Don Boudreaux writes things so simply, even a fifth-grader could understand them.
Unfortunately, it seems most people are less intelligent than fifth-graders:
Read what he has to say about budgets.
A few weeks back I decided I wanted to plant a garden… mostly just to see if I could do it. And because veggies and fruits are yummy.
Since we live in a second story condo, planting space is pretty limited. But we have a small 5′x10′ balcony that we don’t really use, so I figured I could build a box up there and it would work out for us. After a few weeks’ work, I finally finished it yesterday (and planted some carrots, onions, lettuce, peas, and broccoli today). I made it out of 1×10 boards, and used 2×4s in all the corners. I also had some 1×4s for bracing in the middle, and I used 3/4″ PVC pipe for drainage — I just drilled holes into the pipe.
And the dirt. I put a 2-3″ layer of rock gravel at the bottom, followed by about 3-5″ of sand on top of that, followed by about a foot of potting soil (it smells like poo… seriously). That was about 13,000 bags of rocks, 15,000 bags of sand, and 20,000 bags of soil. No not really, but it felt that way when I was hefting it all up the freaking stairs.
Pictures below. And I’m sure more will follow once the little seedlings start showing their sprouts:
I realized today that we in Las Vegas have a few streets which are said a specific way, and while outsiders would understand us, they might not say the street names in the same way as a person who has lived here for a while.
Most, if not all, of the streets in this city have a suffix — Ave, St, Blvd, Way, etc. When giving directions or stating the location of a landmark, no one ever says “Oh, it’s located on Rainbow Boulevard” or “You’ll turn left down Tropicana Avenue”; these suffixes are dropped.
However, there are a few streets in the city for which one Must Always affix the suffix. The three that sprang to mind today were:
Maryland Parkway, Boulder Highway, and Las Vegas Boulevard. You’ll never hear a Las Vegas native say just “Maryland” or “Boulder” or “Las Vegas” — you just won’t.
We also refer to I-215 as “the two-fifteen”… but I’ve heard other cities do this with their freeways. Sometimes we call US-95 “the ninety-five” and I-15 “the fifteen,” but I don’t think I have ever heard “I-215″ in colloquial speech. It’s always just “the two-fifteen”
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting that we do that, and wondered why. Does anyone know? And are there any other streets around town with similar “rules”?
Since I know you’re all curious, and since it’s changed since I last posted about it:
ECON303 INTERMEDIATE MACROECONOMICS
ECON359 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
ECON441 ECONOMETRICS
MATH181 CALCULUS I
PHYS151 GENERAL PHYSICS I
As you may know, I received a C- in my calculus class over the summer, which means I have to retake the class.
My professor now is a guy named Dieudonne Phanord. If you stumbled through that last sentence, don’t feel bad: I don’t know how to say his name either.
Now, this guy has an accent. That wouldn’t be so bad if he didn’t go off on seemingly non-sensical tangents. Or if he didn’t try to teach things from chapters 2 and 4 when we haven’t even gone over chapter 1. Luckily, I know the course (having taken it already), so when he starts talking about derivatives and integrals, I have an idea of what he’s saying.
Today, he started telling us what the definition of a derivative is, using limits, even though he hasn’t taught us what limits are.
I was glancing around the class, and all but a few of us (other retakers, I’m assuming) had very puzzled expressions.
He also went off on a tangent about concavity and inflection points (we were doing a review of common functions) even though that discussion doesn’t come up in the book until chapter 4.
Wow.
His tangents are not confined to strictly mathematics, either. He tells us all the time “Since you’re all engineers, blah blah blah” and goes off about something in engineering. Sorry, I’m not an engineer. And I told you that before. He also does the same thing with other fields of science (eg. “Since many of you are physicists…” etc. He hasn’t said “Many of you are economists…” and I don’t expect he will, either)
Did I mention it is a calculus class, and he is expecting us to write a ten page research paper? Yeah. That too.
End rant.
Don Boudreaux, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University, posted the following blog today.
If you know me, you can probably tell how much I loved that post.
To me, political campaigns are not sacred events, to be eagerly anticipated and avidly followed. They are brutal assaults on reason.
That’s from economist Arnold Kling over at the EconLog site. Check out the rest of his (short) post here.
Before it gets too late to tell this story, I figured I ought to post it.
For the past several weeks, I’d been helping my friend Mike with a tiling job. Due to her work schedule and our work on tiling, Ashley and I hadn’t gotten to spend a lot of time together. So one of the nights last week when I went to work, she went with me.
As we pulled up to the house and got out of her car, I did something dumb: I left the car keys in the car and locked them in. Whoops. To make matters worse, the keys to my truck were also in Ashley’s car. No spare keys were available.
I knew my brother-in-law Jeff had a door-opening-kit of some sort, and hoped he could come rescue us. Unfortunately, he was unable to come. So instead, my sister drove out and gave us the kit. Mike and I messed around with it for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, and then decided to call a locksmith. I used my phone to google “las vegas locksmith” and the first result (in Google Adwords) was the following outfit.
When I called, I asked how much it would be to get keys out of a car. They told me it was $50 and up, depending on the situation. Perhaps I should’ve inquired more, but I assumed “$50 and up” couldn’t go any higher than 80 or 100 bucks.
Twenty or thirty minutes later, this unprofessional, yet smarmy looking fellow in a car (no business decals on the side to indicate his company, either) showed up. He popped the door open in about 30 seconds. Then we walked back to his car so I could pay him, and he told me it was going to be $160.
I told him I wouldn’t pay that amount. I’d pay $50, $75… even as much as $100. But $160 was downright extortion.
He argued with me for a few minutes, and then Janet (the lady we’d been doing the tile job for) came over and started calling him a scammer. I reiterated that I wouldn’t pay him $160.
He finally said, “Fine, I’ll just put the keys back in the car and lock the door, and you can find someone else to come open the door for you.” I figured waiting another half hour for another locksmith would be worth $100 or so in savings.
However, by now, Ashley had posession of the keys. He yelled at Ashley to put the keys back in the car so he could lock it. After some minor confusion as to what was going on (Ashley hadn’t been really involved or paying close attention to what we had been arguing about), Ashley stepped out of the car and threw the keys back in. The guy got in his car and sped off.
As I was thinking to myself, “Well, time for Plan B,” Ashley revealed something amazing. Her key ring has detachable rings on it, and she had detached the car key and hidden it in her pocket when she threw the rest of the keys back into the car.
It’s a good thing I married such a crafty, tricky lady. She saved us from having to call anyone else AND 160 bucks. She succeeded in scamming the scammer.
Check Amazon if you want to find out about any of the books. Also, feel free to make suggestions and tell me where I should stick them into the list. I’m not sure how long it will take me to get through this, and I’m assuming I’ll amend the list as I go along, sticking in titles I want to read sooner than others. One goal I have is to have the Twilight series and Harry Potter series read before their respective movies are released (by the way, I have very very low expectations for these series — I’m sure I’ll blog about it in the future after I’ve read them). Anyway, I think it’ll be possible to read them before their movies come out with the use of audiobooks. Another goal is to read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy (again) about six months to a year before The Hobbit comes out. So… Here’s the list:
When Ashley and I went on our honeymoon, I took The Magician’s Nephew (book 1 of 7 in the Chronicles of Narnia series) with me. I just finished The Last Battle (7 of 7) last night. The shortest book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes in at just over 200 pages, while the longest book, The Silver Chair, is just over 260. At an average of about 225 pages per book, that’s just shy of 1,600 pages.
In that same period, I also listened to Atlas Shrugged on audiobook. While the book is just over 1,150 pages, since I listened to it it would be more accurate to say how long the book is in time: 52 hours, 22 minutes.
Regardless, to hammer through that much material over the summer seems pretty impressive, and I’m proud of myself.
I’ve made a list of books I’m hoping to read in the next year or so… hopefully. Though, I think the only realistic way to do so is to get most of the fiction on audiobook. I’ll show the list in the following blog post.
I rearranged the sidebar a bit. And I more or less got rid of categorization. I realized that sometimes things don’t really fit in the categories I came up with, but I don’t want to have a long list of categories. Tags are kind of silly too. The search function over there works well enough that categories and tags seem almost pointless.
So basically, the site’s just gotten a little more simpler. I’m sure nobody except me even notices.
The gist: Some guys with too much time on their hands analyzed a bunch of songs and figured out which body parts are sung about / referred to the most. The results are interesting. I found out about it from Tyler Cowen’s post on Marginal Revolution, but he apparently got it from Wired. Both links are below:
Once upon a time, when I’d have a few spare minutes, I would sit at my computer and think, “What sites do I like to visit? I’ll go visit them now to see if there’s anything new.”
…Such sites including my friend Brian’s, Marginal Revolution, Original Sound Version, and about fifteen others that I don’t read quite as religiously, but enjoy checking out every once in a while.
The only problem with checking a couple dozen sites is that it’s time consuming, and you have to sort through what’s new and what’s not. This made the site-checking-out become a chore at times, especially if I hadn’t had free time in several days. The task of looking through all the material would become daunting.
And then I learned about RSS feeds.
What is an RSS feed? you ask.
Well, without getting into too much technical jargon, an RSS feed is a small file that a program called an RSS reader can scan to let you know what new things have been posted since your last viewing of the site. In even simpler terms, by using an RSS reader, you can go through posts made on your favorite sites as easily as you go through your email. And that’s really what it comes down to.
I use Google Reader. If you have a GMail account, all you have to do is login to check your mail and click the “Reader” link/button at the top of the page. It loads up Google Reader, and from there, you can add and manage all your favorite sites. It takes about five-ten minutes to set up, and then… no more wearisome site-checking! Just go into Google Reader!
He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly — yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.
From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness. “Don’t ask so many questions, children should be seen and not heard!” — “Who are you to think? It’s so, because I say so!” — “Don’t argue, obey!” — “Don’t try to understand, believe!” — “Don’t rebel, adjust!” — “Don’t stand out, belong!” — “Don’t struggle, compromise!” — “Your heart is more important than your mind!” — “Who are you to know? Your parents know best!” — “Who are you to know? Society knows best!” — “Who are you to know? The bureaucrats know best!” — “Who are you to object? All values are relative!” — “Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet? That’s only a personal prejudice!”
Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival — yet that was what they did to their children.
From Atlas Shrugged.
… how a political party / ideology can understand that government-run health care, education and social programs don’t work, while simultaneously thinking the military can work.
It is a contradiction. It is illogical and irrational.
Got a C- in my calculus class. Ugh. That means I have to retake it before I can go on to other math classes. With the fall semester starting next Monday, I’m now scrambling to figure out what to do with my schedule, since two of the classes I had signed up for were upper level math.
What does it mean to own something? The word ownership means that you, the owner, have the exclusive right to use or control property in whatever manner you see fit. The concept is in no way foreign or abstract to Americans, as everything in this country seems to be owned by someone or something.
Yet, what does it really mean to own something? In the purest sense, ownership means the full use of and right to something, including the right to sell it to someone else, destroy it, or whatever else suits your desires. When you rent an apartment, or lease a car, you don’t own that property. Someone else does, and you are simply renting it. You can’t take that car or apartment and sell it to someone else, because it’s not yours. You can’t gut the whole apartment and remodel it (unless you’ve first gotten permission). You can’t drive the car off a cliff for your amusement (without facing repercussions). The difference between renting and ownership is also not difficult for Americans to understand.
Yet, despite such seemingly concrete concepts, the lines are blurred at times… specifically: what does it mean to own a home? Ashley and I just paid our first of four property tax installments to the county. Even though we supposedly own our condo, we must pay tax in order to keep that property. If we don’t pay the tax, the state can come and take over what we “own.”
This begs the question — if we must continually pay the state in order to possess our property, do we truly own it? How is this setup any different from a renter who must pay his landlord for the rental of an apartment?
But some will say, “You are receiving services for those taxes. How else do you propose the state pay for schools or firemen or police officers if not through property taxes?” Of course, this kind of question only supports my argument, which is that we are all serfs, and the state is our landowning feudal lord.
We look down on the sad history of Europe in the Middle Ages, but is ownership really much different now? Serfdom may have a different name and a new facade, but as long as we must pay tribute to our lord, we are merely just slaves of the state.
“It’s a moral imperative, universally conceded in our day and age, that every man is entitled to a job.” His voice rose: “I’m entitled to it!”
“You are? Go on, then, collect your claim.”
“Uh?”
“Collect your job. Pick it off the bush where you think it grows.”
“I mean–”
“You meant that it doesn’t? You meant that you need it, but can’t create it? You mean that you’re entitled to a job which I must create for you?”
“Yes!”
“And if I don’t?”
From Atlas Shrugged.
“… There is no way to disarm any man,” said Dr. Ferris, “except through guilt. Through that which he himself has accepted as guilt. If a man has ever stolen a dime, you can impose on him the punishment intended for a bank robber and he will take it. He’ll bear any form of misery, he’ll feel that he deserves no better. If there’s not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it’s evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it — we’ll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won’t defend himself. He won’t feel he’s worth it. He won’t fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He’s the man who’ll beat us.”
From Atlas Shrugged.
From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as “Jesus the Socialist.” Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker’s paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country’s “industrial army” at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state…Bellamy’s book inspired a movement of “Nationalist Clubs,” whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston’s first Nationalist Club….
The above was taken from Marginal Revolution, though Alex Tabarrok was just quoting Cato’s Gene Healy. Pretty interesting little factoid.