1. There is no great stagnation, equine edition, the spread of finance, measuring worker value, and a metaphor for the American economy, all in one simple story. Masterful.
2. English translation of an Adonis poem, from Syria.
3. What is the conditional probability of being struck by lightning?
4. Profile of Wendy Braitman, she was recently discussed (at length) in this links section.
5. Rabbit leaping contests are one thing. Bevolke, please explain the Norwegian dog lockers. It seems to be a design trend (?), more here. Is it just Keynes chapter 17 all over again? Are they air conditioned during the summer? Need they be?
6. The velocity of guns is rising; of course that is contractionary in the macroeconomic sense.
These should keep you busy for a while.
#5 — nice. Is this one-off, or is providing download links to copyright-protected works going to be a permanent feature of this blog?
#4: “And her conversations, like her movements, are imbued with the elegance and self-awareness of a woman who has looked deeply inward and come up feeling more or less okay.”
More or less okay. That’s a high bar.
imbued with the elegance and self-awareness of a woman who has looked deeply inward
Suppress gag reflex.
Sharing guns would seem to be a logical extension of the practice of stashing guns, rather than carrying them. Perhaps what we are seeing is a proxy for the perceived likelihood of being frisked.
I had the same thought. OTOH it reminds me of the apocryphal tale of a homicide commited in a locked room that contained two suspects none of whom will say anything.
Communal ownership makes specfic possession harder to prove.
It’s a demonstration of how dumb the concept of “illegal guns” are. It can sit in my closet for years, or it can go out on gang bangs. Good guns are always with their owners but never fired if they are lucky. Bad guns go out with different guys every night. The gun doesn’t care.
A communal gun increases the probability you will be convicted of a crime you didn’t do, probably far higher than the chance that a communal gun will provide an adequate defense.
What is the deterrent value of a stashed gun? Isn’t it much less than a carried gun? Wouldn’t that mean access to a gun is valuable for effects other than deterrence? Or maybe the time horizon is longer than we usually credit?
A stashed gun is useful as an offensive weapon, and as a credible means of retaliation. Bad guys use guns against other people for reasons other than legitimate self-defense.
Re #3:
It says NOAA estimates the risk of being struck by lightning as ~1 in 1,000,000 per year and ~1 in 10,000 over a lifetime.
Does this mean the median NOAA person lives for a 100 years? I’m puzzled.
May be the numbers are 1.1 in 1,000,000 and 0.9 in 10,000?
i’m pretty sure the issue is that god keeps track of how many years you’ve gone without being struck and then violates conditional independence, and/or/so there are lightning-strike-related Bell inequalities at work
Some people get struck more than once.
I don’t see no p’ints about those rabbits that’s any better’n any other rabbits.
Re #6
The previous way of parking dogs was tying the leash to a little hook outside the supermarket. This practice, however, is no longer legal in Norway according to “Hundeloven” (The dog law). The reasoning for that part of the law is that there were problems with people being bitten or threatened by dogs that had been “parked” in this manner. There has also been an increase in thefts of dogs that were “parked” which where then used in illegal dog fights.
The store-owner rents the Dog-den from the company which then services and maintains it for a fairly low cost. Usage of the Den costs NOK 10 per stay, which goes to the store.
According to the website of the makers of the Dog-dens, the dens have a little reader on them that shows how long the dog has been there, and the temperature inside.
http://hundeparkering.no/
Seems like a fairly sensible solution. You can get the dog-den kitten out with your stores’ logo etc. as well!
I write from Norway. Yes, they are an alternative to tieing your dog to a railing outside the supermarket – something which leads to all sorts of irresponsible behaviour on the part of humans and dogs. I can only add that much to my chagrin there is no need for air conditioning in the summer.
re: #4.
The Wendy Braitman comments (previously) by MR commentators were really depressing – didn’t realize how many MR commentators were… basically sorta mean and angry. Are MR commentators basically that irritated in “real” life? I hope not.
You could use those previous comments alone to justify shutting off commenting here…
And I realize that the above generalizations do not apply to all MR commentators by any measure.
Huh? The comments weren’t really about her, that was kind of the point.
Well, you don’t have to read the comments. A lot of people stick to the main post. I don’t always agree with the tone of other comments (mainly because it’s not my style) but I have to agree with Andrew’ that the comments about Wendy were pretty detached from her. More generally, I would bet many of the commenters who sound mean and angry here are actually being big jokers or blowing off steam.
Here we go again.
Of course if you stick to the main post you miss the most important part of Marginal Revolution – ME
You could use those previous comments alone to justify shutting off commenting here…
NEVER!
Re # 3. I think the incidence of fatalities is under-reported by a large margin in South Africa. Most fatalities mentioned in the media are in remote rural areas, and are often ascribed to witchcraft, and a resultant “sniffing out” of the witch. This does not get a huge amount of airtime in our media. I think the locals deal with it in their own fashion and do not report it.
A pedestrian was killed by lightning on the pavement of a house 4 houses down the road from mine. In Johannesburg we all take precautions in summer by disconnecting appliances, modems, etc., that are sensitive to lightning damage, no-one swims, the golfers flee to the clubhouse and we wait for the inevitable power outages as sub-stations trip out.
A few years ago an American physicist was arguing that Ben Franklin never did perform the famous kite/lightning experiment. Does anyone know if the issue was ever resolved?
The wonders of economics. An avalanche of information is available on radio and television, in the newspapers and on the internet to aid in football betting for FREE. Fan friendly horse racing, on the other hand, either doesn’t have the information at all or charges up the wazolla for it and can’t figure out why they’re slowly going out of business.
for those of us who don’t remember, when was wendy discussed at length?
item 3
4. Wendy Braitman and her beautiful bijoodle, Rose, in whom she is “madly in love.”
Giving her more ink is only deepening her personality disorder.
I married my first college girlfriend who worked while I was in law school. She earned my devotion because she put me before herself, and I’d give my life for her or our children.
Romantic relationships “and there have been plenty of them”
The only time she mentions men in her blog, they are either sex objects or gay. She doesn’t talk about romance except how it pleases her. She wants to be wrapped in the live of a man’s arms. She doesn’t have a clue or care what HE wants.
Either she gives herself away too cheaply, or the men who passed her in the night unanimously found her repellant. I can’t understand why, having read her blog and this article. She’s a hundred dollar bill on the ground that for some reason nobody seems to want to pick up.
Tip for you Wendy: when heterosexual men rises to the top of your list of priorities, you won’t have any trouble keeping one of them. Stop feeling sorry for yourself – there are more lonely men in this world than women.
there are more lonely men in this world than women.
Source please (no snark intended). I’ve read this a few other places but never seen a source.
My single male friends appear to me to be much less lonely than my single female friends, which is consistent with their self-descriptions.
He meant ‘this world’ as in the internet. Online there are exponentially more lonely men than lonely women.
1. Fascinating. We measure human performance in races where betting is, more or less, illegal, and until recently we have ignored data where information is ostensibly useful and profitable.
If an arbitrage opportunity is possible but not exploited, I question its existence. Maybe horse racing is more rigged than we know. Jockeys have a lot of control over races. Or maybe chance plays a larger role than we would think.
I wonder if anyone has done a study on the odds of horse races and how accurately they predict outcomes. The house always wins because the odds are based on the bets. Wagering on superior information reduces your payout. The effect is more powerful than an adverse price response in an equity market transaction where every buyer must have a seller. In wagering on horses, your wager alone moves the odds against you. You gain only if your information is offset by disinformation or random selection.
Endless studies have been done on the accuracy of betting. Betting favorites over a period of time always win about 30% of races. The house, or actually the track, horsemen and state, always win because its share is deducted from the betting pool. It doesn’t matter what horse the money is bet upon, except when there is a “minus pool” and after the takeout there isn’t enough money in the pool to pay all the winning bettors the minimum payoff, normally $2.10, regardless of the winner’s odds.
Pretty soon we won’t need horses in the races at all.
Earlier MR post on shared black-market guns. Big point was that due to their durability, they are much more illiquid than drugs.
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