Markets in everything: Sovereign barter edition

The North Koreans want to pay the Czechs back in ginseng!

I am not making this up.

For their part, the Czechs are holding out for Zinc.

Is sunburn really a worse problem than lack of sexual vigor in the Czech republic?

Live and learn.

The 4 chord song....s

Axis of Awesome? Yes, they are pretty awesome. The 4 chord song.
Nod to Angry Alex

Here's to Homicide!

This weekend, Mrs. Angus and I were invited to dinner at the Snow household. Clyde is a national treasure and Norman institution and the title of the post was his pre-meal toast.

Clyde testified at Saddam Hussein's trial about forensic evidence from a mass grave of Kurds.

Apparently, Saddam rejected the idea that the grave had anything to do with him, claiming that Iraq was full of mass graves and in all likelihood it was a leftover from the Hittites!

(in other words, as I pointed out during this discussion, Saddam's defense was, "it wasn't me, it was Nebuchadnezzer")

Clyde allowed that, while he knew the Hittites were quite an advanced civilization, he was not aware that they had actually developed digital watches with batteries so powerful that the watches were still running when the grave was exhumed.

Oh.

The Problem is NOT That Women Don't Know What They Want....

...the problem is that they DO.

Mike, in an earlier comment, is led to think a bit out loud about an analogous experience.

It WOULD be amazing if one could build a single custom made piece of furniture for less than a manufactured unit that sold thousands.

ChiliPunk'd?

Is is just me, or did Mr. Karzai totally chilipunk Obama? He loads up his government with bad guys as part of his re-election strategy, engages in sufficient electoral fraud that the US "forces" him to recant his majority win and agree to a runoff, then his opponent in the runoff drops out, Karzai is President again anyway, and our political masters now seem A-OK with this outcome.

Do y'all think Barack even got the license plate of that bus?

Sadly for Paul Kedrosky, newspapers are not dead

Because if they were, no one would be mocking him on the interwebs for his extremely weak and bogus op ed on tennis challenges.

First, PK doesn't seem to know much about tennis:

The rules allow three incorrect challenges per player per set. In a best-of-five-sets match (which is normal for men), that means at least 18 available challenges per match, none of which carry over from set to set.In other words, use ’em or lose ’em. A player can get an additional challenge if the match goes into a tiebreaker, or if a fifth set goes overtime.

Best of 5 matches are played at the 4 major championships and in Davis Cup ties, meaning that they are an aberration, not the norm.

Second, he does not seem to know what the word substantial means:

And the rewards for challengers can be substantial. For example, the No. 10 seed at the Open, Fernando Verdasco of Spain, averaged 0.4 challenges per set and had a sparkling 43 percent success rate. If he challenged once per set, like Federer, and his challenge success rate fell to a similar 30 percent, it could mean one more point to him in a three-set match. If his success rate didn’t fall as much, however, and he challenged twice per set it might mean as many as three more points in a five-set match. Either way, it could be the difference between winning and losing.

Third, he seems to think that winning a challenge gives you the point (see the above quote). It does sometimes, but often winning a challenge just causes the point to be replayed.

Fourth and most importantly, he seems to forget that the status quo is neither player challenging much. If they both increased their challenges and were equally good at it, then there would be exactly zero net advantage to either player. In other words, in *equilibrium* challenging more cannot be a competitive advantage (not even a tiny one like what he cites in the quote above).

Aside from that, the piece was terrific!

No wonder we have trouble exporting democracy...

...given that the product we produce domestically is of such low quality, it is perhaps not surprising that it hasn't been a best selling export.

On the one hand we have a President promising painless pie in the sky and on the other we have the opposition claiming that Obama wants to kill your grandma.

Who wouldn't want to buy that?

And we keep getting distracted by side issues, like the presence or absence of a "public option".

To my mind, the biggest issue is cost. We have just been given a figure of 9 trillion in additional Federal debt expected over the next decade. This number assumes fairly large tax increases over the current situation and does not reflect additional debt that might accrue due to health care legislation.

If we are going to insure everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions and not let premiums reflect risk, then premiums for healthy people are going to go up, not down, and the subsidy required for lower income folks to hold these policies are going to be extensive.

The government can't make reality go away by legislation, and they cannot borrow unlimited amounts of money without seriously adverse consequences.

We just need a sugar daddy!

The most often made point I hear in the health care debate is the comparison with Western Europe. I find this point intriguing because, if you stop to think about it, the US really helped immensely to finance public health care in Europe.

For example, national health care started in France right after World War II. At that time and over the next 50 years, the US both helped to finance France's economy (via the Marshall plan), and provide a huge subsidy to France (and Germany and the UK) via our military umbrella.

Ironically, instead of using US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in the US, our Government used US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in Western Europe, by paying so much $$ for the defense of the region!

Nowadays we need to find us a sugar daddy to help finance our social programs, but the cupboard is looking mighty thin.

Maybe Venezuela??