Gold Replaces Triple A.
The Sleeping Beauty Problem.
The Hedging Theory of Elites.
Inequality Quiz.
Galbraith v.KeynesSmith.
Note: dead links corrected a week late. sorry 'bout that.
Gold Replaces Triple A.
The Sleeping Beauty Problem.
The Hedging Theory of Elites.
Inequality Quiz.
Galbraith v.KeynesSmith.
A maiden so very particular
In an enterprise extracurricular
Said she'd compass a chat
And perhaps a light pat
But she counseled her love not to tickular.
--Why are there so many different kinds of plugs? Wouldn't it be easier if we all used the same kind of plug?Good luck with that, kid.
--Well, I suppose that when people started using plugs, different nations hit upon different systems. There wasn't as much travel in those days so it wasn't a problem. It became a problem only when people started to do a lot of traveling, like we do. But by then, every country had a lot invested in its own system, and nobody wanted to go to the expense of changing.
I mean, maybe you could think of it like language. People started speaking different languages. When people live apart, it isn't a problem,. It's only a problem when they come together and find they can't understand each other. Do you think we all ought to speak the same language?
--(After much thought). Well, I don't think anybody ought to have to give up his or her language. But I do want people to understand each other. So I guess what I want is for everybody to speak all languages.
... the Louvre Post Office, which is the only post office in France open 24 hours a day (except 6:20 am to 7:20 am).Wiki. Uh, isn't that twenty-three hours a day?
Vincent did leave Paris, for Arles in the south, at the beginning of 1888. In the summer of 1890, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Most of what we remember of van Gogh was done during those two and a half years in the south of France. Theo outlived him by just six months; he died of syphillis at the beginning of 1891.Dear old boy
Thank you for your letter and what it contained. It depresses me to think that even when it's a success, painting never pays back what it costs.
I was touched by what you wrote about home--”They are fairly well but still it is sad to see them.” A dozen years ago one would have sworn that at any rate the family would always prosper and get on. It would give great pleasure to mother if your marriage come off, and for the sake of your health and your work you ought not to remain single.
As for me—I feel I am losing the desire for marrige and children, and now and then it saddens me that I should be feeling like that at thirty-five just when it should be the opposite. And sometimes I have a grudge against this rotten painting. It was Richepin who said somewhere:
“The love of art means the loss of real love.”
I think that is terribly true, but on the other hand real love makes you disgusted with art.
And at times I feel already old and broken, and yet still enough of a lover not to be a real enthusiast for painting. To succeed one must have ambition, and ambition seems to me absurd. What will come of it I don't know; I would like above all things to be less of a burden to you—and that is not impossible in the future—for I hope to make such progress that you will be able to show my stuff boldly without compromising yourself.
And then I will take myself somewhere down south, to get away from the sight of so many painters tht disgust me as men.
1) There's an epidemic of granny fraud.
2) It is caused by Facebook.
3) There's an epidemic of people who see an event they don't like and blame it on a technology they don't understand.
4) 1) and 2)
5) 1) and 3)
6) Other
In a decision signed by 20 bankruptcy judges sitting in the Central District of California, the bankruptcy court (J. Donovan) denied the U.S. Trustee's Motion to Dismiss a Chapter 13 BK case. The U.S. Trustee argued that a same sex couple did not qualify to file a joint bankruptcy case, based on the federal Defense of Marriage Act's (DOMA) definition of "spouse" as a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife. The court ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional.I'm not particularly upset by the substance of the decision, although I think it probably does torture the statute. But statutes get tortured in much worse ways and as a matter of policy, I don't see any reason why Chapter 13 should not be open to partnerships of any sort, domestic or otherwise (same goes for closely held corporations).
No one who knows anything of the working of Parliamentary Government will for a moment imagine that any Parliament would have allowed any executive to keep a surplus of (United States) magnitude. In England, after the French war, the Government of that day, which had brought it to happy end, which had the glory of Waterloo, which was in consequence exceedingly strong, which had besides elements of strength from close boroughs and Treasury influence such as certainly no Government has ever had before--that Government proposed to keep a moderate surplus and to apply it to the reduction of debt, but even this the English Parliament would not endure. The administration with all its power derived from both from good and evil had to yield; the income tax was abolished, with it went the surplus, and with the surplus all chance of any considerable reduction debt for he time. In truth, taxation is so painful that in a sensitive which has strong organs of expression and action, the maintenance of a great surplus is excessively difficult. The opposition will always say that it is unnecessary, is uncalled for, is injudicious; the cry will be echoed in every constituency; there will be a series of large meetings in the great cities; even in the smaller constituencies there will mostly be smaller meetings; every member of Parliament will be pressed by those who elect him; upon this point there will be no distinction between town and country, the country gentleman and the farmer disliking high taxes as much as any in the town. To maintain a great surplus by heavy taxes f debts has never yet in this country been possible, and to maintain a surplus of the American magnitude would be plainly impossibleSo Bagehot in The English Constitution 52 (Dolphin ed.). He goes on to say that "in reality, America is too rich, daily industry there is too common, too skilful, and too productive, for her to care much for fiscal burdens."
"I see nothing, declared Don "except three farm girls on three jackasses."So begins Chapter 1o of Part 1 of Cervantes' Don Quixote. So begins also Chapter 14 of Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, justly recognized as the greatest work of literary criticism of the 20th Century. Auerbach's particular genius is to give us an exercise in "how we see," through the eyes of 20-odd literary creations form Homer through Virginia Woolf. It was written in Istanbul (Auerbach was a refugee from the Nazis) and first published in Switzerland and it is nothing if not cosmopolitan in scope: only one of the authors under scrutiny is German (Schiller) though we have along with the Cervantes such luminaries as Dante, Shakespeare and Montaigne.
"Then God deliver me from the devil!" exclaimed Sancho. "Is it possible that those three hackneys, or whatever you call them, white as the driven snow, look like jackasses to your Grace? By the living God, I would tear out this beard of mine if that were true!"
"But I tell you, friend Sancho, it is as true that those are jackasses, or she-asses, as it is that I am Don Quixote and you are Sancho Panza. At least that is he way they look to me."
There isn't a binary division of public and private, but a spectrum of various types and levels of government involvement. For example, the basic building block of what you would term private behavior--contract--requires government to exist. Absent government, contract performance is optional, which seriously impedes contracting. Even the Mogadishu arms bazaar has some government involved--the warlord in charge has a monopoly on violence and decides what the rules are going to be in the bazaar. Government is always involved; the only question is how.
Indeed, consider what the US economy would look like with no federal spending. The defense sector, the higher education sector, the transportation sector, and the agricultural sector would barely exist. We wouldn't have the Internet. The financial sector would also be in huge trouble because of lack of market confidence absent a credible regulatory regime.
My analysis starts from the assumption that government exists in every form of human society....There's so much to agree with here that it is hard to articulate a criticism, but try this: he doesn't go nearly far enough. It's not just that "government is always involved." The point is that by our very nature, we are social beings, caught in a web of our loyalties and betrayals, to govern or be governed (or perhaps better, both at once) is what it is to be human. So to talk of being "free" of "government," is incoherent: freedom is never an abstraction; it is always merely the sum total of those "restrictions" that we regard necessary or appropriate.
The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.
When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,
I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."
Very likely, with the qualifier that the practice surely isn't all that new. What I hear, it was fairly common back in a simpler time for the knuckle-dusters down at the watering hole to snap Polaroids of their tackle and ship them off to selected friends--perhaps as a guessing game, with valuable prizes (to my everlasting sorrow, I was never invited to participate). Chances are the recipients were the same ones who livened up the office Christmas party by Xeroxing their butts.Heck, after Weiner, I'll bet more men take up the practice of sending photos to women than are scared off by his example.
The only improvement I can suggest is that he needs to work in the passive voice, as in "the deed was done" or perhaps the ever popular "sorry if someone was offended."10. Someone snuck into my house and edited the file while I was in the shower. So sue me!
9. Out of loyalty to my hard-working graduate students, I refuse to pin the blame on them, even though it’s their fault. I take full responsibility.
8. Even a monkey typing at random, if he were to write more than 160 papers and five books, might occasionally To be or not to be, that is the qjuiosusdfu79lkjew.
7. I didn’t plagiarize them, they anticipated me!
6. If I don’t publish a new article or book this year, a puppy will die. Sorry—that’s just the way it is.
>5. Sure, I could’ve copied the original document word-for-word, but that would’ve been really boring. Also, I changed the font,
4. Nobody complained when Dr. King did it.
3. Hey—look over there! Is that a yellow-bellied sapsucker?
2. Somebody hacked my twitter account.< 1. Clippy!
The politics of regulation is where Congress really got it wrong with Dodd-Frank. The fundamental assumption underlying Dodd-Frank is that the financial crisis's root problems stemmed from a market that had out run regulation and that the fix was to be found in adding or subtracting some regulations. In other words, Dodd-Frank diagnosed the financial crisis as a regulatory problem. And there were certainly regulatory failures involved in the crisis.
But the real problem wasn't the regulations or financial economics, but the political economy of regulation. Put in lay terms, the problem was political not regulatory or financial. In most instances, federal regulators had the power pre-Dodd-Frank to have cracked down on many of the practices that led to the financial crisis, in both the mortgage market and the derivatives market. They simply failed to exercise those powers. What's more, Congress and particularly the regulatory agencies themselves engaged in significant deregulation. .
"Divide and conquer." Powers of the weak. Regulation a la Sun Tzu. Why didn't I think of that?
The fundamental problem in financial regulation is that bank regulators and large parts of both political parties in Congress have been effectively "captured" by the financial services industry....
Dodd-Frank didn't fix the dysfunctional political economy of financial regulation. And even if the Volcker Rule had been adopted in full measure (rather than gutted by Scott Brown), it wouldn't have made any difference. The last financial regulatory measure that really addressed the political economy problem was the Glass-Steagal Act of 1933.
No one every conceives of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act as a political economy move, but by splitting the investment banks from the commercial banks, it divided the financial services industry, which meant (1) that each segment had much less weight to throw around, and (2) they could be played against each other. That was the story with the passage of the Trust Indenture Act of 1939 (William O. Douglas got the commercial banks to support the legislation to screw the investment banks out of the indenture trustee business), and the story of a lot of turf war litigation between commercial banks, investment banks, and insurance companies. All of that ended with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which created a financial services lobbying Vultron, much more powerful than the sum of its parts. In retrospect, the political economy effect might have been the most important aspect of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. The Volcker Rule wouldn't undo this political economy effect.
So we're still in a situation in which the fate of financial regulation is decided not on its merits, but by political clout....
From the NYT death notice of legendary diplomat Lawrence S. Eagleburger.Asked at a Senate confirmation hearing if he had ever in public or private pinched a woman’s behind, Mr. Eagleburger replied: “Can I divide that into two questions?”
I think Romney might be shrewdly telegraphing the message that he'll say literally whatever it takes to get elected, then throw it all away once he's in and do sensible things as president. Not too far from Obama policywise (since the range of sensible things that can be done is quite narrow at this point) but without Obama's burden of unconditional opposition from the entire Republican Party, not just the crazies.The scary part is that this just could be true--but it is way too much like a cargo cult, or "if only the tsar knew," or young Prince Hal disporting himself in the stews of Eastcheap as he awaits the day to astonish the world by presenting himself as a King.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
Vanuatu’s government faces a dizzying task, trying to govern a wildly diverse population scattered in 82 volcanic islands over a territory of almost 5,000 square miles. Daniel Scott, a travel writer who recently returned from there, described one ethnic group, the Yaohnanen, who worship Britain’s Prince Philip, believing that he is the incarnation of one of their ancestral spirits, and believe he will one day return to their island and rule the world.Link. Thanks, Larry. Oh, and there's a Wiki.
That would be Leontes on Winters' Tale. Between the two we find the isolated, obsessive and even more damaging Othello.Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one!
Go, play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I
Play too, but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour
Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play.
There have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now;
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there's comfort in't
Whiles other men have gates and those gates open'd,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves. Physic for't there is none;
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis powerful, think it,
From east, west, north and south: be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly; know't;
It will let in and out the enemy
With bag and baggage: many thousand on's
Have the disease, and feel't not.