Links

• Bookworm got caught in a fuel-wasting traffic jam caused by kids having a ‘walk to school day’. You know, to save the Earth!
• Steve Sailer on the political wisdom of (R) proposals to privatize Medicare:
  

  Let’s throw together tax subsidies, incredibly complicated health insurance products, customers who are going senile, and corporations staffed by bright MBAs with spreadsheets. What could possibly go wrong?

• James Bowman is worth reading on Ezra Klein, Paul Krugman, and punditocracy.
• Worthy pull quote from OneSTDV:
  

  We’ve created a false middle class largely comprised of legislative workers (affirmative action for gender and race). These people have no real job responsibilities so they make up stuff to do, like passing idiotic laws.

• Seth Roberts makes an important point so many people seem to struggle getting through their thick skulls:
  

  If you know there was an Ice Age, you should grasp that the Earth varies in temperature a lot for reasons that have nothing to do with human activity.

  BTW he also says “when someone claims AGW is true, I stop taking them seriously as a thinker”.

• South Bend Seven on polls:
  

  I believe it is socially irresponsible to conduct surveys and publicize the results if the question presuppose the fantasy that trade-offs do not exist.

• I read this post of analysis of Bin Laden fallout and thought ‘wow! strong words’ before realizing it was written by Victor Davis Hanson. In retrospect, I should have just realized.
• When it comes to the ‘scientific’ ambitions of macroeconomics, Eric Falkenstein puts into words what I can only intuit and mock, which is a big part of why I read him:
  

  Consider V, velocity. Velocity is the residual of the measurables nominal income and money. Thus, the derivative of V with respect to i (the interest rate) is really from the derivatives, and their correlations, of nominal income and money. Are either of these stable in any sense (d(PY)/di, dM/di)? No. They have no stable values and suggest they are no better than asserting a mathematical relationship between your body temperature and how much coffee you drank based on thermodynamics: there’s a simple effect from the initial impact, but very shortly feedback effects that make the initial physical model worthless. [...] Thinking about aggregates this way is pure blather…

• Seth Roberts notes a journalist, Eoin O’Connell, who noticed that a fifty-author paper fails to control for muscle gain when trying to link meat-eating with ‘weight gain’ and (therefore?) bad health. Which is almost unbelievable, but not quite.
• Half Sigma notes a study implying salt can be good for you. I knew it!

About these ads