voluntaryXchange

Bleeding Edge Visionary – Monitor Edition

How many years until this is your monitor? My guess is 30.

Curious Displays from Julia Tsao on Vimeo.

 

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Blue States and Low Income Growth

Craig Depken at Heavy Lifting has noticed a correlation between income growth by county, and voting for McCain over Obama.

Which is the cause and which is the effect?

Technorati Tags: red,blue,state,personal,income,growth

Craig Depken and the Goldman Case

Heavy Lifting, quoted in full:

Is the pending threatened action against Goldman-Sacs by the SEC/Federal Government more akin to
a) Howard Roark's trial in The Fountainhead?
b) Hank Rearden's trial in Atlas Shrugged?

There should be a choice for both of the above.

Technorati Tags: fountainhead,atlas,shrugged,ayn,rand,goldman-sachs,sec

One More Step in the vXboy Growing Up

From where I sit, I can see a Tonka truck.

In the winter when he turned 10, it still got played with in heavy snowstorms.

This winter he turned 11, and it’s sitting there like The Velveteen Rabbit.

Technorati Tags: tonka,vxboy

An Excuse for When You Need to Escape

From another excellent Bonds column by Elizabeth Bernstein, this time about folks in the office who are starting to share a little more than you’d care to hear:

Or you can always try Mike Dowd's "even more information" technique. As soon as someone starts to reveal a little too much to the 51-year-old architect from Portland, Ore., he interrupts with a story of his own:

"Wow! Then what happened? But before you tell me, I've got to warn you that sometimes when I hear stuff like this, I get this awful rash—in fact, I can feel it coming on now. The only thing that calms me is to hold Mr. Snuggies, the stuffed-animal monkey I got when I was little and broke my ankle and the bone penetrated the skin and was completely exposed, and there was this putrid yellowish pus everywhere!

"The doctor's eyes got so wide when he was treating me, he looked like a space alien—not the fictional ones in movies, but the ones I saw in the park last night.

"So what were you saying? Don't mind my scratching."

All you professors doing grading today have my permission to lift this story.

Technorati Tags: elizabeth,bernstein,bonds,oversharing,office

Barry Ritholtz on Goldman Sachs

I am not a fan of Ritholtz, but I found his opinions about the Goldman-Sachs/Paulson issue enlightening, to say the least.

… Its [sic] a very strong case. Based upon what is in the SEC complaint, parts of the case are a slam dunk. The claim Paulson & Co. were long $200 million dollars when they were actually short is a material misrepresentation — that’s Rule 10b-5, and its a no brainer. The rest is gravy.

Technorati Tags: goldman-sachs,paulson,security

Peter Callesen’s Art

Just paper:

Via Bookofjoe.

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A Couple of Good Obamacare Quotes

George Newman on rising costs of education and healthcare:

… What is curious is that this rise in education costs is deemed by the liberal establishment smart and farsighted while the rise in health-care costs is a curse to be stopped at any cost. What is curiouser still is that in education, where they always advocate more "investment," past increases have gone hand-in-hand with demonstrably deteriorating outcomes. The rising cost in health care has been accompanied by clearly superior results …

And here with a well-put, if familiar, analogy:

… Eating is even more important than health care, so shouldn't we have government-run supermarkets "to keep the private ones honest"? After all, supermarkets clearly put profits ahead of feeding people. And we can't run around naked, so we should have government-run clothing stores to keep the private ones honest. And shelter is just as important, so we should start public housing to keep private builders honest. Oops, we already have that. And that is exactly the point. Think of everything you know about public housing, the image the term conjures up in your mind. If you like public housing you will love public health care.

Read the whole thing.

Technorati Tags: obamacare,quote

More than Meets the Eye

This is what an Ivy League law professor notices about the tea party movement:

How curious. Tea Party events which are not white supremacist events are met with derision and abuse, while a real white supremacist rally is met mostly with silence.

There is a lesson here. The attacks on the Tea Parties have nothing to do with stamping out white supremacy and everything to do with shaping the political dialogue to stamp out legitimate opposition to Obama administration policies.

Hat tip to Best of the Web Today.

Technorati Tags: tea,party,obama,racism

Iceland Volcano Video Close-Up

From a helicopter:

Those of you from southern Utah are probably familiar with ovoid volcanic rocks found around St. George, and also near Boulder Mountain.

Those are volcanic bombs, and if you look closely you can see them being thrown out of this volcano about a minute in.

Bombs are basically big lava drops that cool in the air, and often hit the ground as more or less solid rocks.

Around here, they’re usually not larger than a basketball, but I’m reliably informed that they can get as big as houses in other parts of the world.

Via Bookofjoe.

Technorati Tags: iceland,volcano,video,lava,bomb