Alextatic

The Virtue of Dissent via Big Think

2011-06-13T09:15:00.000-07:00

Summer Nights / One [Disco Deviance]

2011-05-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Its 1 pm on a Sunday, that means its time to dance.

Summer Nights / One [Disco Deviance] by Onur Engin

Storyful. » The Human Algorithm

2011-05-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

I look forward to reading more from these guys.

Storyful. » The Human Algorithm: "One of the greatest advantage of the human algorithm is that it doesn’t stop working at deadline. In the old days, journalists only worried if a story was true at the time it was published. Real-time news communities continue to refine and fact-check and verify, and as the community grows its ability to refine the story grows exponentially.

All of this is tricky for mainstream media organisations, which were designed around deadlines, detachment and clear divisions between reporter and audience. Essentially, reporters have been trained to be a breed apart. Getting rid of that assumption is the first step towards genuine innovation."

Shanghai Museum of Glass

2011-05-28T08:37:00.000-07:00

This looks amazing:

Shanghai Museum of Glass:

Shanghai’s shiny new Museum of Glass opened last week as part of Shanghai’s campaign of becoming a globally important cultural and creative centre by launching 100 museums in a decade.

Shanghai-based German architectural firm Logon handled the architecture and exterior of the museum. Germany’s Glashütte Lambets supplied the enameled glass used for the museum’s façade inscribed with glass-industry terms in ten languages.

COORDINATION ASIA, also based in Shanghai, was in charge of the overall museum concept, art direction, design and supervision of the museum interior. It was also the chief consultant for curation, marketing and operation, as well as coordination of an international team of architects, artists, designers, filmmakers and multimedia specialists.

COORDINATION’s Tilman Thürmer tells TCH that they used black lacquered glass for the interior (cases, floor, furniture, walls), but left the existing structure untouched. The museum building is a former glassmaking workshop, one of 30 former bottling-plant structures that the Shanghai Glass Co. still owns.

The black, sleek glass of the interior reflects the LED lights and screens positioned throughout the space, creating a shiny and glittering multi-dimensional feel. This emphasizes the interaction, interdependence and influences of periods, continents, materials and peoples involved in the art, craft and industry of glass.

The design of the space and exhibits and the use of various media help create an interactive and participatory museum experience where the visitor is directed through the story of glass.

“Designwise, we wanted to create a piece of black crystal glass. Sparkling, reflecting, sleek and deep,” Thürmer says. - Tuija Seipell.

David Brooks: The social animal

2011-03-16T13:45:00.000-07:00

Tapping into the findings of his latest book, NYTimes columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences -- insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge. In a talk full of humor, he shows how you can't hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness.

Bill Gates: State Budgets Hammer Schools

2011-03-16T13:42:00.000-07:00

Economics is great, but economists aren't?

2011-03-06T09:47:00.000-08:00

We can always count on Dr. Shiller to point out the paramount value of "the human element" in economic sciences.

Economics is as popular as ever as a science, yet people don't trust economists. Why? - By Robert J. Shiller - Slate Magazine

Tech, Humans, jobs, and the future

2011-03-06T09:34:00.000-08:00

Here are some interesting reads I've ran into recently that have done a pretty good job of helping me wrap my head around what technology meant to us in the past, what it means for us now, and how it is affecting our future:

Mind vs. Machine via the Atlantic

Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman provides interesting info here.

Smarter, Happier, More Productive by Jim Holt

And a couple of books:

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Create Your Own Economy by T. Cowen

The Financial Crisis: Will It Lead to America's Decline?

2011-02-07T06:34:00.000-08:00

Behavioral Economics Reading List

2011-02-05T12:31:00.000-08:00

Excellent reading list:

Behavioral Economics Reading List - Farnam Street

Why is labor hoarding diminishing?

2011-01-19T06:20:00.000-08:00

Tyler Cowen's adds to the labor hoarding argument:

Why is labor hoarding diminishing?:
Paul Krugman offers three good explanations of why today's recessions are involving larger labor losses than in the past. Bubble-based recessions are tougher to get out of, unions are weaker, and many leading firms face more volatility. All taken together, these mean the incentive for labor hoarding is weaker than before (yet Krugman cannot bring himself to mention that labor hoarding models are based on...a zero MP condition. And that a lot of the real work in the account of the cycle is suddenly being done by structural explanations.)
We can all agree with:
1. Some workers are temporarily zero MP because demand is low.
Are there additional factors behind ZMP-like conditions? Those might be:
2. Some workers weren't producing much to begin with and short of retraining they aren't worth so much.
3. Some workers were better than idle, but a one-time, post-firing reorganization of production (e.g., computerizing their task) has since rendered their efforts largely unnecessary. In other words, they are zero MP ex post but not ex ante.
4. Laid-off workers did not start off as zero MP but they will end up as zero MP as their skills and attitudes deteriorate.
5. The Garett Jones hypothesis: many laid-off workers were building up organizational capabilities, and so their perceived MP falls as the discount rates of managers rise.
6. Workers are like advertising: new developments in information technology allow us to better isolate the ones who are not adding value.
The bottom line is that we do not know how long these labor market predicaments will last.
For general background, here is a useful survey of hypotheses for the cyclicality of productivity pre-1990. Here is a good piece on how labor hoarding and productivity measures are related. From Arnold Kling, here are related comments from the structural side.

Music time: Eskmo 'We Got More' (Official Video)

2011-01-15T19:46:00.000-08:00

10 Great Years

2010-12-02T11:19:00.000-08:00

The Mother of All Funk Chords

2010-10-09T04:40:00.000-07:00

The Mother of All Funk Chords is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at www.openculture.com...great site!

Who said there’s not an art to remixing? The Israeli artist Ophir Kutiel, otherwise known as Kutiman, created this video by weaving together scenes and tracks from 22 separate music videos, all found randomly on YouTube. (Find the full list below the jump.) First he layered in the drums, then the bass and the guitar. And it’s hard to argue that the total isn’t greater than the sum of the parts. The video figures into Kutiman’s larger remix project called ThruYOU, which TIME called one of the 50 best inventions of last year. Visit the ThruYOU site to watch more remix videos in Kutiman’s trademark style.

Thanks Evan for flagging this for us…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU8gmo… Theremin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FX_84… drums

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-CxM… bass also at : playbassnow.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvw2Uu… Funk Guitar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7IFYh… gts-solo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NutUFs… Blues Harp & Vocals

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBS_6P… Rock Guitar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXitAt… Contrabass trombone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ged039… Trombone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tZQpK… Rhodes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgwHtf… mute Guitar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnbrUw… Tuba

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZ0z4v… Bass 2 also at : playbassnow.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRM81J… Tenor Saxophone

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHuein… guitar bridge

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJqqNE… Guitar bend

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BE8Mv5… Hammond

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnMa9c… Orange team cheer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJEcQs… Crazy Sax

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__aTf1… Theremin Sex?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw756f… guitar Licks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Ke39… Trumpet kid

Where young college grads are finding jobs

2010-10-05T07:52:00.001-07:00

Click on the picture to make larger. Government is #1 and finance is dead last. The link is from here.

Scientists discover that people’s color preferences stem from past experiences.

2010-10-04T07:57:00.000-07:00

More interesting stuff, this time about the brain and color preference:

The main theory is that we like colors that are tied to things that are healthy and promote survival.

"What a waste of a good universe if there's none but us."

2010-10-04T07:35:00.000-07:00

"What a waste of a good universe if there's none but us." via the always entertaining Reddit.

Does Unemployment Make Us Sick?

2010-10-04T06:52:00.000-07:00

Pretty interesting stuff:

How you lose your job makes a difference. Generally speaking, people who are fired or laid off for cause are more likely to experience health effects, because they take longer to find a new job, and they are likely to make less money at a future job. The IZA study also looked at an intriguing phenomenon: A fairly high percentage of workers who end up being laid off suspect that they are going to be laid off. Living with that stress could harm your health. By contrast, workers who lose their jobs in "no-fault" situations experience fewer health effects, especially for white-collar employees. And both studies found that those who voluntarily quit their jobs and are quickly re-employed actually see an improvement in their health.

Job churn may matter. Before the Great Recession, the U.S. economy was characterized by relatively low unemployment but relatively high levels of job loss; we "churn" through a lot more jobs than other developed nations. The Harvard study was especially interested in the effects of churn on health, and found that people who switch jobs are far more likely to develop hypertension, heart disease, and arthritis. Frustratingly, it does not offer an explanation.

It may not be the job. When slicing through all the variables, and trying to control for multiple factors, these types of studies often end up saying, essentially, the jobless are no more likely to get sick unless they fit into one or more categories. But when you look at those categories—people with less education, people who are obese, people who smoke, people who don't have health insurance—they describe those who are more likely to get sick in general.

You can get the full post here.

Great movie

2010-10-02T17:23:00.000-07:00

Geeze...

2010-10-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

Obama on Dylan: Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was...

2010-09-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

How do you know if your President is a cool guy? He understands and appreciates Bob Dylan. Obama on Dylan:

Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise.

Yo Mama Jokes indexed by professional employment

2010-09-28T19:34:00.000-07:00

The good kind of lost

2010-09-28T19:33:00.000-07:00

How Shazam works

2010-09-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

Here's how they do it.

The Shazam algorithm fingerprints a song by generating this 3d graph, and identifying frequencies of 'peak intensity.' For each of these peak points it keeps track of the frequency and the amount of time from the beginning of the track. Shazam builds their fingerprint catalog out as a hash table, where the key is the frequency. When Shazam receives a fingerprint like the one above, it uses the first key (in this case 823.44), and it searches for all matching songs.

via Kottke

Techniques for feeling happy

2010-09-23T11:21:00.001-07:00

Techniques for feeling happy

2010-09-23T11:21:00.000-07:00

There is no way this can go wrong.

2010-09-21T05:49:00.000-07:00

The UK's tax collection agency is putting forth a proposal that all employers send employee paychecks to the government, after which the government would deduct what it deems as the appropriate tax and pay the employees by bank transfer.

More here. via Marginal Revolution

Common Misconceptions

2010-09-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

Interesting. Napoleon was not unusually short. Mussolini did not make the trains run on time. Marie Antoinette didn't say "let them eat cake". Vikings didn't wear horns. You can find more here.

Everything is a Remix

2010-09-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Not only are you doomed--but so is everyone else you have touched--!

2010-09-17T05:50:00.000-07:00

Should we raise taxes on the rich?

2010-09-16T05:57:00.001-07:00

I don't know, but take a look at this, via Mark Thoma

The Obama administration is looking for a good reason to justify killing U.S. citizens without legal restraint

2010-09-16T05:48:00.001-07:00

This is interesting...via the NYT's:

The administration’s legal team is debating how aggressive it should be in a brief responding to the lawsuit, which is due Sept. 24. The suit, filed last month, seeks an injunction that would prevent the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who is accused of playing a leading role for Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen.

Justice Department lawyers are circulating a draft brief with several potential arguments for dismissing the case, and lawyers from national security agencies have met to discuss what should go into the final version. But they have not reached a consensus, according to officials familiar with the discussions, because the arguments seen as strongest also carry significant political and legal risks.

"Illegal immigration: What's the real cost to taxpayers?"

2010-09-10T13:56:00.000-07:00

via Mark Thoma:

Here's a follow-up to the post on immigration and Social Security:
Illegal immigration: What's the real cost to taxpayers?, by Edward
Schumacher-Matos, Commentary, Washington Post: In 1909, at the height of the
last great immigration wave, when immigrants reached a peak of almost 15 percent
of the U.S. population, they made up about half of all public welfare
recipients. ... In the country's 30 largest cities, meanwhile, more than half of
all public school students were the children of immigrants. ...
This history is forgotten in the angry debate over the cost to taxpayers of
unauthorized immigrants and their children today. My recent column reporting
that unauthorized immigrants were making unexpectedly large contributions to
Social Security, for example, led to denunciations that I was being misleading
by not looking at the total fiscal picture.
The truth is that unauthorized immigrants are probably a net burden on taxpayers
in the short term, but only if you consider education as a cost and not as an
investment in the nation's future, as it was seen a century ago. ...
Any fiscal look ... has to be placed in the context of overall economic
contribution. Economists overwhelmingly agree that the unauthorized contribute
to the nation's economic growth..., though wages for unskilled workers suffer.
None of this is to say that we should allow illegal immigration. As Milton
Friedman once noted, you can't have open borders and hope to maintain generous
government benefits for your citizens. ...
But you ask: What is the fiscal balance, anyway? No one knows..., no definitive
study has been done. ... The most insightful study remains one done by the
National Research Council in 1997. ... The study found that an immigrant high
school dropout -- which characterizes nearly half of today's unauthorized people
-- received $89,000 more in services than he paid in taxes in his life. But an
immigrant with at least some college -- a quarter of today's unauthorized --
gave $105,000 more than he got. For the high school graduates left, those who
arrived during their teens or earlier were slightly profitable for the
government, while the children of those who arrived later paid off the small
deficit of their parents. ...
A tough federal law passed in 1996 has since cut almost all benefits to
unauthorized immigrants. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, which
advocates forcing out immigrants here illegally, acknowledged that the average
undocumented household in 2002 received fully 46 percent less in federal
benefits than an American one. But this likely would go up with legalization.
So, the main question may be: Are they deserving? Look around you at the people
whose European-born ancestors were on the dole and overcrowding schools a
century ago. You decide.

Why you SHOULD NOT buy any Apple products

2010-09-09T20:19:00.001-07:00

Exhibit A: Macs

This is why I buy Newman's Own brand products

2010-09-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

...cause I hope if I consume them I will eventually be as cool as this guy.

Paying Third-Graders for Better Test Scores

2010-09-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

via Real Time Economics at the WSJ:

Want your kids to get better grades? Pay them. A recent study found success in a program that gave money to children as young as third grade who scored well on standardized tests.

GW Bush Interior Design vs. B Obama Interior Design

2010-09-07T11:18:00.000-07:00

I kind of like the modern flairs thrown into B Obama's office. I would think that President Bush would have liked leather chairs more so than President Obama though. Very cool.

People who feel clean judge others more harshly.

2010-08-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

The cleaner you are the more you look down on people.

As the dirt and germs are wiped away, we're left feeling not just bodily but also morally cleansed - a kind of metaphorical virtuosity that leads us to judge others more harshly. That's according to Chen-Bo Zhong's team, who invited 58 undergrads to a lab filled with spotless new equipment. Half the students were asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe so as not to soil the shiny surfaces. Afterwards all the students rated the morality of six societal issues including pornography and littering. Those who'd wiped their hands made far harsher judgments than those who didn't.

It was a similar story in a follow-up study with hundreds of participants recruited via a nation-wide database. Those primed to feel clean by reading a short passage that began 'My hair feels clean and light. My breath is fresh ...' made far harsher moral judgements about 16 social issues compared with those primed to feel dirty by a passage beginning, 'My hair feels oily and heavy. My breath stinks ...'

A third study was identical to the second, except that after reading either the dirty or clean passage of text the 136 undergrad participants also ranked themselves against their peers on several factors including intelligence, attractiveness and moral character. As before, those primed with the clean text made more harsh moral judgements on social issues. Crucially, this association was entirely mediated by their having an inflated sense of moral virtuosity compared with their peers (by contrast, reading the clean vs. dirty text made no difference to self rankings on the other factors).

'Acts of cleanliness have not only the potential to shift our moral pendulum to a more virtuous self, but also license harsher moral judgement of others,' Zhong and his team concluded.

Sammy Davis Jr. for Suntory

2010-08-28T19:00:00.000-07:00

Handmade Suits

2010-08-28T07:09:00.000-07:00

I keep finding myself thinking that good quality, natural materials made clothes are like eating good quality, naturally raised food.

Synthetic clothes like what you find in malls across America are like McDonalds...hopefully the next trend will be locally produced clothes just like we have the locally grown movement.

Oxxford Clothes - Chicago, IL from Oxxford Suits on Vimeo.

Ground Zero Mosque

2010-08-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Dick Cavett on the Ground Zero Mosque: ""What other churches might be objectionable because of the horrific acts of some of its members? Maybe we shouldn't have Christian churches in the South wherever the Ku Klux Klan operated because years ago proclaimed white Christians lynched blacks. How close to Hickam Field, at Pearl Harbor, should a Shinto shrine be allowed? I wonder how many of our young people -- notorious, we are told, for their ignorance of American history -- would be surprised that Japanese-Americans had lives and livelihoods destroyed when they were rounded up during World War II? Should all World War II service memorials, therefore, be moved away from the sites of these internment camps? Where does one draw the line?"—American television icon Dick Cavett, in the New York Times.

via Boing Boing

F**K YOU

2010-08-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

The tackiness of the curse words is in contrast to the sophisticated soulful sound of the track...I wonder if he did this on purpose?

PUMA salutes the After Hours athlete

2010-08-22T06:29:00.000-07:00

Le Grand Content

2010-08-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Le Grand Content from Lucas Carlisle on Vimeo.

New York Subway in the 1980's...very post-apocalyptic looking

2010-08-21T11:31:00.000-07:00

Check them out here

Life is short. Play naked.

2010-08-20T06:49:00.000-07:00

Music and Circles....aaahhhhhh, this is peaceful.

2010-08-19T06:08:00.000-07:00

Pulsate is simple and calming. Just click to create expanding circles; their collisions create music.

via Kottke

Can anthropology solve an economic crisis?

2010-08-18T13:35:00.000-07:00

via Science Daily:

The field of anthropology is often associated with finding lost tribes, understanding ancient civilizations, and the study of indigenous peoples. However, researchers in Norway argue that anthropology has much more to offer than insights into small-scale societies, traditional cultures or arcane customs. They now argue that anthropology is an indispensable tool to complement others research fields, such as psychology and economics, in solving many diverse problems.

What is emblematic of the 21st century?

2010-08-18T06:25:00.000-07:00

I can't wait for this to spread among the internets...let the debate begin (via Marginal Revolution, who else?):

A recent reader request was:
What things that are around today are most distinctively 21st century? What will be the answer to this question in 10 years?
Here is what comes to mind and I think most of it will remain emblematic for some time:
Technology: iPhone, Wii, iPad, Kindle. These are no-brainers and I do think it will go down in American history as "iPhone," not "iPhone and other smart phones." Sorry people.
To read: blogs and Freakonomics, this is the age of non-fiction. I don't think we have an emblematic and culturally central novel for the last ten years. The Twilight series is a possible pick but I don't think they will last in our collective memory. Harry Potter (the series started 1997) seems to belong too much to the 1990s.
Films: Avatar, Inception (for appropriately negative reviews of the latter, see here, here, and here). Both will look and feel "of this time." Overall there have been too many "spin-off" movies. Keep in mind this question is not about "what is best."
Music: It's been a slow period, but I'll pick Lady Gaga, most of all for reflecting the YouTube era rather than for her music per se. I don't think many musical performers from the last ten years will become canonical, even though the number of "good songs" is quite high. Career lifecycles seem to be getting shorter, for one thing.
Television: The Sopranos starts in 1999, so it comes closer to counting than Harry Potter does. It reflects "the HBO era." Lost was a major network show and at the very least people will laugh at it, maybe admire it too. Battlestar Galactica. Reality TV.
What am I missing? What does this all add up to? Pretty strange, no?

Pizza is good for you - scientific FACT, lol

2010-08-18T06:17:00.000-07:00

Here is the first sentence of the Guardian post:

A series of Italian research studies suggest that eating pizza might do good things for a person's health.

I don't need to read the rest of the article...that would just be extra time spent reading when I could be ordering pizza.

I love these shoes

2010-08-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

via Nerd Boyfriend. The whole package is great - like most things Miles - but the shoes are perfect. Need...these....now...

Miles Davis (This Isn’t Happiness)

The Mechanism of Unhappiness

2010-08-13T10:13:00.000-07:00

Ugly Animal Photo's

2010-08-13T08:17:00.001-07:00

These are great, via the New York Times.

THE ANATOMY OF A DIVORCE

2010-08-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

James R. Hine, What Comes After You Say, “I Love You”?, Pacific Books, 1980

THE ANATOMY OF A DIVORCE

Hal and Veronica met early one summer, when Veronica was engaged to another man with whom she was not getting along well.

THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM

2010-08-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

Milton R. Cudney, Eliminating Self-Defeating Behaviors, Life Giving Enterprises, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1975.

THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM

The point is not to cry over spilled milk. The point is to try and drive home to each of us the deep consequences in missed living that results when people continue to respond to life with defeating behavior patterns.

Half of the story about prices has to do with the negative results within the person using the behaviors. The other half has to do with the prices paid by people and systems beyond the person himself. Let us begin looking at this with a diagram: [right]

To interfere with the creative functioning of any system interferes in some way with each larger system beyond the smaller unit itself.

ANATOMY OF THE NUNCHAKU

2010-08-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

ANATOMY OF THE NUNCHAKU

Fumio Demura, from Nunchaku: Karate Weapon of Self-Defense, 1971, Ohara Publications.

Nunchaku handles should be made from a hardwood that, like oak, loquat or pasania, is both strong and flexible. The nunchaku rope, originally made of horsehair, is now usually made of nylon or chain.

The length of the nunchaku should normally equal the distance from the middle of the hand to the elbow. However, the size of the nunchaku should also be adjusted to fit the individual’s height, weight and arm power.

INTRODUCTION TO HYDROLOGY

2010-08-13T08:10:00.000-07:00

INTRODUCTION TO HYDROLOGY

The hydrological cycle as presented in many hydrology textbooks is defined as a group of numerous inter-related phenomena representing the different paths through which water in nature circulates and is transformed.

Modern Sewer Design

American Iron and Steel Institute, 1980

Unicorn Being a Jerk

2010-08-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

One Sign of Deflation

2010-08-09T13:42:00.000-07:00

Scary chart of the day:

I’m not ready to commit myself yet to one side or the other of the inflation/deflation argument. Part of me thinks that we are heading for a massive dollar depreciation, which would lead to an inflationary squeeze. Another part of me thinks that we are short short short on consumer demand.
Here’s a data point in favor of the deflation argument. As part of my previous post, I calculated personal consumption expenditures, subtracting out education, health, and housing. Education and health have big government support. Housing also has government support–in addition, much of housing PCE is imputed rent on owner-occupied housing, so does not reflect actual out-of-pocket outlays.
So this chart shows the 10-quarter percentage change in PCE, ex health, education, and housing.

Consumer spending today is *lower* than it was at the beginning of the recession, outside of education,healthcare, and housing. What’s more, the growth rate has been on a steady downward trend.
This is not simply an artifact of population growth. The per-capita graph looks just the same.
What does this all mean? Just as the government-supported health and education sectors have been the main source of new jobs since 2000, so has health and education (and housing) been the main support for consumer spending.
Ladies and gentleman, we’re at a turning point. Assume for the moment that we need to combat deflation. Should we accept the long-term trend, where the government becomes the main driving force for the economy? Or should we do everything we can to revivify innovation and private sector growth, and fight deflation in that way? Are Keynesian policies the only way to deal with deflation–or can we leverage new technological capabilities and innovation to create demand a different way?

Saying mean things will give you arthritis

2010-08-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

Great, now this:

STICKS and stones may break your bones, but words might make you more likely to get arthritis. Not as catchy as the original, but it seems social rejection could trigger diseases linked to inflammation.
Psychologist George Slavich of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues asked 124 volunteers to give speeches and perform mental arithmetic in front of a panel of dismissive observers. Saliva analysis showed they exhibited elevated levels of two inflammation markers. A quarter of the volunteers then played a computer game in which other players were instructed to exclude them.
Functional MRI scans showed this triggered increased activity in two brain regions associated with rejection. Participants with the highest inflammatory responses showed the greatest increases in brain activity (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009164107).
Understanding the role the brain plays in conditions linked to inflammation - such as asthma, arthritis, cardiovascular disease and depression - will help in the development of new treatments to combat them, says Slavich.

AAAAHHHHH!!!!

2010-08-07T08:37:00.000-07:00

Seriously, this movie was crazy...

American Fat

2010-08-04T10:51:00.000-07:00

The Fattest States of America: "West Virginia has the highest obesity rate in America, according to new Gallup survey data."

Die Antwoord - Zef Side.

2010-08-01T12:04:00.000-07:00

American Cinema

2010-08-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

Great overview of the history of American Cinema. Your lazy Sunday begins now....watch all the episodes here.

Using clips from more than 300 of the greatest movies ever made, this series explores film history and American culture through the eyes of over 150 Hollywood insiders, including Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Michael Eisner. In-depth treatments present film as a powerful economic force, potent twentieth-century art form, and viable career option.

American Cinema connects subjects such as history, business, and English with other studies. In addition, it is a perfect vehicle for developing visual and media literacy skills and can be used as a springboard for creative-writing endeavors and media production.

Produced by the New York Center for Visual History in association with KCET/Los Angeles and the BBC. 1995.

NEW Between 2 Ferns! Hilarious!

2010-07-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Steve Carell from Between Two Ferns

There's the utilitarian grille, and there's the deontological diner. That's pretty much it.

2010-07-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

Great talk by JONATHAN HAIDT over at Edge. Check out the video or read through the talk here. The analogies are great...like the title of this post or this snippet:

Morality is like The Matrix, from the movie "The Matrix." Morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it's like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix. But there are lots and lots of other matrices out there.

xkcd - HAHA, SO TRUE!

2010-07-30T07:13:00.000-07:00

Game Theory, Dilbert style

2010-07-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

Thanks for helping me live longer...

2010-07-28T13:31:00.000-07:00

...Ellison, Steve, Chris, Tim, Erik, Angel, and all you other folks who I call my friends. Looks like you've increased my odds of living.

TIME TO GET SERIOUS!!!!!!

2010-07-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

I Meant To Do That

2010-07-22T09:42:00.000-07:00

Maze

2010-07-21T06:41:00.000-07:00

Good Morning

2010-07-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

Argument against more unemployment insurance - which just passed in the Senate

2010-07-20T12:37:00.000-07:00

Scott Sumner is upset about the extension of unemployment benefits. I look forward to his next post on the topic:

It just so happens that extended UI causes unemployment.:

I am always a bit amazed by the way anti-supply-siders interpret certain stylized facts. They seem to start with the premise that supply-side tax effects are not important. If you raise taxes on the rich, you get lots more revenue. And if you lower taxes on the rich, you get lots less revenue. I try to imagine their thought process:
Yes, the huge increase in the top MTR under Hoover and Roosevelt didn’t raise much revenue, but that was because it “just so happened” that America’s income distribution got much more equal after 1930. No supply-side effects there. And yes, the Reagan tax cuts on the rich were actually associated with more revenue, but that’s because it “just so happened” that the income distribution got much less equal after 1980. And yes the Europeans don’t actually raise much more revenue than we do, despite higher tax rates, but that’s because it “just so happens” that Europeans work less. You say they work less for tax reasons? Don’t be silly—it “just so happens” the Germans and French have lazy, happy-go-lucky cultures. You say the French worked as hard as Americans in the 1960s? It “just so happens” this distinctive French culture developed only in the past few decades, when their tax rates rose far above American levels.
And then there is the debate over extended benefits for the unemployed, which at 99 weeks is far longer than under any previous recession (that I can recall–does anyone have data?) Unemployment benefits are of course an implicit tax on labor. If the benefits are 77% as big as the wages in the best job you can find, then they are a 77% implicit tax rate. That makes a big difference, particularly for workers in dead-end jobs. Matt Yglesias recently challenged right-wing economists:
That’s because Congress is unwilling to extent UI eligibility beyond 99 weeks. Which means that soon enough we should see . . . something. But what? My guess is not much. My guess is that basically nobody wants to hire the vast majority of the current long-term unemployed. So my guess is that the labor market prospects of people who’ve been unemployed for 98 weeks will look an awful lot like people who’ve been unemployed for “only” 70 weeks. I wonder what people with a more right-of-center approach would predict? Are we going to see a surge in employment among people around the 99 week mark? Will they uncover hidden secret jobs that are stashed away somewhere?
Then a commenter named “wonks anonymous” provided me with a link where Casey Mulligan discusses just such a study by Stepan Jurajda and Frederick Tannery. They looked at the number of weeks before unemployed Pittsburghers found jobs during the period from 1980 through 1985. They choose this period because Pittsburgh had a horrible job market, with unemployment frequently over 10% and peaking at 16%. They found that a few weeks before unemployment benefits were about to run out, roughly 3% of unemployed workers found a job each week. Then the number of job finders jumped to 30% during the week their unemployment benefits ran out, and stayed somewhat above normal for another 9 weeks. That’s pretty definitive evidence that incentives matter.
Why are liberals so often wrong about the supply-side effect of taxes? Partly because these effects go against comment sense, and partly because they seem morally distasteful. Unemployed people really are suffering (liberals are right about that), and claims that they could get jobs if they wanted to appear to be “blaming the victim.” I think this is wrong, and that we need to avoid letting normative considerations distort our positive analysis of cause and effect, but it isn’t easy to do.
Another problem is that people visualize a period of high unemployment as one with very few new jobs being created. This is not true; millions of jobs are being created all the time, even during recessions. The problem during recessions is that many more people are looking for those jobs, and hence it is much more difficult for any given individual to find a job. But it is certainly not impossible, as we know from the jobs created and jobs lost data. My guess is that most of those suddenly finding jobs are less skilled workers who are accepting a lower-paying job out of desperation. The low wage job market is widely known to have lots of turnover.
To summarize, common sense suggests that Matt Yglesias and Paul Krugman are right. And those of us with empathy for the unemployed would like them to be right. But it “just so happens” they are wrong. Does this mean UI is a bad idea? As you know, I favor the Singapore approach of self-funded UI accounts. Given that we don’t have them, and given that millions have lost their jobs due to the incompetence of America’s macroeconomists (who keep insisting that monetary policy is out of ammunition, or that there is no problem of inadequate AD), then I think you can make a good argument for providing some additional help for the unemployed.
In the next post I will discuss why the extended UI benefits are worsening the recession. Is there a way to help the unemployed without making the recession worse? Perhaps the government might want to consider a large, one-time, lump sum payment to the unemployed, which is not in any way tied to the duration of unemployment. I don’t know whether such an idea is feasible, but it seems better on both efficiency and humanitarian grounds than building dubious public works projects.
PS. The preceding is not an endorsement of actual, real world, supply-side politicians. They often do make far-fetched assertions, such as the claim that the Bush tax cuts boosted revenue. Tax cuts usually do not boost revenue, and that isn’t even the question we should be asking.
PPS. I don’t mean to suggest that Yglesias and I are far apart on taxes. We both think a progressive consumption tax is optimal.

Homosexual couples save more money than heterosexual couples

2010-07-20T07:03:00.000-07:00

This is out of the University of Alicante in Spain:

ABSTRACT
Sexual Orientation and Household Savings: Do Homosexual Couples Save More?*

We analyze how sexual orientation is related to household savings using 2000 US Census data, and find that gay and lesbian couples own significantly more retirement income than heterosexuals, while cohabiting heterosexuals save more than their married counterparts. In a household savings model, we interpret this homosexual-specific differential as due to the extremely low fertility of same-sex couples, in addition to the precautionary motives driving cohabiting households to save more than married ones. Evidence from homeowners’ ratio of mortgage payments to house value exhibits the same pattern of savings differentials by sexual orientation and cohabiting status.

How to win at Paper, Rock, Scissors

2010-07-19T10:36:00.000-07:00

It is a game of strategy just like Chess is. Here is the secret.

5 stages of Facebook grief

2010-07-19T10:31:00.001-07:00

Here is a great article that points out the obvious: Facebook would be way better if we were able to have different social groups instead of just 1 large one:

The social network of the future will pattern itself after real-world social groupings. It will enable people to have private, closed, secure conversations within groups, without fear that one social group will gain access to the conversations of another.
One simple approach would be for a social networking site to force you to place each new friend into one or more social groups. Default labels could be "immediate family," "extended family," "former co-workers," "classmates," "best friends," etc.

To successfully post a picture or status update, you would have to click on checkboxes that determined who got it. You should be able to choose any or all groups.
The posts of others could be color-coded to determine which social group they originate with. Comments would stay within the social groups the comment originated in. Related to this, all profile and personal information would have to be checkboxed as well.

I don't know if my imagined scenario is the best one, or even if it would work. The point is that someone must -- and someone will -- create a system for segregating all the social groups in your life. And whoever does that will win over Facebook users spit out the other end of Stage 5.
Such a system is especially urgent because of the rapid growth and coming automation of location services. People will want to automatically share their current location with one or more social groups, but will want to avoid sharing that information with others.

That way this doesn't happen anymore.

**update: just found this on Gizmodo. HILARIOUS!

How Will You Measure Your Life?

2010-07-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

Good stuff from Clayton M. Christensen. The whole piece is worth reading so I won't post any specific part here. Definietly check it out here.

He talks about balancing work and life. Everyone likes to see results quickly or at least be able to fully grasp what the end result will be. Energetic people over-invest in careerism because it gives these quick results: products, wages. Family life, social life, take decades to mature and usually play second fiddle to the quick resulting stuff.

Converse - "All Summer"

2010-07-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast, Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend and Kid Cudi for Converse:

Making of the music of Despicable Me featuring Pharrell Williams

2010-07-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

Extending benefits for the unemployed

2010-07-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

Argument/s for continuing unemployment benefits via Free Exchange:

For some time now, a debate has simmered over the extent to which unemployment benefits have encouraged workers who could find jobs to stay out of work, thereby unnecessarily exacerbating America's labour market problems. Most studies of the question estimate that benefits probably aren't responsible for most of the rise in the unemployment rate, and a recent bit of research from the San Francisco Fed pegged the increase in the unemployment rate attributable to benefits at about 0.4 percentage points. Still Republicans (with an assist from Democratic Senator Ben Nelson) have seized on the question and on deficit politics as an excuse to end additional extensions to unemployment benefits. Several million unemployed Americans have or will soon lose their benefits as a result.
Scott Winship (who Matt Yglesias describes as someone who 'likes to come up with empirical data that debunks liberal views') recently sought to add to the analysis of the value of unemployment benefits by constructing indexes of job openings comparable to indexes of unemployment, in order to construct usable ratios of the two. The idea is that if the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings is high it's difficult for workers to simply go out and find employment, and benefits probably aren't having much of a discouraging effect. Here's what he found:
And he wrote:
I’ll just say I was shocked and that I am much more sympathetic to extension of unemployment insurance than I was yesterday.
Which is appropriate. At the same time, it's important to remember that the best thing one can do for the unemployed is to get them employed. In a piece today providing an economic argument for extended unemployment benefits, Larry Summers quotes President Obama as saying:
Lasting unemployment takes a toll on families, takes a toll on marriages, takes a toll on children. It saps the vitality of communities, especially in places that have seen factories and other anchoring businesses shut their doors. And being unable to find work – being able to provide for your family – that doesn’t just affect your economic security, that affects your heart and your soul. It beats you up. It’s hard.
And he's right. As Brad DeLong noted in his latest By invivation piece:
Workers who are out of work—especially workers who are out of work for a long time—lose a good deal of their market-relevant human capital. Their networks of contacts that allow them to easily get and change jobs, their habits of punctuality, their workplace skills, and their self-esteem all erode. The long-term unemployed, especially, drop out of the effective labor force—and it is damnably hard to reattach them all to employment absent a full-scale World War II-style inflationary boom.
In their recent contribution to the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Ayşegül Şahin explain that the longer workers spend in unemployment, the slower is their subsequent rate of exit from unemployment. Mr Summers answer to this is that unemployment benefits are stimulative:
[U]nemployment insurance puts money in the pockets of the families most likely to spend the money – which in turn expands the economy and creates jobs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has identified increased aid to the unemployed as one of the two most cost-effective policy options for increasing economic production and employment.
Missed unemployment insurance payments since May total over $10 billion – enough to have created 100,000 jobs.
That's a fair point, but the 100,000 jobs created by those payments are clearly insufficient to employ the 2.5 million unemployed affected by the lapse in benefits.
What should be clear is that America's current unemployment policies are woefully unprepared to handle a labour market like the present one. As important as it is to keep families out of destitution, it's also necessary to focus on ways to keep unemployed workers in those families attached to the labour force and prepared to get and succeed in a job when one is finally available. Otherwise, the long-term unemployed will linger on growing ever less employable, joblessness will become structural, and America can get ready to face its own bout with European-style hysteresis.

Jobless vs. Job Openings

2010-07-14T06:02:00.000-07:00

Interesting chart:

Should we extend unemployment benefits?

Study finds misinformed people often have the strongest opinions...

2010-07-13T06:10:00.001-07:00

via the Boston Globe...everyone except me and my strong opinions toward the iPhone:

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Scientists suspect to have found the God particle

2010-07-13T06:07:00.000-07:00

via the Telegraph

Last year, Fermi physicists said they expected to have enough data to find or rule out the Higgs by early next year, and gave themselves a fifty-fifty chance of finding it before the end of 2010.
The Higgs boson is the last of the particles posited by the standard model of particle physics still to be found. It is said to explain why other particles have mass, and its discovery would confirm the standard model. If its existence is ruled out altogether, then other, previously less popular theories will have to be examined.

New Scientist suggests that more may be known this month, when scientists present their findings at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP), which opens in Paris on 22 July.

THIS....IS....FIFA!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-07-11T19:03:00.000-07:00

トリスでハワイ

2010-07-11T07:54:00.000-07:00

Grimace

2010-07-11T07:43:00.000-07:00

Ideas in Action with Jim Glassman is a new half-hour weekly series on ideas and their consequences. Innovation: Is America Suffering an Innovation Ga

2010-07-09T19:19:00.000-07:00

Black To The Future

2010-07-09T13:55:00.000-07:00

Diet Soda makes you fat

2010-07-09T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Frontal Cortex:

The scientists argue that fake sugar is dangerous because it subverts a crucial homeostatic mechanism, as the the brain uses the sweetness of a food to keep track of its intake. More sugar implies more calories; the tongue is a natural energy detector. The problem with diet sodas is that they make this system unreliable, so that the presence of of intense sweetness no longer means anything. (And it's not just rodents: a similar effect has been observed in humans.) The hypothalamus gets confused. The end result is that we lose touch with the energetic needs of our body. Instead of eating to sate a hunger, we just eat. And eat.
This is the curse of soda: it's so bad for us that even diet sodas make us fat.

Ballface

2010-07-09T04:50:00.001-07:00

Ballface. from Jason Butler on Vimeo.

Elements

2010-07-07T19:02:00.000-07:00

Sam Kean, on elements: Nine out of every 10 atoms in the universe are hydrogen; the other 10 percent are helium. The rest of the universe is a rounding error.

Toy Stories

2010-07-06T06:45:00.000-07:00

Dr. Landsburg on Krugman and employment benefits:

Paul Krugman is at it again, casting aspersions on everyone who opposes extended unemployment benefits while offering absolutely no positive argument for those benefits. Let me explain what would count, to an economist, as a positive argument.
There’s no question that extending benefits would be good for the currently unemployed, and no question that it would be bad for those who are called on to foot the bill. Economists usually deal with that kind of conflict is by asking what policy you’d prefer if you had amnesia, and and didn’t know your own employment status. (You can read a lot more about this approach to policy analysis in Chapter 16 of The Big Questions.) The amnesiac is an impartial judge who is forced to care about everyone, because he/she might be anyone.
To translate this philosophical position into concrete policy choices, we have to figure out what the amnesiac wants. Fortunately, we have a lot of experience observing amnesiacs, or at least their equivalents. When you buy health insurance, you don’t know how much medical care you’re going to need; when you accept a sales job, you don’t know how you’ll perform; when you buy a share of stock, you don’t know whether it will go up or down. So you’re making choices in the dark, much like an amnesiac who doesn’t know his own health status, or his own salesmanship skills, or how his own portfolio is doing. By observing those choices, we can estimate how real amnesiacs are likely to behave.
By the industry standards of economics, to justify further unemployment benefits, you’ve got to at least to attempt to argue that an amnesiac would favor them. And you do this not by posturing a la Krugman, but by computing.
Now that’s not an easy business. You need to make educated guesses about a lot of things an amnesiac might care about, like: What’s the chance of becoming unemployed? How costly is unemployment? What utility function do people maximize? How much do people discount the future? How much deadweight loss (i.e. lost production due to disincentive effects) is caused by taxation? Different economists might make different guesses, and so get different answers. But at that point we can at least pinpoint the locus of our disagreements and try to get better estimates in the areas where we differ.
To show you how that kind of thing might work, I’ve just written down a (warning: technical!) toy model where I invented answers to the key questions, did some computations, and concluded that our amnesiac would oppose further benefits. (Honest, I didn’t know in advance what answer I would get.) These computations prove nothing, because at least some of my invented answers surely have nothing to do with reality. But my point is that if you’re claiming as an economist to support further benefits, then it’s your job to do the hard work of writing down a more realistic model and show me how the numbers work out. As far as I’ve seen, neither Krugman nor any of his ilk have even tried to do that.

xkcd.

2010-07-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South

2010-07-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

New book, looks interesting:

Amid all the complicated economic theories about the causes and solutions to poverty, one idea is so basic it seems radical: just give money to the poor. Despite its skeptics, researchers have found again and again that cash transfers given to significant portions of the population transform the lives of recipients. Countries from Mexico to South Africa to Indonesia are giving money directly to the poor and discovering that they use it wisely – to send their children to school, to start a business and to feed their families.
Directly challenging an aid industry that thrives on complexity and mystification, with highly paid consultants designing ever more complicated projects, Just Give Money to the Poor offers the elegant southern alternative – bypass governments and NGOs and let the poor decide how to use their money. Stressing that cash transfers are not charity or a safety net, the authors draw an outline of effective practices that work precisely because they are regular, guaranteed and fair. This book, the first to report on this quiet revolution in an accessible way, is essential reading for policymakers, students of international development and anyone yearning for an alternative to traditional poverty-alleviation methods.

Stylus/Kumarian Press - Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the Global South

The global jobs competition heats up

2010-07-01T05:54:00.000-07:00

From the WSJ:

For generations, coal miners gauged the health of their workplace with a critical indicator: canaries. Any buildup of carbon monoxide and other gases would silence the singing canaries before reaching levels toxic to humans.

Today, another leading indicator—multinational companies headquartered in the U.S.—is signaling widespread and legitimate concerns about the health of the U.S. economy. A new McKinsey report that the three of us advised argues that all Americans should heed their message.

U.S. multinational companies have long been among America's strongest firms. Although they comprise far less than 1% of U.S. companies, they account for about 19% of all private jobs, 25% of all private wages, 48% of total exports of goods, and a remarkable 74% of nonpublic R&D spending. For decades, U.S. multinationals have driven an outsized share of U.S. productivity growth, the foundation of rising standards of living for everyone. They are responsible for 41% of the increase in private labor productivity since 1990.

Despite the common allegation that multinationals simply "export jobs" out of the U.S., research shows that expansion abroad by these firms has tended to complement—not substitute for—their U.S. operations. More investment and employment abroad have tended to create more American investment and jobs as well. From 1988 to 2007, employment in foreign affiliates rose to 10 million from 4.8 million. During that same period, employment in U.S. parent companies rose to 22 million from 17.7 million.

But there is no guarantee that the past will be prologue. McKinsey conducted in-depth interviews with senior executives from 26 of America's largest and best-known multinationals. Their message is sobering: Today the U.S. is in an era of global competition to attract, retain and grow the operations of multinational companies that it's never faced before.

These leading executives laud many longstanding economic strengths of the U.S., such as its large and competitive domestic market. But they also see dozens of other countries—and not just fast-growing economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China—making dramatic improvements in the policies and overall economic environment they present to the world's leading companies. These improvements are not simply a matter of tax holidays and other financial subsidies. Rather, these countries have opened their markets broadly, and they are redefining where U.S. multinationals can successfully operate....

So it makes sense to make it extremely hard for anyone to come to the U.S. and work...right Arizona? It makes sense to make it difficult for students to come here and learn, entrepreneurs to come here and create, simple laborers to come here and make life easier for others who may provide us with the next Google...bullpucky. It does not make sense and I hope we wise up to this before it is too late.

Why do IQs vary across nations?

2010-07-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

via Marginal Revolution

People who live in countries where disease is rife may have lower IQs because they have to divert energy away from brain development to fight infections, scientists in the US claim.
The controversial idea might help explain why national IQ scores differ around the world, and are lower in some warmer countries where debilitating parasites such as malaria are widespread, they say.
Researchers behind the theory claim the impact of disease on IQ scores has been under-appreciated, and believe it ranks alongside education and wealth as a major factor that influences cognitive ability.
The full story is here. The original research paper is here. I'm not sure the authors have a very good test against alternative hypotheses, but still a correlation remains after making some appropriate adjustments.

Google + Abbey Rd

2010-07-01T05:38:00.000-07:00

Serge Gainsbourg

2010-06-30T06:32:00.000-07:00

Serge Gainsbourg (Abendblatt.de)

via Nerd Boyfriend

Revolution in time

2010-06-29T19:46:00.000-07:00

Alextatic

The Virtue of Dissent via Big Think

Summer Nights / One [Disco Deviance]

Storyful. » The Human Algorithm

Shanghai Museum of Glass

David Brooks: The social animal

Bill Gates: State Budgets Hammer Schools

Economics is great, but economists aren't?

Tech, Humans, jobs, and the future

The Financial Crisis: Will It Lead to America's Decline?

Behavioral Economics Reading List

Why is labor hoarding diminishing?

Music time: Eskmo 'We Got More' (Official Video)

10 Great Years

The Mother of All Funk Chords

Where young college grads are finding jobs

Scientists discover that people’s color preferences stem from past experiences.

"What a waste of a good universe if there's none but us."

Does Unemployment Make Us Sick?

Great movie

Geeze...

Obama on Dylan: Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was...

Yo Mama Jokes indexed by professional employment

The good kind of lost

How Shazam works

Techniques for feeling happy

Techniques for feeling happy

There is no way this can go wrong.

Common Misconceptions

Everything is a Remix

Not only are you doomed--but so is everyone else you have touched--!

Should we raise taxes on the rich?

The Obama administration is looking for a good reason to justify killing U.S. citizens without legal restraint

"Illegal immigration: What's the real cost to taxpayers?"

Why you SHOULD NOT buy any Apple products

This is why I buy Newman's Own brand products

Paying Third-Graders for Better Test Scores

GW Bush Interior Design vs. B Obama Interior Design

People who feel clean judge others more harshly.

Sammy Davis Jr. for Suntory

Handmade Suits

Ground Zero Mosque

F**K YOU

PUMA salutes the After Hours athlete

Le Grand Content

New York Subway in the 1980's...very post-apocalyptic looking

Life is short. Play naked.

Music and Circles....aaahhhhhh, this is peaceful.

Can anthropology solve an economic crisis?

What is emblematic of the 21st century?

Pizza is good for you - scientific FACT, lol

I love these shoes

The Mechanism of Unhappiness

Ugly Animal Photo's

THE ANATOMY OF A DIVORCE

THE UNIVERSAL SYSTEM

ANATOMY OF THE NUNCHAKU

INTRODUCTION TO HYDROLOGY

Unicorn Being a Jerk

One Sign of Deflation

Saying mean things will give you arthritis

AAAAHHHHH!!!!

American Fat

Die Antwoord - Zef Side.

American Cinema

*NEW* Between 2 Ferns! Hilarious!

There's the utilitarian grille, and there's the deontological diner. That's pretty much it.

xkcd - HAHA, SO TRUE!

Game Theory, Dilbert style

Thanks for helping me live longer...

TIME TO GET SERIOUS!!!!!!

I Meant To Do That

Maze

Good Morning

Argument against more unemployment insurance - which just passed in the Senate

Homosexual couples save more money than heterosexual couples

How to win at Paper, Rock, Scissors

5 stages of Facebook grief

How Will You Measure Your Life?

Converse - "All Summer"

NEW Between 2 Ferns! Hilarious!