Brain Caplan thinks markets work fine despite having to wait 19 years to be able to a product with a tiny marginal cost of production: i.e. he spent 19 years waiting on the supplier’s whims just to buy allowed to buy some music. Continue reading
Limitless stupidity
This is old news, but I only just found someone even stupider than the woman who refused to believe that -6 is higher than -8. Even stupider than Jerry Taylor, City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma, who threatened to call the FBI because he could not understand how to configure his computer. The record breaker: another small American city that came close to banning items made using dihydrogen monoxide.
Wired’s open source myth
Wired has an interesting twist on the tired old myth that “open source is developed by volunteers”, that has been. The new twist is that it reverses the usual myth that it is not possible to make money from open source: instead the wrong people will make the money and it will all fall apart. Unsurprisingly this flies in the face of the facts.
Nisha Clare Pietersz
My second daughter Nisha Clare Pietersz was born day before yesterday.
She has one older sister, Lucy Tarika.
If you know the derivations of the names (or their Latin and Sanskrit roots) you may notice a pattern.
Both mother and baby are well and full of life.
Why tax havens are fraudulent
I usually enjoy reading Economic Logic, but this post defending tax havens seems badly wrong headed to me. It misses the essentially fraudulent character of tax havens. Continue reading
Who downloads Linux
I noticed that most people downloading Mandriva One using bit torrent were using Windows clients, but almost everyone downloading Arch Linux seems to be using Ktorrent. The latter is to be expected, but the former surprised me. Continue reading
Alan Sugar fails to understand education
Alan Sugar has called for “enterprise lessons” in schools. While a capitalist economy may benefit from there being some people like Alan Sugar, I see absolutely no evidence that we need more of them. Continue reading
Incompetence from The Economist
The Economist’s coverage of Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo has apparently been written by someone who thinks that Yahoo is primarily a search engine. It has been written in complete ignorance of both the competition concerns and the major difficulties of integrating the businesses. Continue reading
How to buy cameras and PCs
Having previously complained about how consumers are too confused to choose complex technology, I am doing my bit to improve the situation with a little explanation, and some useful links. Continue reading
Blog split
I have effectively split this blog into two. I will stop posting on investment and finance related topics here, and instead post on my new blog on my Moneyterms site. Continue reading