Just a quick observation: according to the theory of public goods most blogs shouldn’t exist. For those unfamiliar with the theory, the basic premise is that if an owner of a good doesn’t have a way from preventing anyone from consuming it (in economist speak this is called “non-excludability”), she will have no way to [...]
Archive for November, 2011
The Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki said today that We have told the Iranian and the Americans “We know that you have a problem with each other, but we are asking you, please solve your problems outside Iraq.”….We will not accept Iran to use Iraq to attack the American forces….We don’t want the American forces [...]
Last night PBS aired a biography of Milton Friedman. (It’s more than a little ironic that the only state supported network broadcast an hour and a half documentary on one of the twentieth century’s central libertarian thinkers). They talked about how Friedman went down to Chile in 1975 and gave a few lectures on free [...]
Guitar World has assembled a list of the top 100 guitar solos of all time, and you find videos for the top 20 here. Relatedly, what would the world be like if in the late 1970s, punk had become the incredibly popular genre while metal remained obscure. This humorous essay is a look into such [...]
On New Year’s Eve 2003, Genarlow Wilson, a 17 year old high school senior from Georgia, checked into a Days Inn with some friends. Later, some girls ame over, and everyone got drunk. Soon enough, one of the girls is having sex with each of the guys while another guy recored it with a video [...]
Of all the wars ever fought, the only one people–especially Americans and Britains–usually see as a straight up struggle between good and evil is World War II. While there can be no doubt that America and Great Britain were morally superior to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and fascist Italy such a simplistic analysis is still [...]
Here in Saint Louis there was a massive wind and rain storm that kind of came out of nowhere last July. The winds reached upwards of 90 miles an hour, so if we were on a coast the storm would have qualified as a hurricane. Also that night, the Cardinals were playing a home game, [...]
Well, I think my predictions were pretty much spot on: “Cut foreign energy dependence blah, blah, blah…..better education blah, blah, blah….victory in Iraq blah blah blah….The state of our Union is strong.” Seemingly endless standing ovation. Seriously, anyone can get up there and promise impossibilities like improving education with more federal mandates (all while retaining [...]
I predict that the State of the Union Address will, like most of its predecessors during the Bush Administration, consist mainly of numerous domestic policy proposals that will either stall in Congress or never be heard of again and a lot of empty rhetoric about “victory in Iraq” (or maybe the “dire consequences of defeat,” [...]
This New York Times’ article presents an interesting question: do people really want to watch porno in high definition? Your first instinct might be, “Well, of course they do. What kind of idiotic question is that?” but think for a minute about how incredibly vivid HD TV is and then think about all the acne, [...]
