Brown Paper Packages Tied Up in String

 

Most pleasing musical sounds:

1. Electric guitar with Alnico pickups played through a tube amp and a speaker with paper cone and alnico magnet.

2.Hammond B-3 organ

3. Fender Rhodes piano

4. Stradivarius Cello

5. Selmer Paris tenor Sax

I couldn't pick a guitar brand. I play a Reverend guitars East Ender (a tele-strat hybrid). But I have to admit there are a lot of great sounds coming from Gibson too. It's all about the downstream I think. Only 20 Strad cellos ever made, Yo Yo Ma plays one. Here it may be about the compositions for me. Bach's suites for solo cello are some of the very greatest things a human has ever created. Selmer-Paris was Stan Getz's axe.

Dharma Bum

Who knew that Mungowitz was actually the reincarnation of Harold Lloyd??

Feast your eyes people!

I can't call you sugar, cause sugar never was so sweet

The US government is a welfare agency for farmers with an army! Take the case of sugar (please). This year, the government spent over $100 million buying up sugar to "support" its price. However, producers made so much that the price was somehow not high enough to repay the annual loans they get from the USDA. So the growers just default, to the tune of $171 million!

And and and and and and.... they get to BORROW AGAIN from the same program for next year, como si nada! So far the USDA has issued another $86 million in loans, sometimes to companies that had just defaulted.

Like Amalgamated Sugar. Defaulted on $17 million this year, borrows $18.8 million for next year. This isn't like the World Bank giving new loans to countries so they can pay off their old loans.  That's fresh cash with no strings.

And and and and and and... experts expect the producers WILL DEFAULT AGAIN NEXT YEAR!

It's not a bug, it's actually a feature of our insane farm policies.

Never predict anything, least of all the future

"This fall, as the exchanges come on line, tens of millions of people are going to find they can get health coverage they never could before. They are likely to be quite happy about that, especially if they’ve been hearing for months in advance that it will be a mess."

~Josh Barro, April 29th 2013

Will Sean Penn finally settle the War of the Pacific?

Word is out that, among other things, Evo Morales has asked Sean Penn to reverse the outcome of the War of the Pacific and get Chile to give Bolivia back its coastline!

Is Evo is just enjoying the chance to humiliate Penn?

Is Evo so naive as to think Penn can get national boundaries changed?

Is Penn so arrogant that he led Evo to believe that Penn can get national boundaries changed?

By the way, did you know that the War of the Pacific was fought over poop? It's true!

Markets in Everything / The Culture that is Japan

Non-price competition in the Japanese fast food market has lead to some interesting menu items at American based chains.


Here's the $16 foie gras burger from Wendy's:

and Pizza Hut's "pigs in a blanket crust" pizza:

many more exotic entrees can be seen at the link above.

I wonder if good old price competition (4 whoppers for a nickel!!!) is outlawed/discouraged in Japan, or if the Japanese consumer somehow finds price competition unseemly? My money is on the former.

Hat tip to Mrs. Angus!

Why the Thunder will win Game 2 tonight

Hat tip to loyal KPC reader R. E.

"You can't cook rice with just big talk"

Amazingly, "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" played OKC last weekend and Mrs. Angus and I took it in. LeBron has already written about the film (of course), but something struck me that LeBron failed to mention:

Jiro gets special treatment!

One reason why his diner gets 3 Michelin stars might be because suppliers both save special quality fish and shrimp for him (actually his benighted son). Another might be that his rice supplier refuses to sell the kind of rice he sells Jiro to "outsiders" because "they don't know how to cook it"!

I recommend the movie. It's 1/3 food porn, 1/3 very funny, and 1/3 an exploration of the culture that is Japan.

Grantland!

My latest piece with LeBron is up at Grantland.com.

In it we tackle the problem of asymmetric information when purchasing sports experiences. The idea for the piece came from a very nice paper by J. Zinman and E. Zitzewitz at Dartmouth, for which we thank them.

Here's a lovely bit:

The biggest issue is that our own desire for thrills often works against our better judgment. As a species, we derive pleasure from thinking about what will come — how nice that powdery snow on the slopes is going to be. So we turn off our critical faculties at the worst possible moment in hopes of maximizing the value of the anticipation and getting a bigger buzz. This is particularly bad when it comes to sports experiences, which are rife with "asymmetric information" — when the seller knows something you don't. Your best defense, of course, is to be aware of your vulnerability and maximize your information, as any smart shopper does when in the market for a used car. But when it comes to shopping for experiences, emotions all too often rule. 

 

What in the world?

Let's do a visual version of the Grand Game. Write a caption for this photo:
I'll take a shot: "Boca! Mouth! Boca! Now you say it..."

I also very much like the background, with subliminal messages. Unless that's the teleprompter, and it's just turned around.

Self Serve Line

Masturbation may be adaptive.

Plus, there's a video of an elephant doing it. Not safe for work, or for avoiding nightmares.

7 million new jobs in 7 paragraphs

Man Robert Frank is ON FIRE in his Economic View column. The whole thing is 16 paragraphs, but in grafs 6-12 Bob lays out how we can get "more than 7 million" new jobs by the end of 2012.

I can boil his 7 grafs into 3 words:

payroll tax holiday

Yessirree Bob; it's just that easy. Cut the employee rate to zero and cut the employer's rate to zero for all new hires from now to the end of 2012.

I am in favor of cutting the payroll tax permanently, not just for 18 months, or so regardless of how many jobs it creates, but I am amazed that (a) Bob Frank is advocating this policy, and (b) that he is so sure that the resulting employment gains would be so strong.

Rat Brain in a Jar Runs Robot

I find this very disturbing.


(Nod to Alex T)

Incentives matter

I had posted earlier about the immortal Japanese (who collect their pensions at age 100+ despite being invisible to the untrained eye), and now LeBron posts this morning about the same phenomenon and another interesting manifestation thereof.

We can also toss in this paper by Raj Chetty et. al. showing how the Danish tax code creates sizable labor supply responses around the kinks in the tax brackets, thus creating a large macro elasticity.

What does it all mean?

How about that official estimates of the revenue consequences of tax changes will generally be incorrect in a systematic direction (overestimating the revenue gain of tax increases and underestimating the revenue loss of tax cuts).