Monthly Archives: March 2012

GE opened a 100 year old time capsule buried in the cornerstone of one of their buildings and found…. light bulbs. And some papers.

It could be that income inequality has many complex causes that are intertwined. But I think we should keep reducing our problems to simple ideas that show up well on a graph.

Neil deGrasse Tyson on America’s faltering aerospace industry and the impact on all our innovation it has.

when I stand in front of eighth-graders I don’t want to have to say to them, “Become an aerospace engineer so that you can build an airplane that’s 20 percent more fuel efficient than the ones your parents flew on.” A laudable goal, for sure. But to attract the best students in the room, what I should be saying is, “Become an aerospace engineer so that you can design the airfoil that will be the first piloted craft in the rarefied atmosphere of Mars.” “Become a biologist because we need people to look for life, not only on Mars but in the subsurface oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and elsewhere in the galaxy.” “Become a chemist because we want to understand more about the elements on the moon and the molecules in space.” You put that vision out there, and my job becomes easy; I just have to invoke the familiar vision, and kids’ ambitions rise up within them. Their engines get lit, and they become self-
propelled on the path to the frontier.

Science!

Communism: utter, disastrous, deadly failure. Millions senselessly killed, entire countries destroyed. Aligning yourself with it symbolically would be a bad idea. And sorry if you think it’s all about labor unions, I, being of a certain age, associate celebrating May 1st with the USSR, it being one of their big holidays. The use of socialist realism in the poster doesn’t help.

Unless They Might Be Giants has led me horribly astray, I pretty sure the answer to a lack of helium is fusion. So chop, chop science boy.

Victor Davis Hanson on the immorality of the Left.

Those in the Bay Area who idled critical food-producing farmland would not wish, as the proverbial Committee for Public Safety, the same environmental zealotry aimed at their own offices, cars, homes, and institutions. And they assume that they have the incomes to buy increasingly expensive food when others would not. The grand mufti would not like Billy Graham to announce that he wanted North America freed of all mosques. La Raza would not like a Volk movement that sought to waive immigration law for Germans on grounds they were once America’s largest immigrant group and should be again. Lovie Smith would not wish other rival coaches to pitch their own favorite presidential candidates on the basis of shared racial affinities.

…

Tit-for-tat factionalism leads nowhere but to chaos and carnage. But the Western tradition is not made of adamantine metal; it is fragile and singular. Anytime we do not stand up and defend it, however unpopular, we cede to barbarism ourselves.

Goldman-Sachs executive explains why he’s resigning today. It’s pretty awesome.

At least someone is proposing that spending should be slashed. It has a snowball’s chance of passing, but it’s the thought that counts.

The most reasonable explanation of the iPad 3 yet.

Gas prices? Gas PRICES??! That’s what decides your vote? An easily manipulated market item? When we have trillions of dollars (and growing) of deficit and everyone (except Ron Paul) refuses to acknowledge that something drastic and painful is going to have to be done about it? And while it will be painful either way, sooner will be less painful and less likely to lead to America becoming a banana republic with runaway inflation? I give up.

Thanks for 100 delicious years, Oreo!

O-R-E-O

The book this week is Why Capitalism? by Allan Meltzer. Allan Meltzer is a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University. In light of the recent financial crisis, he mounts a defense for capitalism. It won’t be anything new to libertarians, except specific examples from the last 5 years. It reads like fleshed out class notes and I would have liked to have seen more documentation. He occasionally makes bald statements that I’m sure can be backed up with facts and studies, but aren’t.

His basic points: Regulation should incentivize desired behavior, because markets will find a way around regulations that cost them money. Witness: tax code and compliance. Meltzer also leans heavily on Kantian philosophy, or at least the part of it that says that people are greedy and you can’t stop them from being that way. The problem isn’t capitalism, the problem is people. And while you could say the same thing about socialism and communism, capitalism has provided more freedom and more wealth than any other economic system in the history of the world and by those lights should be the economic system of choice (Which is an interesting takeaway from Kant, I think). His other major point is that regulations are written by lawyers and are static while markets are dynamic and will circumvent regulations that stand in their way more quickly than the regulations can adapt leading to bad, bad situations.

He says these things a few times as he discusses why the welfare state will eventually fail, why we run deficits most of the time since going off the gold standard, why foreign aid hasn’t helped much and why we will eventually have to deal with inflation in this country.

Meltzer goes on to point out how regulation in the last 20-30 years has disincentived good behavior and incentivized unbridled greed. I found the chapter on the history of the Fed and why they made the decisions they did since the end of WWII particularly interesting. Amazing how much it makes sense when someone explains motives. But as the book looks ahead to the future, it’s like seeing a car crash coming that you really really hope someone swerves out of but there’s very little room to maneuver and the drivers don’t have the guts to do it.

To sum up: nothing ground-breaking but a good little book worth the read, especially if you aren’t familiar with why “evil” capitalism hasn’t been shut down yet for the “morally superior” socialism.

Cool photo gallery of scrapyard ray guns that you should want.

Sigh.