dream and trance and magical realism and post-modern meta-narrative, and most importantly, in their ability to penetrate appearances in search of underlying truths. The result is that we see each in light of the other and both as parts of the larger, so-called “mainstream,” and as essential to our understanding of literature, its writers and readers, in the 21st century.
—Verlyn Flieger, Professor of English, University of Maryland at College Park, Author of Interrupted Music, A Question of Time, and Splintered Light

With excellent and accessible scholarship, this book opens wide the door of Native American mythology and fantasy by connecting it with the fantasy many of us already know and love. I'm now convinced there's a vast treasure store of fantasy I haven't even begun to experience, and there's nothing more exciting than that for the lover of fantasy fiction!
—Travis Prinzi, Author of Harry Potter and Imagination and Editor of Hog’s Head Conversations

( Table of Contents )

The book is now available at Amazon and directly from Mythopoeic Press.

Okay, so I have to parade my accomplishment around shamelessly, since I'm shamelessly promoting Libertarianism.

I live in Winston-Salem, NC, the fourth largest city in North Carolina and finally (a small accomplishment, but an accomplishment-don't dare rain on my parade damnit!) published one of my "Letters to the Editor".

I invite you to take a look. Mine is the third one down called the "New Motivation for Schools":

http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/nov/06/its-time/opinion-letters/

Read some of the responses as well! The thread gets kinda interesting.

The full text as published in the Journal is below:

New motivation for schools

I am writing to comment on the Nov. 1 New York Times article you reprinted, "States lower academic proficiency standards." New motivation is needed to get our public schools to teach our children properly and deserve the tax money we, the taxpayers, are forced to give.
The Libertarian Party has it right when stating that competition is a good way to motivate public schools (which would be competing with private and charter schools for money) to actually teach our children instead of dumbing them down and passing them along to graduation without the ability to read or write.
ZEKE COCHRAN

Kernersville

And if anyone out there in the journalsphere happen to be native to North Carolina and would like to see whats going on in the NCLP...you can subscribe to our blog:

style="border: 0px;"
alt="Click to join LPNC"/>

In any case, thanks for looking!

Zeke

Click to join LPNC

Current Mood: excited

Does anyone know what the typical, retail mark-up on a firearm is? For example, say a given gun is retailing for $500; what price did the manufacturer most like sell that weapon for?

The reason I'm asking is because I have an idea for a gun, but I need to do some cost accounting equations to determine it's commercial viability. Any insight that those here could provide would be appreciated. Thank you.

After two years of thoroughly enjoying our old AT&T Tilt phones (and becoming completely dependent on them), it was time to upgrade... to the brand spanking new AT&T Tilt 2!

( Day 73 - New Fen toy! Glee! )

Tags: 365 project 2009-2010
Current Mood: geeky

Again, I recommend Fred. I don't always agree with him, but I agree often enough to suggest his column.

http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/119549.html

She went, she saw, she insulted. Hillary takes the grrrrrrrrr in her grrl too far.

The Firearms Coalition: The "No Guns" Insult:

How does it make you feel when you start to walk into a business and see a "No Guns" sign prominently posted? Are you angry? Offended? Indifferent? How do you react? Do you just turn around and take your business elsewhere? Complain to the management? Just ignore it and go on with your business? The members of the Virginia Citizens Defense League take "No Guns" signs as personally offensive and they let their offense be known - to the business, to fellow VCDL members, and anyone else who'll listen - or read a web page.
[...]
Posting a "No Guns" sign is not a business decision about patron safety nor is disarming just a minor inconvenience. Such signs are a political statement and an insult and they should never go unanswered.

Catepillars in Colorado

This must be a first. While squishy small-l libertarians have done well to rise in their places in the media, this may be the moment where the Libertarian has finally arrived. Beck is out and recovering in the hospital with an appendix rupture (I think), so Judge Andrew Napolitano subbed on FNC this afternoon. No, that's not the big deal. After all, this year started with Walter E Williams subbing for Limbaugh, so unambiguous Libertarians have hosted top-rated shows before.

What makes this segment special is that Napolitano was hosting, and his panel was John Stossel and Peter Schiff. Finally, all of my biases can be reinforced in one glorious mainstream echo-chamber! Normally, I have to watch a Reason TV video for this sort of validation. Question, are we ready for prime time?
Exit question: Are they sellouts for being popular? Libertarianism isn't grunge or punk, but it seems that way often.

Current Mood: silly
Current Music: The most obscure band, honest!

From the Queens Chronicle.

Not sure if anyone really cares, but I thought it was interesting that a candidate endorsed by the Libertarian Party won a seat in the largest city council in America (at least, I think NYC is the largest.) Under New York's electoral fusion system, Halloran was on the party lines for not only the Libertarian Party, but also the New York Conservative Party, the New York Independence Party, and of course, the Republican Party. I wonder how much "libertarianism" will influence him considering this broad electoral alliance.

What pisses me off is that Halloran's opponent, a Democrat, actively circulated fliers in the district telling people not to vote for this guy because he's a pagan. So much for Democrat values and whatnot. And in New York City, no less!

I'm also glad that a candidate endorsed by the United Federation of Teachers lost. Even though its a tiny victory, I always get a surge of happiness in my heart whenever that organization of putrified pond scum gets thwarted.

so unemployment in the US is now 'officially' 10% which means its actually significantly worse than that.

so here's my question....according to this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8346936.stm 10% unemployed = 15.7 million. that means the work force they're basing the % off of is 157 million people. the population of the US is 307 million.

who the fuck are the other 150 million people? obviously a large amount are children who cant work but does anyone know what the % of children are? also, how does the US determine who makes up the work force VS who makes up the population?

obviously it's all BS, i'm just wondering what the bs is based off of to help prove it's bs-ness to me

Approximately one hour ago, I finished the last of the 46 (+1 with no horns) transcriptions.

Shortly after that I made myself a breakfast burrito, because hey-I had bacon, eggs, tomatoes, and tortillas (and garlic, onions, and a slice of provolone), so why not?

I feel very good right now, and very accomplished.

However, upon further inspection, I also feel very unwashed.

Bathing. Bathing is probably next on the agenda.

http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/11/06/friday-lazy-linking/

Justice Is Blind Drunk. Daily Brickbats (2009-11-06). Cops are here to keep us safe. (Cont'd.) (Linked Friday 2009-11-06.)

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/11/book_update_4.html

It looks like I will have two books come out in the same month. The first one will be out in two weeks, but you cannot pre-order it on Amazon. The second one will be out in three weeks, and you can pre-order the book, called Unchecked and Unbalanced, now.

I think it will particularly interest those of you who have been following my arguments in favor of competitive government and against democracy. The book spells out those arguments and proposes ways to shift more decisions on "public goods" to markets.

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