Monday, May 19, 2014

Monday's Child

1.  Duke's graduation ceremony...if you have two hours to spare.

2.  Beta parents:  Trying hard to be the best at...nothing, really. Just trying to survive and not screw up.  I am clearly a Beta parent.

3.  For REAL inequality, just head south a little bit from Miami. Cuba looks like there was a war there, but there was just communism.

4.  I'm pretty sure that everyone I know who bought these shoes was injured soon after, from moderately to pretty badly.

5.  Don't Bike With Texas!

moremoremoremore!



6.  A corollary to the  Pottery Barn rule:  You Make 'em, You Bought 'em.

7.  There is something to this.  I personally think it's fine that Michael Sam had a nice kiss; people should shut up.  But then they should shut up about Tim Tebow praying, too.  Why is it okay to hate on Tebow (I agree it is not okay to hate on Sam)?

8.  PJ O'Rourke getting, as always, to the heart of the matter.  Ol' Vlad is likely to shoot himself right in the Putin, if we just leave him alone.

9.  The Garden of Envy...

10.  Megan McArdle, failure....and Tunapanda!

11.  Perhaps not exactly the way that Steve Horwitz would tell the story of Austrian economics (he is SO scrupulous!), but it's one way.  Oh, and it is a NSFW way, by the way.

12.  Logistics.  Bulgarian town moves to Germany.

13.  This is cute.  I laughed.

14.  Some pessimism on what the Fed can do, and what it should even try to do.

15.  David Brooks criticizes Adam Smith.  He clearly has never actually READ Adam Smith, however, because his "critique" is just a SUMMARY of Adam Smith.  As usual, the "invisible hand" thing is just grossly misquoted.

16.  Five ways Twitter can be useful for academics...

17.  Scientists tell us to tell the truth.  Fair enough.  Unfortunately, they also tell us just what the truth IS....not so fair enough.

18. Knowledge problem:  US paying subsidies that are too high, or too low, to many, many folks.  This is my surprised look.

19.  Why is the propaganda arm of the Dem party (i.e., the NYTimes) so obsessed with the Koch brothers?  This is reported mostly factually, but the conclusion we are to draw is that this one organization, the CGK Foundation, runs the entire world.  A bizarre fantasy.

20.  Czech this out:  A further consequence of unemployment:  you miss out getting some at the office.  I do not see this ad being produced in the U.S., even though the ad itself is quite tame.

21.  If you find a little bit of money in a couch, you might very well keep it.  But if you found a lot?

22.  Holy smokes.  If a President of Princeton calls you feckless and arrogant, you really must be feckless and arrogant.  Because Presidents of Princeton KNOW from feckless and arrogant.

Headlines:

NYPD to stop seizing sex work suspects' condoms (if nothing else, hard to say three times fast)

Former CNN Reporter Launches Psychedelic Journalism Website 

Man Shot on Northwest Side (think about that, now)

Use Yah Blinkah!

Pope Targets Ancient Nemesis:  Satan

Bears Suspected in NH Car Break-Ins




5 comments:

Jacob T. Levy said...

I seem to recall your saying that you'd never read Book V of WN (that is, the *political science* part of the book)...

Kevin Erdmann said...

#14 is making the common mistake of conflating asset prices with loose money and inflation.
Bonds are assets. The 1970's would be very surprised to hear that loose money makes bond prices go up.

Things like gold and housing, to the extent that they are functions of money supply and interest rates, are mostly functions of long term real interest rates, which are only loosely under the Fed's influence.

I argue that, to the extent that home prices are a product of low long term interest rates, rising home prices should induce building, which should lower rents. I think the data backs this up.

You generously linked to one of my posts on the topic a couple of weeks ago. Here are some other posts I've done regarding it:
http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-very-basic-housing-post.html
http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2014/04/economic-growth-was-not-fueled-by.html
http://idiosyncraticwhisk.blogspot.com/2014/03/housing-interest-rates-rents-and.html

Unknown said...

You are dangerously naive about the Koch brothers. A friend of mine, whose judgment I trust completely, delivered food to a meeting chaired by one of the Koch brothers. It was held in New York City, in a conference room of an international financial institution.

My friend set up the spread of food on a huge conference table made of endangered Central American Cocobolo wood. The staggeringly expensive array of food included Beluga caviar from Turkmenistan, pate de foie gras, that incredibly expensive coffee that has been passed through the digestive system of civets, as well as, unaccountably, Spam.

My friend was curious about what would be said at the meeting so he hung around just outside the conference room to eavesdrop. One person reported on the Koch plan to spread MERS disease in the Middle East. They passed over an agenda topic about a plan to buy lots of mortgages in the US in order to kick poor people out of their homes. The guy who was supposed to report on that plot was running late to the meeting. Then the topic moved to the Koch plan to steal minerals from certain countries in Africa, further impoverish people there.

At that point security accosted him and demanded to know why he was there. They manhandled him and took him to a windowless room where they interrogated him for hours. He said the interrogators clearly had high-level law enforcement or intelligence backgrounds. Finally, after checking with the restaurant where he worked, as well as possibly consulting secret federal databases, they allowed him to leave.

Steven Horwitz said...

This explains why Munger thinks so many Austrians are shitheads. :)

OregonGuy said...

Unknown didn't mention the clowns.

There are always clowns.
.