Category: Uncategorized

TVNZ: London’s Metropolitan police said they had arrested 16 people since Friday for illegal reselling of Olympics tickets, as Games organisers said they were investigating why scores of seats were empty at some events yesterday.

Tim Worstall offers wise comment, should the cause and effect not be clear.

Cory Doctorow has other news:

Police in Weymouth, Dorset, England came to the home of a 17-year-old boy and arrested him, because he had retweeted an unpleasant sentiment to an Olympic athlete. The offending tweet? “You let your dad down i hope you know that.” (This was a pretty dickish thing to tweet, as the athlete in question had previously dedicated his performance to his recently deceased father). The charge is “malicious communication.” The law in question is the Communications Act 2003, Section 127(1)(a) (“a message that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”). It’s great to see that the spirit of the Olympics is alive and well: athleticism and international cooperation means that people are only allowed to say nice things or they go to jail. Just about the only thing worse than being a dick on Twitter? Being a loony authoritarian cop who arrests people for being a dick on Twitter. (via /.)

Hat tip: Carl Danner.

1. Chilli, military demand, poor Indian farmers, etc.

2. Will it be Amazon that delivers the death blow to newspapers?

3. Does seeing the doctor more often keep you out of the hospital?

4. The moral sentiments of controlling a drone.

5. The new debate on interest on reserves.

6. Evan Soltas on what happened in the early 1970s.

Sometimes markets in everything surprises even me. Who knew that the market for human hair entangles the Russian mafia, Indian mystics, and Paris Hilton’s “precious.” Here is one bit:

In the state of Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India is a cluster of seven hills. Perched atop one is Tirumala Venkateswara. Dating back nearly two thousand years, it is the most visited religious site in the world. With attendance three times that of the Vatican, Tirumala hosts nearly 20 million pilgrims a year. About half are women participating in a ceremony they hope will bring good luck. Perhaps they still haven’t found a husband. Perhaps their child is sick. For their luck to change, they believe, a special action is required.

So, after waiting in a queue that is miles long, 25,000 women each day mount the steps of a special building. Inside sit some six hundred barbers. The women bend over and, with a few deft strokes of a straight razor, the barbers shave off their hair. The hair used to be thrown away. These days, if it is virgin — that is, never colored, never processed, never cut, having cascaded from her head two or three feet or more — it will have a significance that is not merely spiritual. It is auctioned to licensed peddlers; this past year Tirumala held several online auctions, in one day reaping $27 million. Peddlers sell the hair to exporters, who sell it to manufacturers, who process it and sell it to distributors, who sell it to salons, who attach it to the heads of millions of Western women. Removing the hair had been a means of ego eradication; adding it serves now as an ego boost.

Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.

1. Shortage of doctors could worsen with health law.

2. Appreciation of Dream of the Red Chamber.

3. Is algebra necessary?, response here, and the Dickens-Caplan exchange on poverty.

4. Tavi Gevinson update.

5. Which world records get shattered?

A while ago Bryan and Arnold had an interesting exchange as to whether on-line education might ever “flip” into being a higher-status signal than is currently the case.  A conversation with Karina points me to one interesting example of a signal status flip, this time from Beirut (and possibly other places as well?):

Apparently, here in Beirut, nose jobs have become so popular that those who cannot afford them, or don’t even actually need them, can still opt to wear bandages across their nose…to fake a nose job. Yup. The newest trend to hit the Beirut fashion scene is the post-op nose bandage.

There is a bit more here.

1. The culture that is Japan.

2. Chongqing video for Karl Marx.

3. A short history of toilet paper, and there is no great stagnation.

4. What are the rates of tax evasion on various Greek islands?

5. You have to start a company to graduate.

1. The ice cream market in Afghanistan; “”Security is not a concern when selling ice-cream”…

2. English phrases common only to India.

3. How to play in someone else’s band.

4. Is modern pop music boring?

5. Beijing to set up art freeport.

1. Why is UK employment up and output down?

2. Genetics vs. paleoanthropology?

3. Price inflation and stock returns (pdf), and here, and here, and most recently here; “There is a consistent lack of positive relation between stock returns and inflation in most of the countries.”  I am urging a) a bit of caution, and b) engagement with the literature on this topic.  I do favor a more expansionary monetary policy, but I see the balance of evidence as different from how it is frequently portrayed in the blogosphere.

4. New archery gold medal winner is legally blind, and here.

 Lena Yang, general manager of Hearst Magazines China, who oversees nine publications including Elle and Marie Claire, says that the typical reader of Hearst Magazines in China is a 29.5-year-old woman who is more likely to be single than married. She has an average income of about $1,431 a month and spends $938 a season on luxury watches, $982 on handbags and shoes and $1,066 on clothes.

Ms. Yang says these women often live at home and turn to their parents and grandparents to pay for them. The study also showed that many readers in their 20s saved little.

“Most of them, they are a single child,” Ms. Yang said. “That means they don’t have to pay for their rent. So all of that goes to pocket money. They have the parents support them and the grandparents. They actually have six persons to support them.”

Here is more.

1. A decentralist defense of the minimum wage?

2. MIE: restaurants that will serve your dog (as customer).

3. Progress in athletic performance.

4. Can poor teachers learn to become good ones?

5. New Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook due February 2013, pre-order here.

6. A real copy of Austria in China.

Just half of those given a prescription to prevent heart disease actually adhere to refilling their medications, researchers find in the Journal of American Medicine. That lack of compliance, they estimate, results in 113,00 deaths annually.

That is from Sarah Kliff, here is more.

1. Does money make us write better?

2. Is peak oil dead?

3. Interview with Enrico Moretti.

4. Ngram viewer for “Risk Management,” via Andrew Schroeder.

5. Banerjee on the National Food Security Bill.