Links

• The fact that the jury didn’t really seem to understand the laws they were applying in the Apple verdict (albeit, this didn’t materially affect the outcome) doesn’t give me much confidence that my original glib, ill-informed assessment – that law is recognizing and protecting Apple’s claim to have patented shiny black rectangles that light up and do cool stuff when you touch them – was incorrect.
• This guy seems happy about the Lance Armstrong thing: “Just when we’re convinced the legal system does not work…”. Sorry but what ‘legal system’? This appears to be one private organization lecturing some guy and arrogating to itself the right to ‘strip’ (whatever that means) him of awards he won in the past from some other private organization. I think that at some point we are going to have to either make peace with the fact that athletes ingest things that they think will help them do athletics better, or give up athletics altogether. What is the end state of all this monitoring and sanctioning I wonder? What will the drug-police need to do in the year 2500, when we have nanotech, genetic engineering, bionic bodies, etc.?
• I tend to agree with Matthew Yglesias that the Fed appears to be acting as if “the reigning dogma is that if inflation were to go from 2 percent to 3 or 4 percent that long-term expectations might become “unanchored” and drift higher and higher”. He’d probably convince me to be as mad at the Fed as he is for not doing QE3, QE4, QE[N], …, QE[N^2], …, QE[aleph_0], … – or whatever it is he thinks they should do – if he could convince me they’re actually wrong about that. He says there’s ‘no evidence’ that it’s true (how could there be, even in principle?) but doesn’t seem to realize that doesn’t constitute an actual counterargument.
• Relatedly, Sheldon Richman on Yglesias on Bastiat.
• ‘Economic liberties’ are civil liberties.
• Daniel Larison isn’t any more impressed with the D’Souza Obama-as-anticolonialist thesis than I am.
• Steven Landsburg on the 1972 Democratic convention.
• I think Old Spice was my third- or fourth-favorite Spice Girl. Maybe I’m misremembering.
• Things you once wondered but then forgot to keep wondering: Why does their handwriting go bad in the movie Primer?
• Kevin Drum reads people who chalk up the high cost of government-commissioned civil engineering projects to things like overly-complex and -specific procurement rules – rules meant to avoid the prevous situation where the contractor ripped off the government. Since the government rules are so complicated, you see, the government (and contractors) need to involve all sorts of ‘consultants who consultant with consultants and advisers who advise advisers’, and meanwhile, small contractors and competition are priced out. How does Kevin Drum summarize this problem? Among other things: ‘small government obsession’. Of course! I know when I think of hundreds of pages of bureaucratic rules and giant budgets for consultants to interpret them, ‘small government obsession’ is the first culprit that comes to mind.
• Matt Levine explains why just because you loaned (fixed-rate) money during a time period when LIBOR was being manipulated downward doesn’t mean you got cheated out of interest. Important lesson therein on what ‘market price’ means. Of course, if you bought fixed-rate notes and hedged their interest-rate risk by overlaying a swap linked to LIBOR, you’re in business. And there are a lot of those swaps.
• Simon Grey asks an astute question: Where’s Whoopi?
• Sandmonkey on Egypt. Sounds like the whole ‘Arab spring’ thing is doin’ swell.
• Another one of these things: Newt Gingrich speaks of food stamps (and Ronald Reagan spoke of a ‘welfare queen’), these things made Chris Matthews instantly think of black people, so Chris Matthews calls those other guys (not him) racist.

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