Category: Thoughts

I agree with Dave, despite being an advocate of Scrum in most circumstances. A controversial argument: Scrum was developed for: 1) Small teams of  talented people.2) Strong buy in from the client(s) who are effectively members of the team.3) To compensate for the evolutionary accumulation of knowledge as development progresses. HOWEVER1) It is less contractually…

They don’t. While it costs nothing to abstain from theft, fraud and violence, it costs something to administer defense and disputes.  The libertarian argument is that these things can be produced by private organizations. They have produced a great deal of work that demonstrates how and why that private production of defense is both possible…

There are plenty of treatments of the subject that discuss the decline of the ‘civic society’ and decline of ‘civic participation’ in society, because the state has destroyed the motivation for, and the ability of people to engage in civic behavior.  The ‘corporatization and bureaucratization’ of charity. The reason is ostensibly that conservatism provides charity…

Um.. This is one of those problems that’s really nonsense.  All employees should be compensated at market rates. Otherwise if you are lower, they won’t stay, if they are over, your competition will eat you. Compensation is not equitable WITHIN A COMPANY. It is equitable across ALL COMPANIES. Do not fall into the trap of…

From Karl Smith by way of Noah Smith While you don’t want to get trapped into people thinking that cyclical concerns are liberal concerns … I don’t think it actually helps to offer middle ground. The problem is that too much of the debate is manufactured. That is, it is debate for debate’s sake. There…

What do conservatives, liberals, and libertarians believe is the hidden agenda of the other two political philosophies? From Quora. Conservatives Conservatives believe in a meritocratic hierarchical society where a) there are as few ‘cheaters’ living off the efforts of others as is posible, b) that enfranchisement should be earned, c) that government should resolve conflicts…

Fascinating concept by Amy above.  I’ll try to be a bit more precise and technical. Conservatives believe in a meritocratic hierarchical society where there are as few ‘cheaters’ living off the efforts of others as is posible, and that enfranchisement should be earned, and that government should resolve conflicts. And that civic duties should be…

Interesting posts on Modeled Behavior in response to this post by Bryan Caplan on Econlog Suppose there are ten people on a desert island. One, named Able Abel, is extremely able. With a hard day’s work, Able can produce enough to feed all ten people on the island. Eight islanders are marginally able. With a…

From Econlib RE: “they insist that social justice ought to be part of libertarianism but are unwilling to tell us what it means.” Thats right. They have no program, no argument, no artifice. Only a sentiment. This is why they’ll fail. But libertarianism, or at least propertarian reasoning within libertarianism, provides the solution to ‘social…

1) Yes, FB is trying to pump its share price via advertising in anticipation of the IPO. We should expect advertising higher costs as the public awareness of FB’s income limitations increases. 2) Even if FB produces only 1B a quarter in revenue or only $5 per user, the costs of running that company are…

I loosely follow Mitchell Powel on FontWords.com. In a recent posting he commented on John Fensel’s ten Questions For Conservatives. He was having a bit of fun with it, and I”m trying to avoid finishing my chapter on Ideology, so I had a go at it. Dear David. Here is a lengthy and detailed response…

I keep running into questions over the meaning of ‘utility’. It means only that all actions are in the pursuit of ends. The end might be just the emotional reward that comes from an experience like learning, or a flavor, or the elegance of a composition, or the pleasure of interacting with others. This approach,…

While we use it as such, Government is not a synonym for a bureaucracy that wields law with which it coerces others by the threat of violence. It is not government itself that people disagree with. It is government whose actions they disagree with. And those actions are only possible because we believe government must…

(From Pew Research.) If Republicans skew male, and Democrats skew female, and men accumulate more economic and political knowledge than women, and women have fewer and less diverse friends than men, then isn’t the fact that Republicans are better informed and more open minded than Democrats simply an artifact of the distribution of men and…

Why does wall street resist QE for example? Wall Street staff are in the business of planning and policy interferes with their plans, both by uncertainty and by impact. Like any specialization with a defined methodology and therefore a limited scope of understanding, Wall Street’s opinion is irrelevant (as @Richard Williamson says above) as their…

I supposed I should know better, but the Village voice is attacking me, and every other ‘right wing blogger’ for defending John Derbyshire. Curt Doolittle  … allowed as how “racism is just plain stupidity.” Nonetheless he explained that “African Americans FACTUALLY demonstrate African American distributions of IQ are FACTUALLY almost a full standard deviation lower…

His argument is that the human mind must determine action or the human creature cannot survive as an acting animal, And the human mind therefore is incapable of seeing the universe as anything other than a sequence of causes. It is a criticism of the tendency of the human mind to err. Quote: “It is impossible,…

The Four Academic Parties Of The Economic Apocalypse The 1) Keynesian Spenders, 2) Chicago Monetarists, 3) Classical Liberal Industrial Policy Advocates and 4) Austrian Human Capital Advocates, will not put aside ideological differences and work together to propose a suite of solutions that will both stimulate the economy, and provide each ‘economic political party’, and…

On interfuidity, Steve Randy Waldman writes: We are in a depression, but not because we don’t know how to remedy the problem. We are in a depression because it is our revealed preference, as a polity, not to remedy the problem. We are choosing continued depression because we prefer it to the alternatives. via interfluidity…

Mark Crovelli writes on Mises.org Brazil, that the central message of the Black Swan is “PROBABILITY IS SUBJECTIVE AND SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN TOO SERIOUSLY”. Then on his Facebook page asks for thoughts. Well, it is always dangerous to ask for opinion after you publish something rather than before. 🙂 The central message of The…

Nile Gardner recently wrote about the lack of American political support for the UK’s problems with Argentina. He asks, what thanks does Britan get for fighting alongside the US in Afghanistan? Of course, it may be not obvious that Gardner’s article is an attack on the Obama administration. And that might be forgiven. But the…

http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/04/17/phelps-on-keynesianism It is clear why you could not get economic growth without innovation but the vast majority of business activity over the course of human history have been in economies that were not growing. Indeed, the vast majority of business activity that occurs from now until the end time will almost certainly be in economies…

A humorous anti-immigration cartoon. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AymhJheL4Jk?feature=player_embedded&w=640&h=360] My significant other, who is Meti (mixed native-american and white) has a pretty strong anti-white streak for this reason. And listening to her, I don’t suppose that white people will feel any differently about the minorities that outnumber them in the future.

Just because Karl Smith is the best progressive economics blogger, and a decent and honest man, doesn’t mean he isn’t a poster child for the errors in progressive thought. It’s precisely WHY hes the best poster child for progressive thought: because he’s a decent and honest and intelligent man, yet he STILL simply bathes himself…

THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE – SORT OF.We have plenty of data on why people vote. In very, very, general terms:1 – They agree with the conservative economic program.2 – They agree with the conservative military program.3 – They agree with the liberals sympathy to the plight of minorities and the vulnerable, but not to the…