Results for “cuba” 191 found
Sunday assorted links
1. Clothes and fashion in Cuba.
3. Profile of Hans Rosling, recommended.
4. In defense of moderation (NYT).
5. The science of better-tasting milk (WSJ), here is ungated. “By now, she says, consumers mistakenly believe that this is how milk is supposed to taste.”
Sunday assorted links
1. Are Cuba’s infant mortality statistics for real? And the paradox of Cuban gdp.
2. Mike Konczal on Trump’s messenging. And would Clinton or Trump have won under epistocracy?
3. Martha Argerich.
4. Octopuses and the puzzle of aging (NYT).
5. Vegan lobster buyer markets in everything.
6. Jacobin, Christopher Isett on Taiwan’s broader recent history.
Assorted Links with Commentary
1. Due to massive inflation, shops in Venezuela are now weighing money rather than counting it–a true paper standard.
2. As the economy collapses, Venezuelan’s are turning to bitcoin–using free electricity to mine the coins–but the secret police are hunting the miners.
3. Larry White and Shruti Rajagopolan note that India’s demonetization is really an expropriation that will transfer wealth to the government. Whether the wealth transfer is of black market holdings or not remains to be seen.
4. George Borjas remember’s Castro’s demonetization:
Castro quickly found a simple way of confiscating “excess” cash. The currency was changed overnight. And everyone had to turn in their old paper currency for the new paper currency, with some limits being imposed on the amount of the transactions. There was a miles-long line on what I think was a Saturday morning, as the entire Cuban population was turned into beggars for the new currency.
5. Alex Bellos looks at Newcomb’s Problem. The answer is obvious.
6. Steven Pearlstein on Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. I liked this bit of history:
In 2002, George Washington University President Stephen Trachtenberg noticed that the school owned roughly $1 billion worth of facilities that sat idle for at least a third of the year. If he could reconfigure the academic calendar for year-round operation, he reasoned, he could enroll thousands more students without having to build new classrooms, labs, dorms or athletic facilities.
Doing so, however, would have required some professors to periodically teach during the summer, which didn’t sit well with the Faculty Senate. Its report on the matter reads like a parody of self-interested whining by coddled academics dressed up as concern for the pedagogical and psychological well-being of their students.
Prices aren’t rising because costs are rising, however, costs are rising because prices are rising.
7. Evolution is amazing. By acting as selective breeders, poachers are changing the genetics of African elephants.
In some areas 98 per cent of female elephants now have no tusks, researchers have said, compared to between two and six percent born tuskless on average in the past.
Monday assorted links
Saturday assorted links
1. The culture that is Falls Church City, northern Virginia.
2. Bagpipe nudge.
3. Russ Roberts and Erik Hurst.
5. Why would you sign a cryonics contract because you know it isn’t really binding? And does your identical twin have a right to restrict the dissemination of your genetic information?
6. If Cuba had never had a communist revolution (a research paper based on a counterfactual scenario, pdf).
What I’ve been reading
1. Andrej Svorencik and Harro Maas, editors, The Making of Experimental Economics: Witness Seminar on the Emergence of a Field. Transcribed dialogue on the origins and history of a field, including many of the key players including Vernon Smith and Charles Plott, among others. There should be a book like this — or better yet a web site — for every movement, major debate, new method, and school of thought.
2. Adam Kucharski, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling. The subtitle is an exaggeration, nonetheless this is an interesting topic and book. There is invariably a frustrating element to such an investigation, because the best schemes are hard to uncover or verify. Nonetheless have you not thought — as I have — that a determined, Big Data-crunching, super smart entity could in fact beat the basketball odds just ever so slightly?
3. Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. A good book, and a good introduction to her writing. I have to say though, I did not find this incredibly profound or original. Chernobyl is deeper and more philosophical.
4. Srinath Raghavan, India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia. Consistently well-written and interesting, the title says it all.
Three useful country/topics books on Latin America are:
Lee J. Alston, Marcus Andre Melo, Bernardo Mueller, and Carlos Pereira, Brazil in Transition: Beliefs, Leadership, and Institutional Change.
Richard E. Feinberg, Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy.
Dickie Davis, David Kilcullen, Greg Mills, and David Spencer, A Great Perhaps?: Colombia: Conflict and Convergence. After Uruguay, is Colombia not the longest standing democracy in South America?
Sunday assorted links
1. Rent control for Silicon Valley? (NYT)
2. The fallout from Obama’s visit to Cuba.
3. “Each guy paid for his date’s dinner or drinks, as guys who go out with women are generally expected to do. Each then used Venmo, the peer-to-peer payment app, to request that his date reimburse her share after the fact.” Link here.
4. Which cruise ships have the best libraries? By the way, bigger ships are often worse.
5. “Homeless people in San Francisco say the sprinklers at Bonhams are turned on at night to soak their belongings and discourage them from staying on the sidewalk” There is also this sentence: “Still, anti-homeless design features are ubiquitous around the city.”
What I’ve been reading
1. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History. Belknap Press, a carefully researched take on the political history of a poorly understood era. A bit dry, but very well done and full of information.
2. Richard E. Feinberg, Open for Business: Building the New Cuban Economy. A good introduction to where the Cuban economy is at right now, from Brookings, coming out in June. Here is my earlier post on why I am skeptical about the country’s prospects.
3. Maya Lin, Topologies. What has she done since the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial? Lots, though much of it is scattered widely and hard to see. Pictured below is her Bell Tower at Shantou University. Here is the Box House in Telluride, and the Children’s Defense Fund in Tennessee.
Overall picture books are underrated.
4. Duncan Clark, Alibaba: The House that Jack Built. Books on China, tech companies, and corporate leaders are all usually bad, but this one is pretty good. Most of all a window into how Chinese entrepreneurs built up the country’s major tech companies.
5. Myra Strober, Sharing the Work: What My Family and Career Taught me About Breaking Through (and Holding the Door Open for Others). The memoir of a female economists who started her career teaching at Berkeley in the 1970s. There should be many more books like this. It is a micro-history of discrimination, and how it changed, in addition to looking at the profession through the lens of a “normal” economist rather than one of the super-famous. Bravo.
Sunday assorted links
1. The Boudreaux and Palagashvili paper on the economics of overtime pay.
2. A correction on psychoticism, politics and personality, further information here.
3. Acemoglu and Cowen on Robert Gordon.
4. What if GPS jammers become more common?
5. Cuba is running out of beer.
6. Does chess training generalize to other cognitive benefits?
The Sharks Get Stung
On Friday, Shark Tank, the investment television show, featured two nice ladies from Minnesota and their product Bee Free Honee, honee made from apples. Is cheap, vegan honee a good idea? Perhaps but I was less than convinced by one of the arguments the ladies made for their honee–it will save bees! The ladies argued that reducing the demand for honey will encourage bee farmers to not work the bees so hard thus increasing their numbers.
I was expecting the acerbic Kevin O’Leary to have a field day with this economic fallacy. Or maybe, I thought, Mark Cuban will throw a dash of common sense into the tank. But no, all the Sharks cooed about this mad scheme. So it is up to me.
Reducing the demand for honey, reduces the demand for honey bees. A cheap, high-quality substitute for honey doesn’t mean a world of bees gently pollinating flowers in an idyllic landscape it means a beepocolypse. Bee free honee will save bees the same way the internal combustion engine saved horses.
Addendum 1: You may be concerned about colony collapse disorder. Well, the commercial beekeepers are even more concerned and they have been adapting to CCD and maintaining honey production and pollination services. In fact, there are more bee colonies in the United States today (latest data) than there have been anytime in the last 20 years. CCD is still a problem but it’s the demand for honey and pollination services that incentivizes solutions to the problem. Remember, without honey it’s only a hobby.
Addendum 2:Perhaps the ladies have a sophisticated position on the repugnant conclusion but I doubt it.
Hat tip: Max.
Best business/economics podcast award
I am pleased that my Conversations with Tyler chat with Jeffrey Sachs won this award from Quartz, here is their description:
Smart economist Tyler Cowen interviews smart economist Jeffrey Sachs in the new and infrequently released series Conversations with Tyler. The conversation is wide-ranging—they discuss China, anthropologists, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and more—but centers around Sachs’ belief that well-intentioned humans can solve even the most difficult problems. Sachs offers:”So I pulled an all-nighter, and I wrote a plan for transforming Poland from a communist, central-planned economy to a market economy.” Arguably, this is the best single podcast episode to listen to if you want to be smarter about economics.
The transcript, audio and video versions are here, the entire series of chats is here; next up is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
For the pointer I thank Russ Roberts, who won an award for Excellence in Podcasting Overall, which of course he well deserves.
Addendum: You can help other people discover the podcast by rating it on iTunes and leaving a review.
Friday assorted links
1. Can epigenetics influence sperm?
2. The Marc Andreessen productivity guide.
3. Russ Roberts chats with Mitch Weiss on the economics of the Broadway musical.
4. What it’s like to visit Cuba now, as an American.
5. Which kinds of books actually sell?
6. Music of Adele without overproduction, it is a shame what we are losing.
Which Group has Committed the Most Terrorist Acts on US Soil?
The RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents (RDWTI) contains data on terrorist incidents worldwide from 1968 through 2009. Terrorism is defined as the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change.
According to the Rand database, there were 567 terrorist incidents in the United States between 1968 and 2009. The most terrorist incidents, 140 out of 567 or 25% of the total during this period, were due to one group or cause, anti-Castro Cubans. The anti-Castro terrorist groups have killed 6 people, mostly advocates of dialogue with Cuba such as Eulalio Jose Negrin who was gunned down in 1979. Numerous bombings have also been traced to these groups including hotel bombings in Miami, bombings in New York of consulates (also Madison Square Gardens) and near-miss airplane bombings. Connections between anti-Castro groups, the CIA and the Bush dynasty remain controversial.
The group responsible for the second highest number of terrorist incidents on US soil, 62 incidents or 10% of the total (1968-2009), is the Jewish Defense League. Mostly these have been bombings in New York City of places or people attached to the Soviets. Perhaps the best known is the 1986 tear-gassing of the Metropolitan Opera House on the visit of the Moiseyev Dance Company. Rand tallies 2 deaths in total to the JDL.
Although these groups committed many terrorist acts on US soil neither had much interest in terrorizing US citizens per se, perhaps explaining the relatively low body counts in the United States.
Wednesday assorted links
1. Should you be an insider or an outsider? With advice from Larry Summers.
2. Paul Krugman refers to a piece on New Deal bankers wanting higher interest rates.
3. Would leaving the EU make it easier for the UK to control its border? (no, shout from rooftops)
4. Video excerpt, Luigi Zingales on whether Pope Francis is overrated or underrated. And lots of cheating on emissions tests, not just Volkswagen. Speaking of cheating, Angus and I say North Carolina barbecue is in decline.
5. The polity that is New York City:”Custodians took home an average pay of $109,467 in the 2013-14 school year — and 634 of the city’s 799 custodians earned more than $100,000 in salary and overtime during that time, city payroll records show.”
6. What are the current restrictions on American travel to Cuba?
How to dine well in Yucatan and Quintana Roo
Go to the mercado in Valladolid, right off the main square, and sample as many dishes as possible. Don’t hesitate to use the spicy black sauce. That is the single best introduction to Yucatan cuisine I know of.
Mérida offers a more urbanized variant, with influences from Cuba (the tortas) and Lebanon (kibi, which is like kibbeh). The town has many bad restaurants, go eat at Punto y Coma, a loncheria inside one of the markets, taxi drivers seem to know where it is. Ask for their specialties, and don’t miss Sopa de Lima.
In Cancún, get yourself to El Centro, away from the tourist hotels. If you are stuck on the strip, Tempo offers ten courses for less than $50, the founder chef is from San Sebastian and I would put the quality at that of a Michelin two-star. Otherwise look for small places selling fish tacos.
El cenote Samula was created by the meteor which did in the dinosaurs, today you can swim there. The open air restaurants to its side were the best meal so far.