| 2010 07 30 | Knocking
Why do we insist on the dichotomy between matter and mind, making it permissible to take vitamins for the body but not for the soul? A hormone that enables a man to make love more effectively is touted in medical journals. But what would be the public reaction to a hormone that simply make him a more loving human being?
...Why... are the mind-manifesting drugs still regarded with so much fear? Can it be because modern science still lingers on the threshold of the unconscious, hesitating to knock to loudly for fear of what might be revealed if the door should open?
- Journeys into a Bright World |
| 2010 07 29 | SIS High Top
|
| 2010 07 29 | Intellectual Property
IP law is unlibertarian and unjustified. I realized this myself after trying, and failing, for years to figure out a way to justify IP and square it with libertarian principles. IP is a type of systematic redistribution of property rights, contrary to Lockean homesteading rules, that can only be implemented by the state and its legislation. So the IP libertarians have nothing left but the tired old arguments of the type you might hear dashed off in law school or in a mainstream economics class.
I find it disappointing that these debates tend to be as crude as those related to gun control. Neither is a black and white issue as either extreme ha, AFAICS, serious net negative effects on utility. Until this is acknowledged, we can't move the debate to the real issue of which rules maximize utility and how to best test and measure such rules. |
| 2010 07 29 | Quote of the Day
Duke: There's a uh, big machine in the sky, some kind of, I dunno, electric snake, coming straight at us.
|
| 2010 07 29 | Private vs Public Funding
With it [private money], we sequenced the human genome in nine months instead of many, many years. The public money that flowed into the Human Genome Project, above all, created an enormous, inflexible bureaucracy. |
| 2010 07 28 | Where Did the Money Go
The Department of Defense is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion [96%] of the $9.1 billion it spent on reconstruction in Iraq.
How does the government get away with this? Who is going to prison for embezzlement over this? If a public company reported to it's shareholder that $8.7B mysteriously disappeared, would there be no shareholder law suits? Am I allowed to only pay taxes on 4% of my income and claim the other 96% is "unaccounted for"?
|
| 2010 07 28 | SEC Immune to FOIA
Turns out that Dodd-Frank ["Financial Reform" bill] exempts the Securities and Exchange Commission from the vast majority of Freedom of Information Act requests. |