1. The vote to defund political science: how it went.
2. Jason Kottke doesn't read books anymore.
3. "Food rewards obsessiveness," the best eater in the United States. The full article is gated (the link offers only an excerpt), so buy the 9 November New Yorker. I don't usually link to gated material of this kind, but this was one of the three or four best magazine pieces I'll read in a year.
4. Why Buffett bought that railroad.
5. Weird stuff McDonald's sells around the world. In the Philippines it is "spaghetti soaked in sugar."
6. Fruitless endeavors, or not?: translating works of literature into games of chess against each other, using a computer program.
7. Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?
8. Françoise Sagan: an appreciation.
Jason Kottke only reads mainstream books and books by people he knows.
The ”defund poli sci” chart is terrible… What would Andrew Gelman say?
1. “So tell me again why they want to defund pointy-headed political scientists?”
Because they produce charts like that.
I think James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock defunded political science a loooong time ago. OH SNAP!
Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?
I like how the popular press will jump thru hoops to avoid the uncomfortable thought that natural selection might apply to humanity. So Neanderthals didn’t die out due to a selective disadvantage vis a vis modern humans – the latter were merely “lucky” that an entire continent decided to physically rearrange itself in a way that just happened to suit them better.
Had modern humans not come along, there’s no reason to think Neanderthals would not have adapted to the changing environment, but come along we did, and Neanderthals did not survive.
“What capitalist would actually lock up cash in a firm? That is a waste of good capital that can be leveraged to produce far greater returns!”
Indeed, it has been said that this is Buffett’s managment style: Extract cash from the firm, and raise prices. Oh, and don’t invest in any technological innovation.
Buffett is betting on several things:
1. The price of energy will remain high and go higher. Railroads move goods with much greater fuel efficiency than trucking.
2. The stock price of his Berkshire Hathaway company will not grow as fast as it did historically. Otherwise, he would be making an all-cash offer instead of giving away shares.
3. The Pacific Rim will prosper and its trade with the US will continue to matter greatly. The railroad in question connects to the Pacific coast and not to the Atlantic.
4. The US will remain favorable to deregulation and market pricing, in which case owning a railroad will be a great inflation hedge. But if inflation flares up, his railroad’s customers will lobby heavily for price controls and re-regulation, back to the same environment in which railroads struggled financially some decades ago.
5. As in #4, he may be betting on high inflation in the future (exchanging his cash reserves for hard cashflow-producing assets) and quite likely on a fall in the US dollar versus the renminbi and other Asian currencies.
Buffett likes companies with “moats” that keep out potential competitors, and railroads certainly fit that bill, since it’s pretty impossible to build any new ones. His only competitors in serving the Pacific coast are Union Pacific and the two major Canadian railroads.
He is also idiotproofing Berkshire Hathaway as part of his succession plan, tilting his conglomerate more towards traditional industry and less towards insurance and the rest of the financial industry.
(3) Great piece indeed. The New Yorker is too damn good to cancel (aha! a revenue model!), and that guy can write about food in a way that makes you *emotional* about it… (also a good example of a “do what you love…” kinda career
What Tom S. said. I’m a huge fan of his blog but rarely look to him for any book recomendations.
Is there any point to plugging two novels into a chess program? Surely the author felt a need to justify this project–perhaps my eyes just glazed over before I read that far? Shall we next assign values to sports scares and plug two teams’ seasons into a poker game?
The linked article suggests that humans prevailed over Neanderthals because we had better endurance running capability. Were there perhaps other differences?
According to a recent article in The Atlantic, humans apparently have “orchid gene” characteristics that cause a wide variation in personality types, which may in turn make the species more adaptive in a wide range of environments. Apparently only humans and rhesus monkeys have this characteristic, and not chimps or gorillas or similar species. It seems to be a characteristic that evolved in humans only in the past 50,000 years (so it would have evolved independently in rhesus monkeys).
The article in The Atlantic doesn’t mention anything about Neanderthals, but perhaps it could be a candidate for another key difference between them and us?
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