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From LifeHacker - 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make

Tuesday round up

• France is seeming warlike
• Personal Batwings!
• There's a site for everything it seems. Including celebrity heights. Fred Thompson is six foot six.
• More on the Atlanta BeltLine Scam. There is no definite plan, no construction yet, and taxes are already rising.

  the proposed 22-mile loop of park and trails ringing downtown will create a circle of wealth and an outer ring of concentrated poverty, warns the Georgia Tech professor who conducted the analysis.

  Atlanta is an unconscious conspiracy of real estate developers.
• From LifeHacker - 7 Thinking Errors
• Jane Fonda caused Global Warming! A massive overstatement, but it's sobering to think where we would be in terms of carbon emissions if we had continued our nuclear power pace from the 70s. Given cheaper electricity, we would probably be farther along with electric cars too.
• Zen Pundit on al Quaidastan
  

Reagan and the Cold War

One of the many annoying things I often hear is "Reagan won the Cold War". It's the wrong question. While the Cold Warn certainly wasn't won by Jimmy Carter, it wasn't Reagan either. Here is the analogy I use.

Imagine two men in a bar. They've just finished fighting other people together. After that fight is done, they start to squabble amongst themselves. Both men pull guns and a tense standoff ensues.

Neither side has a clear edge as both guns are comparable and effective. The standoff continues for quite some time. Both parties upgrade their weaponry periodically. One of the people spends all of his non-weapon money on health food, while the other spends all of his non-weapon money on crystal meth and salty snacks. After a while the first health food person buys a pricey new SA80 rifle. The meth/salt guy complains about a new arms race, then has a heart attack and dies.

That's the end of the Cold War. The canard "We outspent them" ignores the fact that Communism is not capable of utilizing resources efficiently, and if the Soviets hadn't been using their resources on weapons they would be wasting the resources some other way. While Reagan did see the evil nature of communism accurately, he wasn't responsible for the heart attack. Happily, communism is self-limiting that way.

2 things that annoy me

1. When pundits, wags, and periodically me use the term "unintended consequences" as a rhetorical trump card. It's a well established concept by now, and it is usually used to refer to a foreseen, but unpleasant risk, not anything unexpected.
2. When people say "It's more complicated than that" when they really mean that the set of options or outcomes is different than what the original speaker thinks. The situation is not necessarily more complicated, and it could even be simpler than originally thought, just different.
   

Quotes of the moment

La Brigada has the best baby lamb intestines you can imagine.

You have a status quo bias. And like most people, you probably overinvest in goods and underinvest in experiences. Get off your bum and go. Many major cities in the USA have direct connections to Buenos Aires. You fly overnight and sleep on the plane. You wake up in a new universe.

Tyler Cowen