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Homo Economicus can vote, but chooses not to

Interesting lecture, put out by the Adam Smith Institute, about The Lessons of Public Choice Theory. It turns out that democracy is a less efficient system than the free market.

For example, voters rationally remain ignorant because their input in the election is not correlated to their knowledge about the process and the candidates. When [...]

Embarrassing Big Brother

I read today an interesting article on Lew Rockwell’s site about one Robert Kahre. He had arranged to pay his employees in gold and silver coin. He arranged for them to all work as private contractors, and paid them absurdly low wages (the face value of the coin). Some fascinating ramifications of this arrangement:

Each [...]

College Isn’t For Everyone

I’ve been spending a lot of cog cycles processing ways to make money doing education. It’s apparently quite difficult. With statements like There is No Profit in Education, No Competitive Advantage to Better Learning. and posts about Why Education Startups Do Not Succeed, as well as a (conspiratorialist) video about the College Conspiracy.

From these [...]

Minds from Agents

Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote:

Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson, it is clear there is very little understanding [...]

Intellectual Land Grab

The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored the issue. Here, I seek to provide some links to more fundamental content.

It begins [...]

Axiom of Abortion

Recently the ever popular doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, got in trouble for supporting our new political administration.

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20.

Somehow, [...]

Mawwiage…

It’s been 4 days since Californians voted to deny rights to a certain minority of its population. Let’s look at a few of the arguments against gay marriage:

It protects our children from being taught in public schools that “same-sex marriage” is the same as traditional marriage.

This argument was loud and clear in a [...]

Can an Instutition be immoral?

Last night I was embroiled in a long argument with my flatmate about the Government. I used the typical Libertarian claim that the government was an immoral institution because it uses coercive force to collect taxes. Of course, he countered by saying my residency in a country implies a contract with the government, and the [...]

The Misinformation of Crowds

I’ve seen much recently piggy-backing on the Wisdom of Crowds. Much of the Web 2.0 seems highly focused on exploiting this phenomenon:

Datamining the crowd: Yahoo and Google both have an Answers service that purports to harness the wisdom explicitly. Ranking results: Digg, Newsvine, Technorati all use forms of distributed social voting to determine quality. [...]

Audience Question at Conferences

I’ve been watching the videos of last year’s Singularity Summit and noticed that, along with all other conferences I’ve watched, questions from the audience are completely inaudible to the sound recorder. There is a very simple solution that I haven’t seen anyone using: The parabolic dish and microphone set that makes such great spy equipment. [...]