February 10, 2003 – 12:00 am
PowerPoint slides on what you can do now to continue to have a career in software.
UC Davis labor critic Norm Matloff was not impressed with these, but I think they are worth a look. One can’t program forever…
December 17, 2002 – 12:00 am
Over at KQED, Krasny and company were talking about media ownership on Forum, so after listening to the suits talk about how concentration of ownership is good for you and the public interest being so 1930’s, it’s good to read Aaron Swartz talking about Open Spectrum. Technology has made broadcast spectrum frequency scarcity a thing [...]
December 6, 2002 – 12:00 am
Professor Kiesling discusses how new markets created by the Internet ran afoul of existing institutions (wholesale liquor distributors) that had their niche by law.
New York, Michigan and other states prohibited shipments to individual buyers from out of state wineries.
The liquor wholesalers arrangements grew out of the post-Prohibition environment. Laws which were enacted out of a [...]
December 1, 2002 – 12:00 am
I forgot to link TNH’s wonderful post on the Taxonomy of Fraud from her weblog Making Light. Why do we see frauds?
These scams take the forms they do because they’re parodies–no, a better way to put it: they’re cargo-cult effigies–of the deals the ruling class cut for themselves. If you’re an insider, if you have [...]
October 31, 2002 – 12:00 am
Meanwhile, Lynne reports that California Governor Grey Davis wasn’t in any mood to talk auction theory and electricity markets a few days ago.
Sigh, I don’t trust Davis any further than one of the sacks of money he gets from the prison guards, but he’s a known quantity.
October 31, 2002 – 12:00 am
Over at W6 Daily, Phillip responds to my links from yesterday. And no, there’s nothing funny in the break room coffee at Apple, aside from it being undrinkable.
Nutter v. Nutter
I compared Rall and Lileks because I thought both theories were silly. Serial killing isn’t Al Quida’s MO, they go for the mass murder (heck, they [...]
October 30, 2002 – 12:00 am
I enjoyed this wonderfuly snarky econoblog, which doesn’t have a by-line, but appears to be written by someone in the UK. Update Victor at Fourstones IDs the writer as Daniel Davies, an economics PhD in the UK. Thanks!
On the West Coast Docks Lockout:
Consider for the moment, the dockworkers of the ILWU, who were on strike [...]
October 30, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via J. Bradford Delong ] Folks will quibble about the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden, not being a real Nobel. But the 1999 winner, Robert Mundell, appeared on Letterman to let us know how it improved his life:
Any meaningless crap I say, the next day it’s in the [...]
October 17, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via CamWorld ] Stephen Den Beste talks about how CDMA won, and why Europeans may end up leaving their GSM phones.
Aside
I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I bought the Danger Sidekick handset from T-Mobile. I took it back and canceled the contract. T-Mobile, I should note, was professional, and honored their fourteen-day [...]
August 21, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via laughingMeme via DavosNewbies ] A diagram, large, of the interrelationships between the entites and players in the current round of financial miscounduct.
You can get it on a tshirt too.
August 21, 2002 – 12:00 am
[ via The Knowledge Problem ] Jane Galt discusses the spam problem in the context of the Coase Theorem, and finds:
In short, there isnít (gasp) a market based solution [to spam], and short of a technological breakthrough that either significantly lowers transaction costs, or improves filtering to the point where spammers wonít bother, there wonít [...]
August 21, 2002 – 12:00 am
On kuro5hin, they’re discussing Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels, and the distant-future post-scarcity utopia in those books. Iain’s novels will defnitely come up in the “Socialists in Kilts” panel at WorldCon.
August 18, 2002 – 12:00 am
This week’s Economist reports the results of pilot projects in two rural areas of Tanzania where health aid dollars were allocated, and treatment and intervention strategies developed on the basis of what health problems facing the people in the districts.
Treatment and prevention strategies started with low cost methods with great returns, such as insectide soaked [...]
August 12, 2002 – 12:00 am
Lynne Kiesling teaches economics at Northwestern. Her weblog has carried many links on auctions, market design, and energy economics. Worth a read if you’re into any of these areas.
an aside: A couple of weeks ago someone asked me “why do you need mechanism design, if, after all, markets take care of themselves?” A reason [...]
August 3, 2002 – 12:00 am
Thursday I met with acquaintances to talk about math. The organizer, T., introduced Newcomb’s Problem:
You are at a Web conference, Tim Berners-Lee is giving the keynote when, a Grey from Zeta Reticula appears in a flash of light. The alien has two boxes. One is transparent. The other is black. You know that Greys from [...]
