Monday, October 30, 2017

Monday's Child is Full of Links!

1.   7 Nihilistic Quotes That Only Brilliant, Misunderstood Young Males On The Internet Will Appreciate.

2. It's not so clear he DID know what he signed up for. Unless he signed up for random death and pointless violence, perpetrated by a state without any purpose or conscience.

3. By at least one measure, Trump actually is telling the truth about being the "DeRegul-Nator."

4.  Looking for something else, I came across Malcolm X's  1964 "Ballot or Bullet" speech. Don't know why I didn't already know it. I'll be using it in class now....

5.  I taught Chris Freiman everything he knew. Fortunately, he learned a lot more. An interesting discussion of "luck egalitarianism." And then there's his terrific book....

6.  The Angus/Mungowitz grad alma mater has decided to enter a sucking contest, on speech codes. And I have to admit that Wash U really does suck pretty hard.  Trying to be #1 at SOMETHING, perhaps?

7.  The problem:  We have produced so many artificial snowflakes.  The solution:  van Jones, with whom I agree on almost nothing, crushes this out of the park and into low-Earth orbit.  Brilliantly said, Mr. Jones. We should not pave the jungle for our young people.

8.  Was this Jeff Flake's equivalent to riding down the escalator?

9. The transaction costs economy and unintended consequences of policing Craig's List.

10. Should insurers manage the opioid epidemic? The "other" Dr. Michael Munger offers some views.

11.  National book publishing rates per million of population. The English-speaking countries are hard to interpret, because market is so big.  But Turkey is surprisingly highly ranked, given repression on most speech. And Denmark:  Wow. Pretty impressive.

12. Aussie report on productivity. Overall, not too bad. But multifactor productivity growth is essentially non-existent. That's not good. (Tomorrow 3.0, on the horizon?)

13.  Millenials feel entitled to use the word "entitled" without being ashamed of how entitled they feel.

14. Impeach-O-Meter: The jerk doesn't fall far from the jackass tree.

15. The corruption of the National Book Award.  Pretty powerful indictment.

16.  Blockchain, supply chain.

17.  You may recall the butter crisis in Norway. Which prompted this, one of the all time best videos to appear at KPC.  Epic. A plea from the heart. Etc.



Well, there's a new butter crisis.  And it's equally hilarious, in terms of the solutions proposed.

18. The U.S. is on the verge of its own "Cultural Revolution." On the obligation to speak up....

19.  Our attic has been living a lie. Almost verbatim the thesis of my new Cambridge book, in one pithy cartoon.  With thanks to the LMM.

20.  How smart do you have to be to be famous for being smart without ever having actually done anything?  Pretty smart, I'd say.  I did try to warn people about this classic type, though, right here, at #5.

21.  I often hear of people who are excoriated for "advising" dictators. The problem with that criticism is that growth usually produces democracy. So advising dictators how to grow the economy is corrosive to dictatorship (or maybe it is). (It's true that the U.S. government advised dictators on how to torture, but what do you expect from the state?) The oddest thing, though, is that for some reason telling outright lies in support of the Soviet regime was cause for Pulitzer prizes.


And the grande lagniappe: For Halloween tomorrow: 50 most excellent pun costumes.


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