Adumbration

The "country club" analogy argues that the bad things in the social order are the price we must pay to live in the society. more »

The regulatory state tends to promote special interests more »

In short, we don’t need “government policies that boost them along”. more »

In the same week I found two distinct but complementary takes on the question of whether there might be better ways to improve education among the poorest in our communities. more »

Among the recent news is a report in Nature Materials out of Charles Lieber's lab at Harvard, describing what they call "nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues."  This sort of topic is liable for all sorts of hyperbolic rambling, so I'll try to restrain myself. more »

I am amazed and disappointed that Seattle's City Council can be considering yet one more public subsidy to sports teams.  How do we know it is a subsidy? for one thing, if the stadium enthusiasts were just in business, then all they would need is a building permit. more »

... the scams are so obvious because the perpetrators need to filter out the people who won't end up sending money. more »

Current events have me prone to pessimism, but this podcast encourages a longer view that observes large improvement in the human condition, with dramatic gains in worldwide standard of living, lifespan, infant mortality, and other measures, tracking co… more »

This discussion of regulation made a point I did not previously appreciate, in the context of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) regulations that were enacted a few years ago in response to some blatant cases of fraud on the part of some corporate executives.   … more »

This episode wraps around the context of our modern economy, focusing on features of increased specialization and dispersion of knowledge, and what checks are there to institutional size and scope.   ‎Addresses whether we must have concentration o… more »