Category: Web/Tech

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Myron Scholes lecture on YouTube.

2. Eliot Spitzer on taxes and growth.

3. Marriage and jobs: we're slowpokes in both.

4. Why has the Australian property bubble yet to burst?

5. Revisionist claim that Haiti death toll is below 100,000; hard to evaluate.

6. Hollywood Stock Exchange to go "real money."

7. Sometimes the internet complements TV.

8. Lars von Trier directs Danish tourism ads (or maybe this is a joke?)

Good opening paragraphs

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’m sort of inured to pain by this point. Anesthetic is illegal for people like me, so we learn to live without it; I’ve made scalpel incisions in my hands, pushed five-millimeter diameter needles through my skin, and once used a vegetable knife to carve a cavity into the tip of my index finger. I’m an idiot, but I’m an idiot working in the name of progress: I’m Lepht Anonym, scrapheap transhumanist. I work with what I can get.

Here is more.  I thank David Cassel for the pointer.

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. Why are gamblers hard to study?

2. Islamic derivatives.

3. "In defense of much, but not all, financial innovation"; a very good new paper by Bob Litan.  See pp.3-4 for a summary or here is the executive summary.

4. What does it cost to create a new job?

5. Markets in everything: cremation that looks good.  This is one of my favorite recent articles.

6. Cartoons from the financial crisis of 1720.

Charlie Brooker on eBooks

by  Tyler Cowen in

Anyway: eBooks. They're the future. The only thing I'd do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn't be arsed to finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally it'd shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like "THE BUTLER DID IT" for potboilers, or maybe "THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER" for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That's ink-and-paper dead, right there.

The article is here and hat tip goes to The Browser.