Archive for October 2008

Respectful Disagreement

Early last month there was a short piece by Robin Hanson on his group blog titled Disagreement is Disrespect: But this does seem a handy opportunity to repeat that while disagreement isn’t hate, it is disrespect. When you knowingly disagree with someone you are judging them to be less rational than you, at least on […]

Costs and Benefits of Voting

Economics has lots of odd results. Many of them are deeply insightful, like the principle of comparative advantage, with the potential to improve lots of people’s lives when understood and acted upon. On the other hand, some of them are just bizarre, which for my money includes the claim that voting is irrational. Basically, the […]

Diseffected

A photographic portrait of Keith Packard writing his lca abstract:

Lunch

Lunch for today. Recipe: Lamb forequarter chop (200g). Cook on frypan ’til medium, sprinkle with garlic salt to taste. One mandarin, peeled, broken, scattered. One cavendish banana, peeled, sliced, scattered. Blueberries. Strawberries. Total time to cook, consume, clean, and blog about an hour. Total cost, about $5. Missing were mango, cheese and beer. Oh well, […]

On the banking collapse

I’ve been trying for a while now to find someone saying something sensible about the current financial shenanigans. It’s quite difficult. First you’ve got to avoid getting distracted by the various folks who’re going to claim it’s a crisis even if it isn’t — newspapers looking for some bad news to run on page one, […]