February 2010 update to the EconDirectory
It's a massive collection of data on the most-visited (and least-visited) websites about business and economics. The evidence suggests that a "long tail" effect persists among these sites just as it is thought to exist everywhere else on the Internet. See the average daily visits of the ranked sites, illustrated on a logarithmic scale:
It's really quite pleasing to see real-world data that fits so smoothly with what the models predict.
PDF my URL
A simple little tool for turning any page on the Internet into a PDF file
Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - February 6, 2010
Help desk: What to do when bogus antivirus lands on your computer
"Women should 'pop the question when it will soon be biologically challenging for you to have children'"
Celebrating the 130th anniversary of the first electric streetlights
It started in Wabash, Indiana, and it would likely be difficult to overstate just how significant a development electric streetlights really were. Today, we take streetlights utterly for granted. Yet they really were a revolution. We should acknowledge just how exciting are many of the developments we're witnessing today: Terrible diseases are being cured, human lifespans are growing significantly, we're producing more food with fewer inputs than ever, new tools for energy production are being developed at a rapid clip, and we're aggregating the world's knowledge via the Internet. This is the most exciting time in all of human history, and it contains the greatest amount of potential for good. Pessimists be damned; these are awesome times. Problems abound, but so do the tools to fix them.
Higher debt means lower growth
Some prominent economists are starting to speak up about the really awful degree to which the United States, in the public, private, and household sectors alike, has been racking up a debt burden that is difficult to sustain. Whether there's really a "tipping point" at a certain ratio of debt to national income may be in debate (some say we're approaching just such a tipping point, where the national government's debts are equal to 90% of gross domestic product), but there's no question that borrowing on the scale we've seen (again, across all three sectors) has to be slowed and at least partially reversed. Some people think that we're in the middle of a circular firing squad of debt bombs that are ready to start a cascading trigger effect. That's probably a little too pessimistic; after all, if the debtors go into a rage of self-destruction, the lenders go into crisis as well...and we're all sharing the same global economy. But practical individuals today ought to be looking to deleverage themselves from debt, and probably ought to be seeking investments that are similarly independent of debt. The highly-leveraged are going to be in a world of trouble sooner or later. Probably sooner.
People respond to incentives
(Video) It's one of Greg Mankiw's ten principles of economics, and it's illustrated with hilarious results in a Bud Light viral commercial in which an office clothing drive incentivizes giving through the reward of beer
The Strategic Air Command may be back from the dead
At least, in a sense. The Air Force folded SAC into the Air Combat Command at the end of the Cold War, which SAC has been credited with having ended. Now, the Air Force is creating the Global Strike Command to basically do what the Strategic Air Command used to do. It's certainly captured the attention of the people inside the Air Force.
Help desk: How to get cell phone service overseas
It might be impossible to overstate how much economic malfeasance is being done by North Korea's government
A nearly-overnight devaluation of the currency -- by a factor of 100. The closing of private markets for food. Draconian restrictions on the use of foreign currency and imported goods. It's probably the most gut-wrenching display of economic evil on display in the world today.
MRI scans allow some presumptive-vegetative patients to communicate
A hospital in London used a sort of backdoor method to give people the ability to answer "yes" or "no" to basic questions. They found that almost half of the people they thought were in a vegetative state were capable of communicating those "yes" and "no" answers, just like people with normally-functioning brains. A binary means of communication might not seem like much, but "yes" and "no" can mean quite a lot when one needs to tell doctors whether to do things like increasing pain medication or end life support. And, of course, it signals that we might be able to figure out a lot more about brain function that could overcome traumatic brain injury altogether.
Federal debt ceiling will rise by $1.9 trillion
The debt ceiling isn't the problem; it's the debt itself. Raising the ceiling is a necessary consequence to prevent default, but the spending is what really has to be reined in. And even though it looks like pay-as-you-go budgeting may be reinstated along with the higher debt ceiling, the real Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads is that our unfunded future liabilities are going to escalate without any sense of control or proportion, thanks to the "promises" made by Social Security and Medicare. We keep putting off real reform, and the consequences keep getting more expensive. Sovereign-debt problems around the world are starting to earn some real (and deserved) attention. Something has to be done before it's too late. The only thing that's likely to work (considering how hostile the American public is going to be towards either benefit cuts or tax hikes) is a massive, prolonged rise in productivity. The latest figures (showing a 6.2% annualized rate of increase in the fourth quarter of 2009) might be enough -- though, unfortunately, it's quite unlikely that we'll be able to sustain that rate of increase for any serious length of time.
"Shoot first and ask questions later" fails scientific scrutiny
It turns out that humans respond more rapidly to the appearance of a threat than we are capable of creating the same threat -- that is, we're faster at being the "white hat" cowboy than at being the "black hat" who shoots first. It probably has to do with the wiring of the brain that likely evolved to favor rapid reactions more than the creation of trouble.
How teenagers are using the Internet as we start 2010
Lots of texting. Lots of Facebook. Not a lot of blogging.
We can't trump authoritarianism by being authoritarian ourselves
Senator Dick Durbin wants Facebook, Amazon, Apple, eBay, and other companies to report back to him with their plans to protect human rights in China. While it's not unreasonable for Americans to want American companies to behave in an enlightened way around the world, Senator Durbin really has no meaningful jurisdiction over this matter. He chairs a Judiciary subcommittee on human rights, but that doesn't really give him grounds to start throwing around the weight of the Senate to tell American companies how to behave overseas. The US government does far more to empower the authoritarian regime in China by running up a colossal Federal debt (which weakens our negotiating power on the world stage and puts American taxpayers at the mercy of Chinese bondholders) than anything American companies can do on their own. Those companies should be held to a high standard -- but by their shareholders and customers. The Senate needs to get its own act together before it starts imposing on others.
A new X-Prize: Connecting the brain to a computer
A new X-Prize is being cooked up to encourage the development of an interface between the human brain and a computer that could make the technological advances of the last 20 years look like child's play. If anyone denies that they'd ever consider connecting their brain directly to a computer, let them consider whether their attitude would change in the face of a terminal illness. Figuring out where and how the brain can safely reside in connection with computers -- and, ultimately, whether we have a mind that can survive outside the organic brains we have today -- could have a dramatic effect on the way the human species aggregates its knowledge. What if Stephen Hawking were no longer bound by a body debilitated by ALS? What if Warren Buffett didn't have to joke about guiding his company via seance from beyond the grave?
Podcast: Why Perkins is a beautiful example of capitalism
Podcast: How the Amazon Mechanical Turk makes life easier
It's becoming really difficult to forecast the prices of most metals
Show notes from the WHO Radio Wise Guys - January 30, 2010
Key components to longer life: Eating a low-meat diet and being active with friends
We have to learn how to do two things at once: Extend human lifespans and improve the quality of life throughout that lifespan -- well into old age. The objection a lot of people have to living an exceptionally long time is that they don't want to be old and infirm. Take away the infirmities we too often associate with old age, and what's the problem with aiming to live for a century or more? In fact, it would be a vast improvement in the human condition if we could live longer and be healthier throughout that lifespan -- children would have more loving caretakers (grandparents, great-grandparents, and even great-great grandparents) and society would benefit from the application of their accumulated wisdom. After all, if we spend about 20 years getting educated well enough to become productive members of society, then the longer we can be productive, the better the rate of return on educational investment. Not everyone, of course, will want to continue contributing to the economy after an arbitrary retirement date, but we really only need for a few geniuses to keep producing well into old age for the entire world to benefit. Norman Borlaug was still working to save lives from hunger into his 90s, and Galileo was still inventing in his 70s.
Innovation trumps regulation
Bill Gates has issued a clarion call for more innovation in the energy sector, noting that there's only so much that present technology will allow us to do either to reduce energy waste or to produce more without creating environmental harm. That's why we need inducement prizes to encourage significant new innovation. Higher taxes and more burdensome regulations might suppress some of the energy waste that we presently overlook, but they don't really concentrate the incentives sufficiently to compel people to come up with the great new ideas we urgently need. Gates has taken the interesting step of investing in geoengineering research as a sort of stopgap measure -- just in case it turns out that climate change is more severe than expected or happens faster than we anticipate. But the need for better energy production and storage would be important with or without the threat of global warming, so it's in our best interest to accelerate the development of new ideas in that field.
Home video of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster rediscovered
(Video) The video itself doesn't do much, other than to show us a different angle of a sad event we've all seen before. But what's especially interesting is that the content is now migrating to the Internet. Home videos that once sat in basements are now finding their way onto the Internet for immediate worldwide distribution. Surely there are many treasures hidden in vast untapped storehouses of information -- libraries full of unread books, for instance, and archives of all sorts that have been bound by the physical limitations of whatever medium upon which they're stored. The great challenge now, aside from finding ways to digitize all of that old content and put it online, is finding out how to make that content searchable. Google seems to be trying myriad ways to make a variety of content formats searchable -- their automatic voicemail transcription in Google Voice is undoubtedly an effort to build a voice-to-text engine that can translate old audio recordings to searchable text, just as Google Books is one of the largest-ever experiments in optical character recognition.
Are Americans losing our "infuriating but reassuring" sense of self-confidence?
President Obama is smart enough to reject populism
It can only be hoped that his temporary turn to the lazy old tactic of populism will be reversed before it can do much damage
Flooding will be virtually inevitable in Iowa this year
The "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" project is really just making its salespeople rich
The initial book by Robert Kiyosaki wasn't anything remarkably good nor bad -- though it was so poorly edited as to be distracting to read. If the fundamental message taken away is that one is better off acquiring useful assets instead of buying stuff that just depreciates, then it's been taken correctly. But the trademark has apparently been licensed to a seminar company in Canada that's using the name to upsell, upsell, and upsell some more -- with courses costing as much as $45,000. In reality, people can get an outstanding education in personal finance by reading just ten books. For those whose attention spans won't permit that much reading, "What I wish someone would have told me about investing when I was 22" would be a good start.
Keeping one's composure
An archival recording of a BBC newscast from 1940, during which the studio itself is hit by a bomb. The newscaster just kept on reading.
Living up to one's potential
An updated list of ages at which major figures achieved the things that made them remarkable, now sortable by the age of the person and the year in which it happened. Useful for illustrating that one is never too young, nor too old, to have a great idea.
Why dirty old men are good for the species
If older men chase younger women, they may end up passing along genes selected for longevity
This is why health care costs go out of control
The fastest-growing type of cosmetic surgery in the UK is breast reductions for men. Because more exercise and fewer calories are apparently too much to ask.
Podcast: When Chinese propaganda hits American airwaves
How water utilities are preparing for climate change
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