Saturday, August 29, 2015

Cab Thought 8/29/15

Sound economic reasoning teaches many things, but perhaps the most important lesson is about the importance of the instituitonal framework for marshalling the self-interest of individuals into publicly desirable outcomes by enabling the judicous negotiation of trade-offs so that the gains from trade and the gains from innovation are realized.--Peter Boettke


In 2009, retailers lost $2.7 billion due to return fraud during the holiday season. The most common form of return fraud is the return of stolen merchandise. It is also common for criminals to return merchandise that was bought with counterfeit receipts or currency. In the 2010 holiday season, return fraud was expected to cost retailers $3.7 billion.  
 
Ignoring her husband's final request that his play not be performed for 75 years after his death, Eugene O'Neil's wife took Long Day 's Journey Into Night from Random House as soon as she could after he died. The world premiere was in Stockholm, in a Swedish translation, the following February, with the off-Broadway American premiere that November. The audiences were moved to tears and standing ovations, the reviewers saw the "saga of the damned" as going beyond personal pain to "epic literature," and the playwright received a posthumous Pulitzer, his fourth.
 
The outstanding share count--the number of shares available for sale on the New York Stock Exchange--was well below where it was about 10 years ago. Net financial flow into US stocks have been relatively flat since 2006, while net stock issuance, or the amount of new stocks being introduced onto the market, has plummeted. The math, then, indicates that the most recent bull market has been all about reduced share counts.

Who is....Caliph Uthman?
 
The Bootlegger and Baptist theory, an innovative public choice theory developed more than 30 years ago, holds that for a regulation to emerge and endure, both the “bootleggers,” who seek to obtain private benefits from the regulation, and the “Baptists,” who seek to serve the public interest, must support the regulation.

The Great Plague, lasting from 1665 to 1666, was the last major epidemic of the bubonic plague to occur in England. The Great Plague killed an estimated 100,000 people, almost a quarter of London's population. The last Plague--pretty good reason to be optimistic, huh? Ten years later the Mini-Ice Age began.

Robert Burns is said to have had more statues and busts made of him than any other man save Christopher Columbus and, maybe, Lenin. In response to one of the first statues erected to her son his mother is reported to have quoted scripture: "Aye, Robbie...ye asked for bread and they've given ye a stone." (a reference to the "ask and you shall receive" gospel, Matt 7.9)

Golden oldie:

Nigel Richards  has won several English-language Scrabble titles. He just won the French-language Scrabble World Championships. Richards is a New Zealand native and does not speak French, he just learned the words. In late May Richards began his quest to win the French world title, according to the French Scrabble Federation. That's when he set about memorizing the French Scrabble dictionary. The newspapers covering the championship wrote his competition from France, Switzerland, Senegal and elsewhere were the cream of the crop. Richards has won the (English-language) world championships three times. He won the U.S. National Scrabble tournament five times.
 
Nocturnal: adjective: Relating to, happening, or active at night. Pluto’s moon Nix is named after Nyx, the ancient Greek goddess personifying night. In Roman mythology she is known as Nox. The Latin word for night, nox, also appears in such words as equinox (equal day and night) and noctambulation (sleepwalking).

Unless and until technology eliminates scarcity, technology will not eliminate the possibility of human beings working gainfully for each other (and, alternatively, if technology does eliminate scarcity, then we’ll have heaven on earth and there will be neither a need for paid human work nor a willingness of anyone to perform such work).(It’s interesting that many religious people long to spend eternity in a place without scarcity and, hence, without the need for labor; that sublime place is commonly called “heaven.”  Yet many of these same people also believe that technology now threatens to so reduce scarcity here on earth that there will no longer be a need for labor; that prospect is considered to be hell.)--Bordeaux
 
Two Russian nuclear bombers flew within 40 miles of the California coast and one of the pilots relayed a veiled threat during the Fourth of July aerial incident, defense officials said. “Good morning American pilots, we are here to greet you on your Fourth of July Independence Day,” a Russian Tu-95 Bear bomber crew member stated over the emergency aircraft channel.
It must be the policy of great men and great statesmen to play nuclear chicken on the global stage.
 
A woman from London has died while bungee jumping on holiday in Spain. Kleyo De Abreu, 23, was killed on Tuesday in Lanjaron, Granada, according to the Guardia Civil. Has anyone ever offered an alternative thrill of uncertain doom that might be easier yet more lasting, like a company that offers exposure to malaria or smallpox? How about random surgery?
 
According to Muslim tradition the Prophet Mohammed received the revelations that form the Quran between 610 and 632 AD. At this time, the divine message was not compiled into the book form in which it appears today. Instead, the revelations were preserved in 'the memories of men.' Parts of it had also been written down on parchment, stone, palm leaves and the shoulder blades of camels. It was only under Caliph Abu Bakr, the first leader of the Muslim community after Mohammed, that the collection of all Quranic material was ordered to be gathered in the form of a book. Quran manuscript dating from the late seventh century has been found to contain older text. With the help of radiocarbon analysis, two fragments have been shown to be decades older -- which puts them among the oldest known examples in the world, according to researchers at the UK's University of Birmingham. "The final, authoritative written form was completed and fixed under the direction of the third leader, Caliph Uthman, in about AD 650. Muslims believe that the Qur'an they read today is the same text that was standardised under Uthman and regard it as the exact record of the revelations that were delivered to Muhammad."
The testing, which is more than 95% accurate, has dated the parchment on which the text is written to between 568 and 645 AD, the researchers said. This means it was created close to the time of the Prophet Mohammed, who is generally thought to have lived between AD 570 and 632 AD, they said.
The two parchment leaves are believed to contain parts of Suras (chapters) 18 to 20, written with ink in an early form of Arabic script known as Hijazi. And according to Professor David Thomas, professor of Christianity and Islam, the text is very similar to what is found in the present day Quran. "This tends to support the view that the Quran that we now have is more or less very close indeed to the Quran as it was brought together in the early years of Islam," he said.
 
Rousseau update: "On the whole foragers seem to have enjoyed a more comfortable and rewarding lifestyle than most of the peasants, shepherds, labourers and office clerks who followed in their footsteps."  "There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging. Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker. " Both of these totally unsupportable notions appear in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari where the relentless deterioration of human potential is suggested in progress.

The MacArthur Foundation, which has operated in Moscow for more than 20 years - financing higher education, human rights and anti-nuclear proliferation campaigns - said new Russian laws had made it "impossible to continue," by placing the charity on a list of "undesirable" organizations. "We are entirely independent of the United States government and receive no funding from it. We have never supported political activities or other actions that could reasonably be construed as meeting the definition of 'undesirable'," MacArthur Foundation President Julia Stasch said in a statement Tuesday. More than 60 countries in the last three years have sought to curb the ability of non-profit groups to receive or use overseas funds, using a variety of justifications, the Thomson Reuters Foundation revealed in an article earlier this month. What is astonishing is that the aims of these organizations may well not be in concert with those of the host nations even if you are not a spy; why are these people surprised? It is like sending the Red Cross to the Sinai and then being surprised when they shoot at you.

"So the best use of our time is to figure out how to gouge more income from the lowest tier in that bottom 90%? Really?" This was a response to a guy arguing against the minimum wage; his actual position is that someone opposed to the minimum wage does so, not because he thinks it a bad economic idea that endangers the economic community more than it helps, but a truly evil idea that is the result of personal greed and cruelty. An ancient bigotry has been to regard people with opposing views of problems and issues as either intellectually or morally unworthy. The Nazis were great at it.
 
Under pressure from the NAACP, the Connecticut state Democratic Party will remove the names of two presidents, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery. Cleansing the past is tough and has been successfully done--only temporarily--by the most savage and centralized systems. The Soviets try it regularly. The iconoclastic ISIS guys are trying it now.

AAAAAnnnnnndddddd....a  graph:
 
  

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