I Read Stuff, You Read Me

• More internal email fun.
• Dusk in Autumn, Going beyond personal nostalgia in admiring the past
• Regulations cost jobs. Perhaps, and perhaps on net, but in the process they also create jobs for the white-collar Smart folks who administer or ensure Compliance with them. Surely that’s more important.
• James_G on the who? whom? of fractional reserve banking
• James Bowman eulogizes Gore Vidal. I guess he didn’t like Gattaca as much as I did.
• PostLibertarian also wonders why people obsess over candidates’ budget “plans”, in the process doing some actual legwork/journalism to dig a little into how a prior “plan” panned out.
• Beyond the Box Score has a fascinating electoral map wins-above-replacement map. Would be better if normalized by population however.
• Carbon trading fail. Golly, it’s almost as if letting Smart People cook up fake securities to trade is a bad idea, isn’t grounded in good science, is prone to blind spots, arbitrage, and unintended consequences (remember: All Large Calculations Are Wrong), and will benefit only the well-connected, the highly-educated, the already-wealthy. But hey. It makes a subset of Smart People feel good, and a (partially-overlapping) subset of Smart People get rich, so it’s all good.
• Was Fast & Furious not about gun control? I have no idea.