Sunday reading

• Cities and Ambition -

  "A friend who moved to Silicon Valley in the late 90s said the worst thing about living there was the low quality of the eavesdropping."

  I've always judged cities by the quality of the homeless and convenience stores, but there's all sorts of different metrics I suppose.
• What if politicians pandered to economists?
• The AJC now has foreclosure listings

John Robb's annoying moments

On the whole, I like John Robb, his book Brave New War was thought provoking, and his upcoming book on Resilient Communities looks to be good as well.

But then posts like this one anger me to no end. He goes over current world trends in apocolyptic tones and then closes with

Except for the fanatical optimists, market mystics (the divine invisible hand), and the naive/uninformed, the debates over these trends are over.

He always mentions the broad trends with no real mention of where economics might shift the current, instead he just brushes that off with the thesis (this is what I gather from reading him anyway) that practically all of the benevolent inputs are dynamic, whereas the benevolent inputs are static.

This is no ordinary Tuesday

My predictions are Obama and Huckabee here in GA. On a related note, I met my first Ron Paul door to door guy on Saturday, he seemed very nice. He gave me a bumper sticker too.

Before I go vote, here are some links that caught my eye:

• Barstool Economics
• Leading denominations by location
• Your tax dollars by at work - Atlanta cop and Duluth cop in shoot out
  

Quote of the moment

I was perusing Marginal Revolution (about vouchers) and came across this comment

In other words, even if a child’s chance of going to the state university is not increased by his new school, the kid’s chance of ending up in the state penitentiary is radically decreased. This consideration might not be of primary concern to many who support vouchers, but to those who live in the ghetto, it is of PRIMARY concern. Schools, more than anything, breed gangs. Like the projects of old, when you are FORCED to a geographical location, you make gang recruiting easier - and your kids chances of entering the prison system that much greater.

I saw a lecture by Nobel Laureate James Buchanan many years ago and before he veered off into pure math he said that there were three types of social organization, which he dubbed (something like this anyway), the closed circle, the open circle, and the broken circle. The closed circle is a prison, the open is free association, specifically where members have the right to exit and the right to exile rouge members and the broken circle, which is no association at all.

The Buchanan point came to mind...

Throwing stuff to the wall

Via Marginal Revolution, here comes today's quote of the day

Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don't overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.

The market is a discover process after all.

Tuesday link roundup

• Advice from your public defender (best of Craig's List)
  
• Why we should hang out: a mathematical proof, this sounds like something I would do actually
• Interesting post on academic taboos from David Friedman
• Another blog post about Sarah Stever, from one of my realtors actually
• Ron Paul Facts, my favorite -

  Ron Paul has been shot at more than a dozen times, but the
  

  "pro- 2nd Amendment" bullets refuse to harm him.

The market has spoken

This editorial from the AJC is an annoying example of the current hysteria about subprime loans

Describing the wreckage of the subprime mortgage collapse as part of the normal business cycle is akin to characterizing the devastation of New Orleans as the aftermath of a seasonal downpour.

In both disasters, human blunders and government inattention played pivotal roles. And the market can no more be counted on to fix the subprime mess than Mother Nature could be trusted to fix up the mess after Hurricane Katrina.

Government must intervene quickly and firmly in the subprime fiasco, in helping desperate borrowers keep their homes if possible and, more important, in ending abusive lending practices that contributed to the national leap in mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

New federal and state laws must couple strong prohibitions against abusive lending with equally strong enforcement and consequences. The pain must be felt by the duplicitous mortgage brokers who talked the homeowners on Elm Street into loans with hidden brokerage fees and unnecessarily high interest rates all the way up to the investors on Wall Street who profited from the bundling and selling of these subprime loans.

The article then goes on to describe several cases of fraud that happened in the Atlanta area, fraud as everyone knows is already illegal. Foreclosure and the denial of credit IS the marketing working, mainly in stopping people from buying homes they can't afford. Absent fraud, no one is forced into a mortgage, and everyone knows how much they'll be paying.

I suppose I'm more sensitive to this now (having just bought a house) than most times, but it's quite maddening.

Shock Doctrine reviews

This is a week or two late, but anyway, check out Tyler Cowen's review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. You should also read this interview with her and Alan Greenspan.

Klein is the current favorite of the anti-globalization left. If after reading the articles you feel like cursing the fire department for making your house all damp and soggy after a fire, then you understand her quite well.

This is funny

I forget how I came across this, but check out Why Marrying For Money is Never a Good Idea.

Tuesday night rapid fire

• Robert Kaplan on private military contractors
• John Robb on private military contractors - one thing he doesn't mention (and I don't think he has mentioned it before) is that there could be many, many problems with highly trained combat forces under no particular command, they would make quiet a crime crew. It's unlikely with the current stock of PMCs, but it might be with the next generation.
  
• Solar Power is becoming a vested interest
• For some reason validator callout extenders won't work with a custom validator with the standard Visual Studio code, but it works with this code.
• Nazi War Criminal was found in Metro Atlanta. Why must events like these be the only time Atlanta makes national news?
• Building a tree fort as an exercise in project management
• DNI on leaving Iraq
• A client of mine was in the AJC today, I did the Atlanta Arrangements site late last year.
• Secret Geek has a nice post on the Principles of Scale
• Tyler Cowen on income inequality. I wonder if anyone is actually worried about this. No one seems to be, but everyone thinks everyone else is scared stiff. One thing to bear in mind is that the bottom is fixed at zero
  

Economics for five year olds

Arnold Kling has a great post on explaining economic development to five year olds, with the hope that journalists understand it. The version he came up with was this

There are lots of people in the world who will give us things that we want, as long as we give them something they want in return. This is called trading. Some of the things we trade are hard to see--they are like nice thoughts. Other people keep thinking up nicer things to trade with us, and we keep thinking up nicer things to trade with them. We keep trading nicer and nicer things. Many years ago, people had not thought up all of these nice things, so they did not have as much to trade as we do. That is why people who lived back then were poor, and we are not.

Now if he'll only do one for deadweight loss.

A civics quiz

I got this from Megan McArdle, it's the Civic Literacy Quiz!

I scored 57 out of 60 correctly — 95.00 %!

How about y'all?

Greespan

Alan Greenspan impressed me on the Daily Show last night.

One minor thing, they ran out of time before Greenspan could fully respond to Jon Stewart's question of "Why do we favor investment over work?". The question was in response to the stock market jumping in response than a greater than expected prime rate cut. The question does demand a long answer, and the part Greenspan didn't have time to get to was

"The tax code is used to incentivize investment and work (a very approximate answer, it does that whether we want it to or not). The role of the Federal Reserve is to regulate the money supply and ensure that a dollar a year from now buys about as much as a dollar today."

Shock Doctrine

A well done piece of propaganda is Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, available on MySpace TV. It's another attempt to get everyone riled up about income disparity, which no one seems to mind. Unmentioned is the fact that it is an indie film, being released on a social networking site, and being given away. Hardly something that would happen in a poor society.

Maybe countries are in the Gap for a reason...

From the Economist Blog

Why would anyone with a robust sense of reality simply assume that each national jurisdiction contains the seeds of a viable economy? If we insist on thinking of development as a matter of national growth, we may well consign most of the bottom billion, and their children and their grandchildren, to unrelenting poverty trapped within their UN-recognised national prisons. Our real moral concern should not be the Central African Republic, but its unfortunate denizens. The best thing for their prospects may simply be to get out--to leave for a place where growth has already commenced. The West's many attempts to jumpstart growth where the world's poorest already reside has yet to work. So why does the international community insist on betting the poor's lives on the gamble that it will, finally, some day?

While development has worked in some places, South Korea and Taiwan come to mind, there is little compelling evidence that a society locked into antiquated social capital can shift to a modern one absent the destruction of the existing social capital. The shocks would be a significant war, or a tyrannical government (i.e. China) willing to uproot society.

Its food for thought anyway.

Monday morning roundup

My apologies for the light blogging, work has been a frenzy lately. You should all read

• The Buy Vs Rent Calculator on the NYT
• HDR in Photoshop CS3
• The coolest Silverlight application to date
• Will Wilkerson makes an excellent point on the current supply-side forforah going on these days.
  

Quick links while uploading

An assortment of things I've read while I've been uploading things today

• The golden age of Chicago prostitution - The Everleigh sisters are respoinsible for the term "get laid". An interesting read - the more things change...
• Rifle Robots!
• John Allen Paulos has a new book out soon, I think it's going to a more civil (and knowing Paulos well written and interesting) version of the recent Richard Dawkins screed. My favorite blurb from the Amazon page "A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind"
• How to build your business without quitting your day job
• Firefox tune-ups
• Conan O'Brian hates my homeland - favorites

  Brazil
  Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.
  
  Burkina Faso
  In the traditional tribal language, that's Burkina for "land of" and Faso for "people who want to get the hell out of Burkina Faso."
  
  Colombia
  You'll come for the enticing beauty of the Caribbean Sea. You'll stay because you've been kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a Dodge Dart.
  
  East Timor
  It takes a lot to admit you live on the bad side of Timor.

Another interview worth reading

In this case, with industrialist Charles Koch. It's seems that most interviews on the internet are with either celebrities or analysts, and seldom anyone who has taken his own risks and created his own empire.

Saturday link roundup

• A nice how-to on HDR photography
• Survivorman is blogging again!
• The greatest living American you've never heard of.
• The world's stupidest Fatwas, my favorite -

  Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together.

  The injuction against the Polio vaccine is scary though.
• It seems that tires will outlive us all
• More on the Kathryn Johnson case
• A Slate article on the ethanol haters, of which I am one. He leaves out the fact that creating ethanol takes more energy than it produces.
  

Friday in appreciation, volume II

The In Appreciation for this week goes not to a person, but to the economic force known as Capital Flight. Wikipedia defines it accurately as

when assets and/or money rapidly flow out of a country, due to an economic event that disturbs investors and causes them to lower their valuation of the assets in that country, or otherwise to lose confidence in its economic strength. This leads to a disappearance of wealth and is usually accompanied by a sharp drop in the exchange rate of the affected country (devaluation).

Modern technology makes it easy to move money from one country to another; giving an immediate cost to bone headed economic decisions and plundering. For examples, think of governments defaulting on debts and anything that has happened in Zimbabwe over the past few years.

So Capital Flight, for enforcing some degree of fiscal and monetary responsibility on the governments for the world, you get my second Friday In Appreciation.

Finally, a problem we can blame on the Mexicans

It's not a major problem, but from some reason they (Mexicans) bicycle approaching traffic, which is the way it's done in Mexico, but not in America. This endangers the cyclist as the amount of time between perception and action is dramatically reduced for both parties, which means that they have less time to avoid each other. It's particularly bad at night. Also the Tullock Effect is reduced as avoidance is not the clear responsibility of either party.

I saw three people doing it yesterday.

New Jersey outlaws sale of many bikes

Read this post on Asymmetrical Information. It would seem to outlaw both of quite a few bikes no matter how you read the law.

You would think that not having the wheel fly off is incentive enough to secure it properly, but if someone says "it's for the children" then it must be a good idea.

Wednesday link roundup

• An interesting post on autism and vaccines
  
• This post from EconLog

  Back in 1980, State correctional facilities had 9 violent criminals for every drug offender. By 2003, that ratio was 2.6:1.

• DOD Braces for a fight with Pelosi

  Pentagon officials are bracing for a fight with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over her desire to allow lawmakers’ adult children to tag along on taxpayer-funded travel for free.
  
  Pelosi wants them to be able to fill the role of lawmakers’ spouses when the latter are unable to make a trip because of health issues or work commitments.

  The shameful part is that they can say all that with a straight face. "Fill the role of Lawmaker's spouses", ridiculous.

Monday link roundup

• Popular Science has a predictions market
• Global Warming makes you fat! Really! Or so say the environmentalists. For some reason we treat a virgin birth as a matter of faith, but the weather in thirty years is a scientific fact.
• Safari is now available on Windows, I'm not sure why.
• An-arrgh-chy - The economics of Pirates. HT: ZenPundit
  

The good side of ethanol

It would seem that the viability of ethanol is finally being questioned in the environmental movement. About time too.

A good post on immigration

From Kerry Howley in Reason

The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”

Line of the moment

I came across this podcast of Steven Landsburg, author of More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics and found it quite entertaining. I thoroughly enjoyed his earlier works, especially The Armchair Economist (much better than Freakonomics). In the excerpt it has this bit:

...If your common sense tells you otherwise, remember that common sense also tells you the earth is flat.

First thoughts on Brave New War

I just finished reading John Robb's Brave New War and I'm struck by how similar his vision of the future was to David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom.

I'll have my review of the book later. On the whole I liked it a lot.

The mother of all abortion posts

Glen Whitman has pretty much all of the abortion analogies (all five of them) that enter the logical debate about the topic.

It's an odd thing. I used to debate him quite frequently on a now-defunct website, and he caused me to change my position on what the legality of early-term abortion should be with analogy number five

The Negligent Driver. When you negligently or deliberately cause harm to another person, the law requires you to provide compensation, either with money or some kind of action. If your negligent driving puts a pedestrian in the hospital, you are liable for his medical bills. Likewise, one might argue, your sexual behavior creates the risk of placing a fetus in a very precarious situation. If so, you are liable for the fetus’s care during that time. This analogy emphasizes the responsibility of people for the risks they create, thereby dodging the previous analogy’s “no invitation” problem. The difficulty with this analogy comes from the definition of “harm.” Harm doesn’t mean being in a difficult situation – it means being in a worse situation than you would have been otherwise. Were it not for your reckless driving, the pedestrian would (in all likelihood) still be walking around, safe and sound. Were it not for the act of sex, the fetus would not exist at all. To sustain the claim that the act of sex creates a risk of harm to the fetus, you have to insist that existence in a dependent state is worse than sheer non-existence. If the act of sex constitutes a tort, it is the only tort I can think of that creates the very person it victimizes.

I'm the only person I know of who changes his mind on abortion due to a logical argument.

Thursday rapid fire

• In camera photo tricks that get you around Photoshop
• Business 2.0 magazine fails to back things up with disastrous consequeces
• Getting fat can mean that men are committed to a relationship, among many other things
  

More wisdom from my old econ professors

The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

"Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true".

As gun control is the abstract topic of the week

Megan McArdle (in the Atlantic) has some interesting thoughts and graphs on the subject.

More Friedman

While looking over David Friedman's blog today, I came across this article on "The Economics of War". It's an interesting read. Here is another one I haven't read in ten years or so, Paying for Crime Prevention it winds up being a partial defense of the system we have in America where the government is not liable if a defendent is acquitted at trial. To wit:

The outcome of a criminal case depends, among other things, on decisions made by police and prosecutors. Consider a situation where, at some point in the proceedings, the police begin to suspect that they may have the wrong man. Suspicion is not certainty; they can choose to ignore the evidence that their suspect is innocent or someone else is guilty. They can also choose to do their best to keep such evidence out of sight of the defense. How likely they are to do so depends in part on the cost to them of being proven wrong. Under a legal system in which acquitting the defendant, or dropping charges after he has been imprisoned for some time, results in sizable cash penalties against the police department or its individual officers, the police have a strong incentive to repress their doubts and push for a conviction.

How serious this problem is depends on a variety of factors. If there is a substantial chance that the conviction of an innocent will eventually be discovered and reversed, a police department that suppresses such evidence risks having to pay for years in jail instead of months. If, on the other hand, such a reversal is unlikely, suppressing evidence may be an attractive gamble.

I suppose that is another variant of the Gandhi game, or turning the other cheek as it's less tactically known.

Schelling points

I refered to these in an earlier post, so I figure a definition is in order. I originally came across it in David Friedman's ruminations on the origins of Natural Rights theory. He defines it broadly as "a possible solution to the problem of coordination without communication".

"Communication" might be better defined as meaningful communication. He lists many examples in the essay where no communication is possible, as well as zero-sum conflict where communication would not be believed.

The functional definition (i.e. the way I use the term) is that a Schelling Point is a point or marker that is obvious to both sides without explanation, and could also mark some point of principal to one of the sides, which would cause that side to expend more effort defending it than the point might seem to be worth.

The usual example of a Schelling Point is a river (flowing North to South in this example), with an opposing tribe on each side who need to set a border. There is no significant difference difference in land between using the river as the border, and using the river plus five feet West of the border. However, the river itself will always be chosen as the border because A)it's obvious, and B) one tribe could very well attach special meaning to the river above and beyond the land itself, i.e. the Western Tribe shall not stain the ground made holy by the River God (or something like that).

The other example is abortion. The two popular Schelling Points at which "life begins" are considered to be either at conception (by the pro-lifers) and birth (by the pro-choicers). Both of these points are trivial in a lot of ways; the components are largely the same as they were before each event (differing in union in one way, in location and dependence the next). But, both of them are obvious to both sides in the dispute and both can be plausibly seen as having special meaning to either side (Ensoulment in one case, no physical attachment to the mother in the other).

In looking over this, I see I've called birth "trivial". Oh well, the point still stands.

Pithy post on tortue

Tdaxp has an interesting post on the government use of torture here, to wit

My reply back to him mainly concerned, the subtile, which is The inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle—without resorting to torture—and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq. The title's odd in that it is both boring and inflammatory.

The boredom first. I can imagine an article subtitled The inside story of how programmers at Microsoft Corporation released SQL Server 2008 on time -- and without using hash tables.

I've always found the specific opposition to torture strange. We're willing to jail people for the rest of their lives, hold them without trial, and bomb various countries which involves inherent civilian death and maiming. Drawing a line at torture seems odd to say the least. I suppose to some people it is a categorical difference in government action, and not an incremental difference in human suffering.

Now that I think about it, it does make for a good Schelling Point. It is objectionable to differing degree to both sides of the argument, as well as obvious to both. It is also seen as a categorical tactic (though not strategy) by both. Hmmm....

European vs American Talents

From Marginal Revolution

Because European government works better, Europeans demand more of it and get more of it. American liberals look at Europe and see (sometimes) better results per dollar spent. They then conclude that America should be more like Europe, whereas in reality America would end up spending more to get more bad American government.

It's a very nice argument against moving towards European style nationalized health care, to wit, we would not get the same results as they do. Instead we would probably just magnify existing problems.

Sunday round up

• A good read on economics and statistics
• Islam and Christianity - IBM and Microsoft - Embrace and Extend
• Resiliancy, and how to measure it
  

A rogue Core

Subadei has some interesting thoughts on the possibility of a new and hostile Core (shortly defined as a group of connected, interdependent nations) involving Iran, Venezuela. However, I think there is not much to be worried about. Assuming they do create/evolve into a second core, they would have enough incentives/core-like attributes not to do so.

I guess that raises the question, can there be two Cores? Wouldn't the opportunity cost of maintaining the divide between the two Cores? Wouldn't the opportunity cost of maintaining the divide between the two Cores become too costly for the divide to be sustainable?

Update:Edited for clarity

A vanishing meme

One pleasantly departed meme is "War is good for the economy". While never true (you can't destroy human and physical capital and have a net increase in the economy) I haven't heard it that much in the past few years.

A useful axiom

In my first advanced macroeconomics class my professor defined truth as "The consensus of informed opinion". I remembered that for some reason today.

Friday rapid fire

• A quick review of video hosting services
• DIY public hotspot
• SQL Refactoring and formatting - a bit pricey, but it seems interesting
  
• Yet another electric car - due sometime next year
• Revealed: Why understanding economics is hard
• What economists agree on
  

Deepthink of the moment

From the ever interesting Jane Galt about child rearing and careers

I'm not sure. If childrearing is a) necessary and b) as tedious as everyone assures me, then it strikes me that whatever feminine thrill women get out of doing it probably increases the happiness associated with the activity. And, based only on my own previous relationship experience, I'd imagine that socialization which reduces the number of areas that have to be negotiated probably, on net, makes marriages happier.

That would go a long way to explaining why opposites attract, if in fact they do.

RIP Milton Friedman

Instapundit has a good collection of links on his life and legacy. He was the first to think of many, many things in economics that seem blindingly obvious now but were heretical at the time. One of the larger intellectual giants of the past 100 years, on a purely technical level, outside of the politics (which I agree with).

Quick Monday rapid fire - fun addition

• On the matter of remittances by immigrants to foreign countries

  Moreover, remittances are far more likely to make their way to people who actually need them. American aid tends to be received by governments, which in most third world countries are not especially honest. So the majority of American foreign aid never makes it to actual poor people in the developing world. In contrast, Latino immigrants are wiring money directly to their mothers. They know exactly who’s getting the money, and they’d hear about it if the government stole it from them. It probably even has foreign policy benefits, as the remitters are likely to have a generally positive impression of America and to transmit that impression along with their remittances.

  And the best part about all this is that it doesn’t cost us a dime! All we have to do is let them scrub our toilets and pick our strawberries. We get lower prices on the goods and services we buy and we get the warm, fuzzy feeling of knowing we’re helping to alleviate Latin American poverty. It’s such an incredible win-win arrangement that I find it rather depressing that it’s considered controversial in American politics. Increased immigration is a cause that should unite liberals (with their concern for social justice) and conservatives (with their belief in hard work and entrepreneurship. Unfortunately, that’s not how the issue has played out in the real world.

  Very well put.
  

• Gun toting robots!
• From the mouths of ad executives
• An original knife holder
• Easily the best use of Flash I've seen in months
• Quotes from Jim Webb, the Marine veteran and aspiring Democratic Senator from Virginia. Though nothing beats him saying "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch Jane Fonda slash her wrists."
• A FoxNews empolyee gets waterboarded, sadly it's not their web designers (their site gets worse by the day, though, still no Lou Dobbs, happily)
• Iron Man is about to be real!
• This looks quite interesting
  

Two things

Whilst listening to left wing radio today I heard two notable things, which struck me as totally wrong.

• The claim that over 50% of all discretionary government spending is spent on the military. While true, the weaselly use of the "discretionary" modifier makes it meaningless. To declare that some percent of the budget "must" be spent on programs, when they have the full power to change any law making them spend it on said programs is downright silly.
• The left wing (usually uttered by baby boomer types) screed that it is wrong not to show caskets of dead soldiers and marines as they arrive back in the states. This is usually followed by something like "if we could only see the human pain of this war, we wouldn't be there at all." Then it occurred to me that we all watched 9-11 happen and then three weeks later we were bombing Afghanistan, and 18 months later we invaded Iraq. The sight of dead Americans seems to make us more aggressive, not less.
  

Still uploading

Pesky large files. Anyway, here is some lovely reading material for you.

• This is the strangest article you will read this week. By a lot.
• Profanity across languages- the Dutch "May you get the measles" is my favorite
• Deadweight Loss / Excess Burden - if more people understood this, the world would be improved remarkably. Short version, it's a cost to someone with no benefit to anyone.
• Human Powered Vehicles - a bike that goes over 40 miles per hour

Why is Lou Dobbs taken seriously?

His latest CNN.com column is the best example. His latest bloviations about our "shrinking manufacturing base" are dispensed with quite handily in every Econ 101 class. There's some apt criticism of American fiscal policy there but overall it's quite silly.

Monday rapid fire

• The best use of graphic thumbnails I've seen
• Calculate your Body Mass Index. This seems a tad unrealistic, and if this is what people are using to measure America's obesity "Epidemic" I'm much less impressed. It seems over broad and crappy. For instance, my ideal weight range is between 137 and 183, a difference of 46 pounds.
• Stirling Engines!
• Kurdistan, the other Iraq, it's where all of the American troops will be should a full fledged civil war break out. Described my Michael Totten as "a Muslim Utah". Shoul Iraq break up, this will be the country we subsidize most, besides Israel.
  
• $10 Panoramic Tripod Head - I need one of these.
  
• Apex Predators
• How much is inside....
• Cheap Handlebar mounts - something else I need.
• Milton Friedman TV!
  

Saturday round up

• Magnificent photography from Afghanistan
• A guide to chopping foods
• Race, Advertising and the Sony Playstation.
• Big Brother mixes with the cast of Friends to create Dodgeball
• An insightful post on Energy from the Winds of Change; it starts

  An optimist says the glass is half full, the pessimist says the glass is half empty and the engineer says the glass is the wrong size.

  Read the whole thing.
  
• Some quite impressive numbers you're not likely to hear about.

  In less than three years, the U.S. economic pie has expanded by $2.2 trillion, an output add-on that is roughly the same size as the total Chinese economy, and much larger than the total economic size of nations like India, Mexico, Ireland, and Belgium.

  I think Iraq is keeping the political class occupied, much like the Clinton scandals did in the late 90s, and saving us from grand new ideas.

Abortion and immigration

A long one.

I predict that soon someone will make some correlation between legal abortion and increased illegal immigration, similar to Steven Levitt's abortion-crime idea as told in his book Freakonomics.

For those of you who haven't read the book it spends a lot of time explaining his theory that abortions are disproportionately had by women who would otherwise bear criminal children (to put it bluntly). Those children are never born, which reduces the number of criminals, which reduces crime rates. He has a large amount of documentation and math to support this idea. Bear in mind that the 80-20 rule applies here, something like 20% of the women who get abortions have 80% of all abortions.

A similar idea (unique to me so far) is that were there no abortion, there would be many more children who would grow up to be low-skilled, low wage workers. That creates an artificial void on the bottom of the income ladder, which the Mexicans and other illegals fill.

---

I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it's all part of my emerging theory on open-source eugenics and artificial evolution, which I'll explain more when I flesh it out.

---

On a related note, the pro-choice argument and the usual nativist argument are essentially the same. There is ownership in a country, as there is in one's body. It is up to the owner; the citizens of the country collectively or the individual woman to determine who can be there (to put it crassly). Every child is a wanted child, and every immigrant, is a legal immigrant.

Or that's what I think right now anyway. Thoughts anyone?