The Kos diarist eugene has written an excellent summary of the arguments against mandatory health insurance as a means of achieving universal health care.

Ecch.  "Maintaining user perferences after an email change" is not supported in the current Google AppEngine API.  Personal identity is tricky for the philosophers, and also for the grunt programmers who wish to implement signons.

Maybe OpenId instead of the Google User API?

This anecdote by Thomas Bernhard resonates with the current crisis. This was the first I've heard of him.

George Soros on the advantages of the Danish mortgage model

I like this as much as the Swiss mortgage model.

From 2002: Recipe for conjuring a housing bubble with fiscal & tax policy.

Does one follow a recipe to conjure, or is the term "spell"?

The next four years are in his hands

2008.10.02 - 538 VP Debate-11,
originally uploaded by Brett 538.

The black and white gives a patina of timelessness, don't you think?

Customers as investors

A restaurateur funds expansion from future customers. A principle of accounting is that costs should be matched to the period of benefit, and this mechanism works on this level. One risk is that enthusiastic customers might use their Comfort VIP cards too quickly, before the working capital represented by VIP Card balances can be replace from retained earnings.

Image889

Natural science offers a respite from fretting about politics and markets. Welcome to the sea slug forum.

If anyone has a French translation of Black Angel's Death Song, I would like to see it.

So far I have:

La myriade de choix de son destin
Set d'eux-mêmes sur une assiette
Pour lui de choisir
Qu'est-ce qu'il a à perdre

Pas un fantôme ensanglanté pays
tous couverts de sommeil
...

I like the twist of the meaning in line four from "What had he to lose," to "What he has to lose."

SlickEdit for Linux (Ubuntu) has incomplete support for Perforce out of the box. The Manager command is missing. The Get command is broken.

Even after I set the Manager command (to p4v), the option is grayed out on the popup menu within the project.

I do not understand what it is about Al Gore that gets up the nostrils of the Cafe Hayek bloggers. Both Russ Roberts and Don Boudreaux are bright guys, but if Al Gore is involved, the quality of their arguments plummet.

In this particular story, we see Russ Roberts, a professor of economics, praising this line of reasoning:

1. Al Gore proposes a national goal of generating all U.S. energy from renewable sources.
2. The Pickens Plan is to generate one-fifth of U.S. energy from wind, natural gas, and biofuels, for an investment of one teradollar.
3. Therefore, the Al Gore proposal will cost at least five teradollars.
4. Bonus point: The Al Gore proposal is as fanciful as a lunar casino.

The conclusions are not supported by the premises. There is no evidence showing a necessary relationship between the Al Gore proposal and the Pickens Plan that would permit the cost of one to be used to compute the cost of the other. Russ Roberts would never let such logic-chopping go by in a student paper - would he?

I don't know Enrico Zoni, but I like the polite way he comments on Python's idiosyncratic commands module.

The text search tool in SlickEdit 2008 has been renamed from grep to sgrep. Allegedly this was done to avoid conflicts with cygwin grep.

A defense of the Clintons as politicians.

Another YouTube that is best without title

Useful, perhaps, within bureaucracies, when responsibilities have been incremented, but not compensation.

The Mortgage Bust

Excellent essay about the impact of the Mortgage Bust of 2007

"Safe as houses" is an English proverb. What happens when houses are feared?

The camels march.

“The history is that lenders move in great caravans between two extreme points, which we can call stringency and accommodation,” said Mr. Grant, recalling how hard it was for companies to get loans as recently as 2002.

Instapundit.com -

Glenn Reynolds complains that a CNN reporter is not a lickspittle.

Update:

Looks like Drudge got burned, as, to a lesser degree, did those of us who relied on him.

Will Glenn Reynolds will rely less on Drudge? To ask the question is to answer it.

 

Three Worlds LIRR

The sunset sky from the window of the Long Island Railroad on a Sunday in October, 2006.

British Calendar Act of 1751 For The Year 1752

For years I have wondered what happened to rents, interest payments, etc. that fell due during September 1752 in England. That was the month when England converted to the Gregorian calendar, at a loss of eleven days.

Did tenants see the landlord come around eleven days early? Did someone who lent overnight on the 14th collect eleven days' interest? Did youths attain majority eleven days early?

Here is the text of the Act of Parliament. The members legislated that all such rents, annuities, sums of money, leases, etc., on the same Natural Day "in case this Act had not been made."

That was sensible.