1. Competition in the hug market.
2. Should restaurants charge for bread and butter?
4. The education of a libertarian, by Peter Thiel.
5. The ten most influential films of recent times?
Assorted links
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2. Should restaurants charge for bread and butter?
The trouble with charges is that people use that charge, supposedly a means to address free riding, and they lump a lot of other free riders into the charge and that excessive charge becomes a strong incentive that is doomed to lose money. At an R&D facility, we had a central testing facility. They started charging for the tests. The problem was that the tests cost so much that people started reducing testing drastically. Having the test facility available is a service that wasn’t factored in. It simply wasn’t worth the cost of the test when the entire budget was spread across the bill. But, once the testing facility closes and a product fails noone will remember that the recall costs should be included in the cost savings calculations.
5. I would argue many of these changes were not for the better and some of them are a bit exaggerated.
I hadn’t realized that extending the franchise to womyn was the doom of the libertarian project, but heh, I’ll take it.
The rest of the screed seems to imply that the failure of Donner Party Conservatism directly caused the debauchery (or escapism) of Rich White Males, as reported by someone uninformed by Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Escapism”. I’ll let Holbo unpack the hilarious connections if he’s so inclined, but frankly, yall libertarians are so tired (and tiring) that it’s not really worth it.
Thiel; “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms…”
Agreed. The productive class cannot compete with the political class in the arena of politics for the simple reason that the politicians are professional politicians and the producers are professionals only at whatever it is that they produce.
Though I doubt that “escape” is truly possible, what may be possible is to simply ignore them. Pay taxes and obey the laws, but otherwise refuse to participate. Do not endorse their schemes, do not participate in their wars. Make it personal. Resolve to live by the code of the productive, and not by the code of the political.
I found the parent essay by Patri Friedman, for which Thiel’s essay was a response, to be at least as interesting if not more so. I recommend people read both.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyond-folk-activism/
“Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy† into an oxymoron.”
So, for the record, this is what he said about women. Not that stereotypes are all bad, but he didn’t. He stated a testable fact, and in my experience it is a truth. I have a theory that does border on the stereotypical, so I’m not telling.
I also have a theory on the answer to the problem of libertarian democracy, and I’m not telling that one either. Nanananana.
5. I would argue many of these changes were not for the better and some of them are a bit exaggerated.
Actually, so did the creator of the list.
Gorobel, commenting on the orgasm essay in one of he last episodes of Assorted Links, refers us to pandagon.net, whose Amanda Marcotte has this: Libertarian inadvertently argues for 90 percet marginal tax rate
and this:
But I’m the nutty one
to say about Thiel’s piece.
I used to be perfectly fine with the libertarian label; it’s on my facebook profile and the guys on the right-wing college paper up at school and I never shied away from it.
But now I’m starting to see that I’m not what most people, on the net especially, are calling libertarian. These libertarians do not speak the language of Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, or even Hayek, really. It seems rather a shame to have to abandon this term; I don’t see why the Austrian types out there, eg, can’t just own up to being anarchists.
Anyway, it’s not quite clear to me how Thiel fits in to all of this. I’m on board with most of what he’s saying in this piece, and feel a common experience (he was on Stanford Review, I was on Binghamton Review), but the stuff about outer space and the seasteading and his self-portrayal as a beleaguered minority do evoke the kind of libertarian nuttiness that I see people decrying on the net.
A real libertarian would not lament women’s suffrage.
JAPAN SOFTBANK
Softbank, now with about 20.6 million subscribers, controls about 19.2 percent of the nation’s market, up 1.1 percentage points from the previous fiscal year. But average sales per user declined for voice calls, while they were up for data transmission.
Losses on investments from the market downturn dragged on its earnings, according to Softbank, which bought British cellular giant Vodafone Group PLC’s struggling Japanese operations in 2006.
A major one-time loss related to payments for bonds for its mobile unit as well as a write-off for its optical fiber Internet services, also hurt results, it said.
One business area that performed better than last year was its Internet-related “cultural” businesses such as advertising, Internet shopping and auctions, Softbank said.
Softbank also introduced attractive mobile content such as video of comedy acts popular in Japan called “S-1 Battle,” and easy-to-use applications called “mobile widget.”
For the fiscal year ending March 31, Softbank’s profit dropped 60.3 percent to 43.2 billion yen, on 2.67 trillion yen in sales, down 3.7 percent on year.
Softbank did not give a net profit forecast, but expects operating profit for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010, to rise 17 percent from the fiscal year just ended to 420 billion yen.
“So by complaining about Thiel’s mention of drug and alcohol escape, you help to illustrate the validity of the basic thesis. You just can’t seem to let other people be.”
Bzzzt! Wrong again. In fact I am amused by his account of he and his acquaintance’s dissipation, and most definitely NOT interested in curtailing it. AFAIAC, a drunken, useless libertarian is in the best of all possible worlds, for everyone. What I was pointing out was the assignment of blame for this happy state: apparently NON Rich White Males.
As for the films, I agree that many of these influences are, for the most part, bad ones, especially the fast camera work stuff. And, to call Coraline one of the most influential movies of the last 10 years is dumb given that it’s only been around 6 months or so. It _might_ become influential, but it cannot possibly yet be one of the 10 most.
Just wanted to say HI. I found your blog a few days ago and have been reading it over the past few days.
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