EconTech

Quite possibly. Well, all sorts of things seem to be shaping up according to Ryan over at Ars. Most importantly, my beloved Tree View will be back in KDE 4.1. You might remember that I was quite depressed over its removal in 4.0. However, looking at the feature list, things may be looking REALLY good. [...]

Well, the hard drive question was answered, kinda. And yet, people ask, which file system? For a capacious portable drive (>10GB) that doesn’t run software natively (e.g. portable mp3 players), I say, go with 2 partitions. A small (100MB or less) FAT32 partition, where you store various versions and installers of FUSE, MacFUSE, and NTFS-3G [...]

READ! (who would’ve thought) Tyler Cowen points us to a book:
Cop in the Hood

Motivated primarily by a desire for court overtime pay, police officers want arrests on their own terms, ideally without victims, complaints, or unnecessary paperwork. Young officers make more arrests than veteran officers. These officers believe that making arrests is police [...]

Dani Rodrik asks if he should start reading The Economist again? The answer to this question largely depends on whether you have access to a publication that gives a decent overview of world news. If you do, don’t bother. If not, it is a great weekly. YouNotSneaky has some advice on how to read The [...]

I find it amusing how DeLong dismisses the environmental and labor practices as obviously Good Things (TM) so quickly, when I’ve had so many professors dismiss them as obviously Bad Things (TM) just as quickly. Nevertheless, he has a good discussion that is worth reading.  My little bit of commentary will be on the obviousness [...]

Well, besides putting Season 1 to the top of your NetFlix queue. You will probably call me crazy for suggesting this, and it does depend on why you like”The Wire.” If you like it because of the raw violence and that it is a crime drama, then this suggestion will apply to you less than [...]

I agree with what is being said here to a very large extent. Of course, the policies being put forth by Obama and Clinton do not create a single payer system; do not get pulled into that fallacy. Nevertheless, if government payment really is so much more efficient than private payment, then it would not [...]

It is a simple matter of expected payoffs. Unfortunately, my gambit install seems to be refusing to cooperate, so I can’t draw the diagram I want. Nevertheless, it can rather easily be explained.
If there is no consequence to breaking with the pack (voting outside, in this case, early, your allotted time) and there are potential [...]

What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? Part Nine

I should have seen it coming. But I didn’t.
The Thugs informed me that they were not interested in watching the last 2 episodes of season 5 of The Wire. I’ve been pleading with them to reconsider.
“We’ve seen this s–t already,” Shine told me. “This is fun [...]

Or so some want it. I don’t disagree that this is a good idea. But, as the article points out, there are more ways to disguise unfavorable results. Let’s hope the regulators can outwit the cheaters in these other instances. Also, note that many problems are discovered using observational data. I resubmit EMR as a [...]

I’ve heard from a lot of people railing against inflation always and everywhere. Mostly, these are people who seem to know very little about economics but continue to have very strong opinions about it (Ron Paul). Krugman explains one positive effect of inflation. But in all things, moderation.
In praise of expected inflation

Real rates go negative
There [...]

Not that the Republican machine hasn’t been screaming tax break for decades with ZERO sign of ever implementing an actual decrease on taxes. Either they don’t get it, or they don’t care. A drop in taxes is ONLY implemented in a spending decrease. Reducing taxes while implementing such a break is not a ‘tax break,’ [...]

You may be familiar with the JPE paper on file sharing published about a year ago. For various reasons, it has garnered quite a bit of controversy and criticism, not the least of which comes from Stan Liebowitz. Even as someone who has railed against the idiocracy that is the major media producers, I have [...]

Just yesterday I was witness to a discussion of whether the Florida and Michigan delegates were being counted by the major media outlets. I knew that they were of course not counted for the simple majority required to receive the nomination. However, I had no idea whether the media bothered to subtract the nuked delegates. [...]

Remember: IANAL
In various policy circles, there is a rather common idea that regulators, after working so long with the regulated, begin to cooperate with them instead of properly regulating them. I think if you look, you will see a lot of this behavior wrt brand name versus generic drug manufacturers and the FDA. Warning, contains [...]