voluntaryXchange

Protecting America from the Dreaded Chinese Ironing Boards

The government is paying about $70K per year to save each job that pays about $30K – making All-American ironing boards.

If only we allowed them to tax us more, they could spend the money so much better than we could.

Via Megan McArdle.

Technorati Tags: ironing,board,tariff

This Would Have Gotten Me to Pay Better Attention In Trigonometry

Via applied mathemagics.

Technorati Tags: tan,line,tanget,curve

Looney Tunes

Almost 8 years ago I started digitizing the content on VHS tapes. I’ve been “done” for ages, but there are straggler tapes around the house.

One set of stragglers contained various Looney Tunes recorded off the air when the kids were little. I like almost all cartoons, but I wanted to make sure we bought copies of these when we went to digital because they had good memories.

So, I faithfully invested in the Looney Tunes Golden Collections when they came out.

The thing is, when they started coming out several years ago, it was devilishly hard to figure out what I had, and what I didn’t have. There were 60 or so shorts on each DVD set, and over a thousand Looney Tunes to draw from (probably half of which were “good ones” that were frequently shown on TV.

Anyway, I spent hours one Christmas vacation just putting together a searchable database of the shorts we had on DVD, because this sort of thing just didn’t exist on the internet.

And … that handful of tapes sat around, mostly unplayed, because I knew there was stuff on there we couldn’t buy yet.

Flash forward to the present. Wikipedia now has a fairly detailed filmography of all the Looney Tunes. This is searchable by production year, main character, title and director. Even better, it is also searchable by whether the short is available on a digital collection. And, of course, there are Wikipedia pages devoted to each of those collections too.

The bottom line is that my patience paid off. I was now able to identify that those straggler tapes contain 9 Looney Tunes that are not available for purchase yet.

And, here’s a benefit of “illegal” copying that is a positive externality for Warner Bros because of the internet. I was fairly committed to not buying any more Looney Tunes sets. But, now I am because I know what I’ve seen and what I don’t have. This is information that just wasn’t available before.

The analogy I draw is to radio stations in the 1970’s. Listeners would hear good music, but often be unable to identify it and buy it because DJ’s weren’t always very good about making that clear, and the record companies didn’t get that they weren’t making enough information available to consumers. The internet is proof that people wanted that information, and the record companies were clueless.

FYI: Curious about what I’m waiting for? Remember these shorts:

• A squirrel tries to crack a coconut that looks like a face …
• A St. Bernard rescues Yosemite Sam by mixing a martini for himself …
• Pepe le Pew in Algiers …
• Elmer Fudd pulls a Rip Van Winkle and wakes up in 2000 …
• Two short Texans wildcatters with a really long limo strike a gusher of carrots …
• Bugs, a genie, and a magic carpet ride …
• Sylvester tries to teach his son the right way to catch a bluebird …
• Daffy faces a bulldog while trying to get adopted by a millionaire
• Wile E. Coyote uses giant-fly-paper to catch the Roadrunner, and instead captures a giant fly.

Technorati Tags: looney,tunes,golden,collection

Stirring Things Up a Bit

A faculty member who left* had this to say:

I just couldn't stay at SUU where I felt very unsupported by my own Dean and over micromanaged by [administration].† 

And then there’s that collegiality aspect that we spend so much time talking about:

Thanks for checking in with me. It means a lot. Anyway, I hope things are good for you and I really appreciate your interest, because you are the only person at SUU that has even asked [why I left] …

* All I’m saying is this person did not leave from the School of Business.

† I “banked” this e-mail for at least a year to give this person some hope of anonymity.

Technorati Tags: faculty,dean,administration

Yeah … You’ll Never Use Any of that Stuff You Learn In School

I can remember starting to learn this stuff in 2nd grade.

But, what I mostly picked up was the union of these sets, not the intersections. Until I had to explain it to the vXkids for their homeworks:

When I was in school, we also spent a lot of time on homophones: words that sound the same. Some of those are heterographs, and the rest are homonyms.

Via I Love Charts.

Technorati Tags: homonym,heterograph,heteronym,synonym

Table/Rod Hockey Is Hot Again

I played a ton of this in the 1970’s, and a lot on more substantial machines in bars in the 80’s.

But, in a Sports Authority, I showed one to the vXboy, who’d never seen one.

I told him that if we bought one, snuck it into the house, and plopped it in front of his Mom at the right time … she’d drop everything and start playing. Bingo. What a hit with the family.

It turns out, we’re not the only ones reviving this game.

Technorati Tags: table,hockey

Joplin vs. Tuscaloosa

Both Joplin and Tuscaloosa suffered major tornado damage last year, but they’ve taken different routes with local policy.

Joplin is thriving, while Tuscaloosa’s rebuilding is stalled.

This makes me sad: I lived in Tuscaloosa from 1989-91 when I was on the faculty of the University of Alabama. A lot of neighborhoods I can still remember clearly were destroyed.

In Joplin, eight of 10 affected businesses have reopened, according to the city's Chamber of Commerce, while less than half in Tuscaloosa have even applied for building permits …

The reason for Joplin's successes and Tuscaloosa's shortcomings? In Tuscaloosa, officials sought to remake the urban landscape top-down, imposing a redevelopment plan on businesses. Joplin took a bottom-up approach, allowing businesses to take the lead in recovery.

Read the whole thing, entitled “Tornado Recovery: How Joplin Is Beating Tuscaloosa” in the April 14 issue of The Wall Street Journal.

Technorati Tags: tuscaloosa,joplin,tornado,recovery

Increasing Economic Entropy

Hernando de Soto has made a career out researching the unclear legal systems that stifle growth in developing countries.

He claims that the ongoing financial crisis has occurred for much the same reason: we’ve allowed people with in interest in muddying the waters to make our financial facts murkier:

During the second half of the 19th century … creative reformers concluded that the world needed a shared set of facts. Knowledge had to be gathered, organized, standardized, recorded, continually updated, and easily accessible—so that all players in the world's widening markets could, in the words of France's free-banking champion Charles Coquelin, "pick up the thousands of filaments that businesses are creating between themselves."

The result was the invention of the first massive "public memory systems" to record and classify—in rule-bound, certified, and publicly accessible registries, titles, balance sheets, and statements of account … Knowing who owned and owed, and fixing that information in public records, made it possible for investors to infer value, take risks, and track results. The final product was a revolutionary form of knowledge: "economic facts."

Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded.

It’s an interesting thesis, but I’m not sure how to measure it or test it. But, de Soto is no crank, so it is worth adding to your mental toolkit.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

Technorati Tags: hernando.de,soto,economic,facts,information,destruction,entropy

Cool Annular Eclipse Video

Cory Poole made this with a telescope in Redding:

Via Kottke.

Technorati Tags: annular,eclipse,video

The Joy of Books

I loved the swimming ones:

Technorati Tags: joy,books