Economics for five year olds

Arnold Kling has a great post on explaining economic development to five year olds, with the hope that journalists understand it. The version he came up with was this

There are lots of people in the world who will give us things that we want, as long as we give them something they want in return. This is called trading. Some of the things we trade are hard to see--they are like nice thoughts. Other people keep thinking up nicer things to trade with us, and we keep thinking up nicer things to trade with them. We keep trading nicer and nicer things. Many years ago, people had not thought up all of these nice things, so they did not have as much to trade as we do. That is why people who lived back then were poor, and we are not.

Now if he'll only do one for deadweight loss.

Recommended Friday viewing

Check out this speech by Michael Sheurer.

Russian Weirdness

From the AJC (again)

Woman's 12th Baby Weighs Over 17-Pounds
A small Russian city just got a really big addition: a 17-pound, 1 ounce baby whose mother had already delivered 11 other children.

Tatiana Khalina, 42, delivered the girl by Caesarean section at a maternity clinic in Aleisk, a town of 30,000 people in the Altai region in southern Siberia, a nurse at the clinic said Thursday.
...
The Guinness Book of World Records says the heaviest baby ever was born in the United States in 1879. It weighed 23 pounds, 12 ounces and died 11 hours after birth. Guinness says they heaviest surviving baby was born in 1955 in Italy, weighing in at 22 pounds, 8 ounces.

The criminal side of over coming handicaps

From the AJC

Armless Gwinnett man involved in deadly fight jailed
A disabled artist known for painting with his feet was jailed this week on charges related to a deadly brawl with another man earlier this month.

William "Rusty" Redfern was booked into the Gwinnett County Detention Center Wednesday on a misdemeanor charge of affray, a legal term for fighting in public, and later released on $1,200 bond.
...
Witnesses said the men yelled at each other from across the street. Redfern, who was born with no right arm and only a stump for a left arm, then ran into Teer's driveway and head-butted him.

Teer, 49, died minutes later. Police initially suspected Teer died from the head-butt. However, a subsequent autopsy determined that he died of a heart attack. Teer had been suffering from coronary artery disease, according to the Gwinnett County Medical Examiner's Office.

If you put your mind to it, I suppose you can accomplish anything.

A Hoffer appearance

It seems that ZenPundit is a fan of Eric Hoffer too, as well as Mises and Orwell. Interesting.

Somethign work reading

From LifeHacker - 7 Stupid Thinking Errors You Probably Make

A cool ASP.net feature

If you're getting strange ASP.net errors like "Padding is invalid and cannot be removed", check out this entry on CodingHorror.com.

An interesting series on the death penalty

The AJC is having a series on the death penalty in Georgia. Two interesting tidbits

Tidbit 1

White killers are more likely to face capital prosecution and land on death row, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. The reason: White killers are more likely to kill white people.

A statistical analysis shows Georgia prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white.

Tidbit 2

Though most crime involves a victim and a perpetrator of the same race, there is no tradition of outrage on behalf of black victims who are attacked by black assailants. Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, who is black, has noticed the difference.

"Everyday my office ... handles horrible cases involving the sexual assault and/or death of black children, black women and black senior citizens. It is difficult for me to recall an occasion wherein my office has received a note, card, letter or phone call from any black advocacy group or political leader in support of these victims. We receive many communications in support of black defendants in some of those same cases," he wrote in an e-mail.

"I am very disturbed about what's happened to Genarlow Wilson and the 'Jena Six,' but I am equally disturbed by the plight of the endless number of black victims who don't have the benefit of community support or outrage," he said.

Public Choice theory strikes again I suppose.

Free tech stuff

I have a perfectly good scanner and laser printer (black and white) which, alas, are not Vista compatible. Does anyone in the Atlanta area either of them?

A hopeful sign

A pleasing development in DC and Alaska

FBI tapes Stevens calls as part of sting
The FBI, working with an Alaska oil contractor, secretly taped telephone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens as part of a public corruption sting, according to people close to the investigation.

The secret recordings suggest the Justice Department was eyeing Stevens long before June, when the Republican senator first publicly acknowledged he was under scrutiny. At that time, it appeared Stevens was a new focus in a case that had already ensnared several state lawmakers.

Sound off

Wow, hits are up massively today, who are all you people?

I did notice that Google Images is indexing a fair amount of my photography, perhaps that's the cause.

A civics quiz

I got this from Megan McArdle, it's the Civic Literacy Quiz!

I scored 57 out of 60 correctly — 95.00 %!

How about y'all?

Greespan

Alan Greenspan impressed me on the Daily Show last night.

One minor thing, they ran out of time before Greenspan could fully respond to Jon Stewart's question of "Why do we favor investment over work?". The question was in response to the stock market jumping in response than a greater than expected prime rate cut. The question does demand a long answer, and the part Greenspan didn't have time to get to was

"The tax code is used to incentivize investment and work (a very approximate answer, it does that whether we want it to or not). The role of the Federal Reserve is to regulate the money supply and ensure that a dollar a year from now buys about as much as a dollar today."

Quote of the moment

From Bloggingheads:

"Marxism went to the universities to die in comfort."

A cool solar thermal video

From CNNFN.

A good article in the NYT

About the prolonged influence of Atlas Shrugged.

Tuesday round up

• France is seeming warlike
• Personal Batwings!
• There's a site for everything it seems. Including celebrity heights. Fred Thompson is six foot six.
• More on the Atlanta BeltLine Scam. There is no definite plan, no construction yet, and taxes are already rising.

  the proposed 22-mile loop of park and trails ringing downtown will create a circle of wealth and an outer ring of concentrated poverty, warns the Georgia Tech professor who conducted the analysis.

  Atlanta is an unconscious conspiracy of real estate developers.
• From LifeHacker - 7 Thinking Errors
• Jane Fonda caused Global Warming! A massive overstatement, but it's sobering to think where we would be in terms of carbon emissions if we had continued our nuclear power pace from the 70s. Given cheaper electricity, we would probably be farther along with electric cars too.
• Zen Pundit on al Quaidastan
  

Rep. Jack Kingston provides a stirring indictment

Of himself in this case. From the AJC

But Rep. Jack Kingston is making no apologies for being the House champion for Georgia when it comes to snagging federal dollars for his home state and his home district around Savannah.

In the current spending bills working their way through Congress for the new fiscal year, which begins next month, Kingston is sponsoring or co-sponsoring earmarks estimated at $83 million, more than any other Georgian in the House.

Despite being a conservative Republican, Kingston argues that snagging programs and projects is a time-honored tradition for Georgia lawmakers.

I suppose they're going to lose a few more rounds. It's always time for term limits.

Advice on seeming Reaganesque

Since all of the Republicans candidates for president are trying to be the next Ronald Reagan, why not run on his platform? Just cross out the parts about the Soviet Union, and presto! It's not like much of his domestic agenda got enacted. We still have the departments of Energy, Education and so on. Government is still the problem after all...

An awesome use of web video

Check out dylanmessaging.com

Random thought

The more advanced the combatants in a war, the less likely it is they'll be fighting the same war.

Shock Doctrine

A well done piece of propaganda is Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, available on MySpace TV. It's another attempt to get everyone riled up about income disparity, which no one seems to mind. Unmentioned is the fact that it is an indie film, being released on a social networking site, and being given away. Hardly something that would happen in a poor society.

Friday round up

Sorry for the light blogging, work and the house hunting process have been quite draining on me.

Anyway, Here is your recommended reading for today

• The Economist has a great read Iraqi Kurdistan, or as it will soon be known, Kurdistan.
• The absolute minimum you should know about Character sets and Unicode
• Russia Tests "Dad of All Bombs". It's good they're keeping themselves busy. Money Quote: " Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn't hurt the environment"
• Megan McArdle on why we haven't been attacked since 9/11. Personally I think it's a lack of talent/money/motivation on their part, plus a host of supporting factors
  
• The view from the top of the world
• I'm surprised this hasn't come back to life among the many Bush conspiracies.
• There's this from Craigs List

  Sushi Model: Willing to act as display showcase as sushi is displayed placed on body for patrons to eat off of.
  • Model preferable of Asian ethnicity
  • Height requirement: 5'6'' to 5'11''
  • Slim built; clean and body shaven
  • Will wear bottom with pasty/string bikini top or topless
  • Compensation: $200/3 hours

• Don't you just love it when support for Microsoft Products is done using commands only they know? Check this out (which did work for me)
  

Quote of the morning

From David Frum on BloggingHeads.tv

First God blesses you with luck, then he curses you by letting you think you're smart

The best new development in some time

Check out this article on MSNBC about American computer geeks disrupting and scooping al Qaida's internet efforts. Basically they just troll message boards and other places on the internet and post bin Laden's releases early and generally disrupt the marketing effort.

Since most of radical Islam consists of marketing, this is a wonderful, unexpected organic development. A heroic romantic vision of a struggle appeals to disgruntled losers everywhere, but a bumbling piece of incoherent crap will just send them back to video games and porn.

Everyone feel free to attach the 5th Generation terminology of your choice...

Maybe countries are in the Gap for a reason...

From the Economist Blog

Why would anyone with a robust sense of reality simply assume that each national jurisdiction contains the seeds of a viable economy? If we insist on thinking of development as a matter of national growth, we may well consign most of the bottom billion, and their children and their grandchildren, to unrelenting poverty trapped within their UN-recognised national prisons. Our real moral concern should not be the Central African Republic, but its unfortunate denizens. The best thing for their prospects may simply be to get out--to leave for a place where growth has already commenced. The West's many attempts to jumpstart growth where the world's poorest already reside has yet to work. So why does the international community insist on betting the poor's lives on the gamble that it will, finally, some day?

While development has worked in some places, South Korea and Taiwan come to mind, there is little compelling evidence that a society locked into antiquated social capital can shift to a modern one absent the destruction of the existing social capital. The shocks would be a significant war, or a tyrannical government (i.e. China) willing to uproot society.

Its food for thought anyway.

A minor internet miracle

Yesterday I was searching for a domain name for a friend of mine, and found exactly what we wanted, in the .com! That hasn't happened in years, it's a name you think would be taken as too.

Monday morning roundup

My apologies for the light blogging, work has been a frenzy lately. You should all read

• The Buy Vs Rent Calculator on the NYT
• HDR in Photoshop CS3
• The coolest Silverlight application to date
• Will Wilkerson makes an excellent point on the current supply-side forforah going on these days.
  

High-concept low tech

The guide to one-night stands (fairly safe for work). I actually did laugh out loud.

The mystery of the bees...

It might have been solved, or so says Ron Bailey in Reason. It's Israeli acute paralysis virus about which I know nothing.

Freeman Dyson

David Friedman links to this essay about climate change from mega-scientist Freeman Dyson. It's quite interesting reading, and Dyson is a fascinating man. Check out the Wikipedia entry and the WikiQuote entry. I need to get some of his books.

The funniest thing on CNN.com today

This article, about the German terror arrests (which isn't funny mind you) contains the following passage

the same chemical used in the London transport bombs that killed 52 people and four terrorists in 2005

Note the distinction!

An interesting thought experiment

PurpleSlog has an interesting thought experiment of What Five Places/Events Would You Visit With A Time Machine? They are

1. Israel at the start of Christianity (the same as PurpleSlogs)
2. The Kennedy Assassination - I'm partial to the Oswald acted alone theory, but it would be nice to know for sure.
3. The Russian revolution
4. The writing of the US Declaration of Independence and Constitution
   
5. The White House with Lincoln during the Civil War
   

I'm back

The trip was nice, more details to follow