voluntaryXchange

New Angle on Rwandan Genocide

Uniformed French troops have been accused of 1) colluding with genocide-intent Hutus, 2) actively flushing Tutsi’s out of their hiding spots, and 3) even firing on fleeing Tutsi’s in the days before the 1994 genocide began.

The motivation? The impending victory by the anti-French Tutsi rebels.

Read the whole thing. 

Technorati Tags: rwanda,french,hutu,tutsi,genocide,collaboration

Filling the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean was a landlocked salt lake that dried up about 6 million years ago: a huge version of the Dead Sea.

New research shows that when it refilled – in an event called the Zanclean flood – water poured in from the Atlantic so quickly that the entire basin filled in 2 years.

Technorati Tags: mediterranean,zanclean,flood

B Class Shares at Facebook

Here’s an example of share classes that students can relate to.

Facebook is issuing B class shares to insiders.

It’s counterintuitive, but B class shares are extra powerful shares issued to insiders of a company who want to retain control of it. In this case, it is rumored that each B class share will have 10 times as many votes as a standard share.

Technorati Tags: facebook,b,class,share,insider,ipo

Quote 07 from Swonk’s “The Passionate Economist”

Here’s Diane Swonk in The Passionate Economist: Finding the Power and Humanity Behind the Numbers:

Separately, there is the collapse in confidence in Wall Street analysts, who are not economists but often talk about the economy on television and in their analyses. This has not only undermined the credibility of their profession but, I believe, put an unfair tarnish on my own. [pg. 215]

In case you didn’t notice, these were the people in charge during 2008.

This wraps up my quotes from this book. Remember that catchy idea: surplus dissipation.

Technorati Tags: diane,swonk,passionate,economist

Locavore Elitism

Eating locally is the new fad. Like most fads, it only makes sense in a bubble – in this case, bubbles where you can raise a lot of food.

Here’s a great piece by Zombie going through the details of one logical extension of the locavore movement: having school kids produce the vegetables for the cafeteria. It isn’t pretty.

Note the map, and it’s fine print. It turns out that $4 is the per capita spending on local food by Americans. Even if you bought turnips, that wouldn’t last you a week.

And, of course, eating (well) from local sources would probably lead some people to emigrate to California. Somehow, I don’t think the dim bulbs that thought this up figured on that unintended consequence.

Via Newmark’s Door.

Technorati Tags: locavore,local,food

Blizzard

Wow …

 

Looks like … Baltimore.

(Click here if the webcam video doesn’t come through).

Uh-Oh

Charlie Cook:

I … reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it's just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush's …

[Democrats were] sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn't big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn't want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.

And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn't worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn't a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.

And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we've seen in modern political history. [emphasis added]

Now, Charlie Cook is not exactly liberal, nor is the National Journal where this interview was published.

But, he is neutral enough to hold an electoral commentary job at a TV network.

Having said that, the strength of this criticism borders on unprecedented.

As I’ve said many times here, I voted for Obama – although in truth that was mostly a vote against McCain. I’m still OK with that.

But, this reanimation of the Frankenstein monster they call a Obamacare is the scariest thing I’ve ever heard out of D.C. It’s not just clueless, it’s sociopathic.

Via Best of the Web Today.

Windows Tip #3: Control the Drive Letter of Your Flash Drive

Do you want your flash drive to always come up with the same drive letter – say, if you use more than one?

The default in Windows is to assign flash drives to available letters in the order that you plug them in.

To give them a fixed letter, right click on My Computer, and choose “Manage”. Then choose “Storage” and then “Disk Management'”. Your (plugged in) flash drive will show up in the pane on the right. Right click it, and an option will show in the context menu to assign a drive letter to that flash drive (on a permanent basis).

N.B. Do check your available drive letters in My Computer before you start. The drop down list in the last step allows you to use any letter, including those you are already using.

Technorati Tags: assign,map,letter,flash,drive,permanent

Quote 06 from Swonk’s “The Passionate Economist”

Here’s Diane Swonk in The Passionate Economist: Finding the Power and Humanity Behind the Numbers:

Faulty and lagging data have also undermined the public’s respect for economic analysis in general. (it is tough to be right when your source data are wrong!) Over the last few decades, the U.S. statistical agencies have been hard hit by budget cuts, with budgets held at 1995 levels until increases in fiscal year 2001. This is to say nothing of the problems in how we measure profits and then extend those measurements in any form of consistency across country borders. Efforts to reverse the trend in recent years are commendable but still fall short in catching what has become a moving target in a rapidly evolving information age. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan summed it up best in a March 27, 2001, speech to the National Association for Business Economics (NABE) when he said that an economy increasingly dominated by “the value of ideas over material substance or manual labor inputs … is imposing significant stress on our statistical systems.” [pg. 214]

Anyone care to chip in on how we had good data when we need it when the sh** hit the fan last year?

Technorati Tags: diane,swonk,passionate,economist

Milestones

This is the 3,000th post on vX.

Also coming up on a 6th year anniversary this Saturday.

I wish I could say that I still generated comments and trackbacks at the rate I did in 2005 – but spam has led to so much of that being closed down here.