Not PC: Friday Morning Ramble

Friday 4 September 2015

Friday Morning Ramble–04.09.15

“The human flood to Europe hit bloody depths over the last week.”
They're all human beings – Toby Manhire & Toby Morris, RADIO NZ
Talking refugee “quotas” – NOT PC
The drowned Syrian boy photo is viral social media at its most hollow and hypocritical – VOX
Sharing a photo of a dead Syrian child isn’t compassionate, it’s narcissistic – Brendan O’Neill, SPECTATOR
Take Action – AMNESTY NZ

“Many of Europe's young worry about xenophobia more than they do about their own future.”
What Europe means to the young – ECONOMIST

“The country's government is only obliged to take in 50 asylum seekers a year, according to a humanitarian quota.”
More than 11,000 families in Iceland have offered to open their homes to Syrian refugees – INDEPENDENT (UK)

Australian Senate Committee delivers another damning report into conditions in Nauru detention.
Kids in Detention: Nauru – ASYLUM SEEKER RESOURCE CENTRE

“Oliver Hartwich leaves behind rose-tinted accounts of the history of European integration with a more realistic view of how they wandered into a dead end.”
Why Europe failed, part II – Oliver Hartwich, INTEREST.CO.NZ

The Greens’s Climate plan: no new petrol cars within 15 years.
The Greens's climate plan – David Farrar, KIWIBLOG

“Peeni Henare and Kelvin Davis have great mana. Hopefully the rest of Labour will come 'round to giving Partnership Schools a chance to prove themselves at helping kids, which so far the schools are succeeding at nicely.”
Labour's charter school division – Patrick Gower, 3 NEWS

“The Fonterra monopoly came from a conjunction of dairy politics with the instincts of a leftist Clarke Cabinet, at a time when they needed to rebuild trust with business.”
Leave Fonterra to sort itself (or not) – STEPHEN FRANKS

“I have said from day one that Nick Smith’s Special Housing Areas cannot work as they defy development logic.”
Why (Greenfield) Special Housing Areas Won’t Work – Ben Ross, TALKING SOUTHERN AUCKLAND

"These sorts of costs arise from dull legislative details written in Parliament's committee rooms where only the Greens may be awake. They probably have no idea of the perverse consequences they create."
Red tape gives more headaches than liquor – NZ HERALD

Idiocracy arrives a few centuries early.
Donald Trump says he wants Oprah Winfrey as his running mate – MAIL ONLINE

“County clerk Kim Davis has a right to observe and adhere to her religious beliefs, but she does not have a right to her job as county clerk.”
Justice Scalia Explained Why Kim Davis Should Issue Marriage Licenses or Find a New Job – Jonathan Adler, ANYTHING THAT’S PEACEFUL.

Creative destruction and city planning, theory and practice, in one place.
A Long History of a Short Block: Four Centuries of Development Surprises on a Single Stretch of a New York City Street – GREENE STREET

“So resource availability has gone from what was available to humans just outside the cave to what is available to humans on Amazon. The possibilities are virtually infinite.”
Hooray, the Earth is Not Running out of Resources – Stephen Hicks, SAVVY STREET

Barriers to entry are barriers from ending poverty. “It's time to end occupational licensing and revive the freedom to work.”
Government Permission to Work – Doug Bandow, F.E.E.
Obama's Econ Advisers: Occupational Licensing Is a Disaster – Mikayla Noval, ANYTHING PEACEFUL

“Ignorance of basic economics is so widespread that we ought to have a specific word for it, like we have for illiteracy or innumeracy.” Nice chart too.
Why Economics Matters – Jeff Deist, MISES DAILY

Just add town planning, stand back, and …

The Koch Brothers, who are hated for the "sins" of refining oil and promoting liberty, speak out.
Charles Koch blasts Obama – POLITICO

“The deficiencies of Libertarianism.”
Q&A on Objectivism – Will Thomas, ATLAS SOCIETY

A big chunk of the so-called "green" activists are younger than 18 years and 8 months. And none of them has seen warming in their lifetime.
A New Record ‘Pause’: No Global Warming For 18 Years 8 Months! – CLIMATE CHANGE DISPATCH

“The technology behind plastic grocery bags is so useful it won a Nobel Prize. Employing an unimaginably small amount of base material, manufacturers can create tools of surprising strength and durability. Far from being the environmental threat activists make them out to be, plastic bags are not particularly to blame for clogged sewers, choked rivers, asphyxiated sea animals, or global warming. Instead, they are likely our best bet for carrying all of our junk in a responsible manner.”
Slaying the Myths about Plastic Bags – David Henderson, ECON LIB

“If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: You should drink eight glasses of water a day. It’s just not true. There is no science behind it…. Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 U.S. Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. But they ignored the sentence that followed closely behind. It read, ‘Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods’.”
No, You Do Not Have to Drink 8 Glasses of Water a Day – N.Y. TIMES

“The rising number of equations per paper shows the increasing mathematisation of economics.”
The use of mathematics in economics and its effect on a scholar's academic career – M.P.R.A.

“In 1942, economist Joseph Schumpeter described “creative destruction” as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” There probably hasn’t been a better example of Schumpeterian creative destruction in the last decade or more than the recent ascendance of app-based ride-sharing services like Uber …”
Schumpeterian creative destruction — the rise of Uber and the great taxicab collapse – Mark Perry, A.E.I.

“The Fed can force the rate to zero, but it cannot change economic law.
”They miss the real harm of zero interest.”
Move Over Entrepreneurs, Make Way for Speculation! – Keith Weiner, CAPITALISM MAGAZINE

“’Bond King’ Bill Gross thinks global financial markets are ‘out of whack. He blames the Federal Reserve’s easy money policies for warping the economy. …
“With interest rates at effectively zero, borrowing money is virtually free. So nothing looks like a bad purchase … no business idea is too dumb to fund...no $120,000 car goes unsold to someone who can’t afford it…and no overpriced house sits on the market for more than a month.
“The old question of ‘Does it make sense to borrow this much money?’ has been replaced with ‘How much can I get?’ …
“Cheap credit has stoked the economy, stocks, and the housing market. Zero interest rates have distorted prices so badly that we can’t even know what prices would be if interest rates were normal.
“We’re now Alice in Wonderland…where reality isn’t what it seems.”
Major world economies are slipping into recession… – CASEY DAILY DISPATCH

“It’s always hard to predict exactly when bubbles will peak and crash.”
4 Charts Show Why This Rally Will Become a Rout! – Harry Dent, CONTRA CORNER

“Next year alone 10 new skyscrapers of at least 1,110 feet (338 meters) will be completed.”
The World’s 10 Tallest New Buildings of 2015 – ARCH DAILY
From London to China - Where is Today's Skyscraper Curse? – Mark Thornton, MARKET ORACLE

Yes, people have seen it coming.
Beware Of The 'CCC Aches' Bubbles – Jesse Colombo, SEEKING ALPHA, 2012

“One key characteristic of this fragility is that it invisibly accumulates beneath the surface stability until some minor disturbance cracks the thinning layer of apparent stability. At that point, the system rapidly destabilises …”
Massive Central Bank Intrusion Means Ever Increasing System Fragility – Charles High-Smith, CONTRA CORNER

New study:

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“’We were going to cut one of our big bills,’ says Kim. ‘We couldn’t cut the student loans—that’s permanent—so we got rid of the mortgage’.”
Honey, I Shrunk the House – MINDFUL.ORG

“The Google self-driving car may never actually happen.”
Driving in Circles – SLATE

““I haven’t heard of a human being who isn’t musical, or who doesn’t respond to music one way or another,” he told an audience at Columbia University in 2006. “I think we are an essentially, profoundly musical species. And I don’t know whether — for all I know, language piggybacked on music.” Oliver Sacks, neuroscientist.”
' A Legendary Neuroscientist Says “Goodbye” – Vinay Kolhatkar, SAVVY STREET

“Even civilities in appearance of otherwise sensible but unwitting Americans have regressed into outright primitivism in forms of self-mutilation like piercing and tattoos, turning bodies into billboards for so-called nonconformist “self expression” that is anything but self expression.
”It’s time to ponder this devolution.”
Group-Think Leads to Breakdown in Culture – Alexandra York, NEWSMAX

No. Insanity is not doing what you’ve always done and expecting different results. It’s this.
Teen Boy Will Be Charged As Adult For Having Naked Pics of a Minor: Himself – REASON

“Art is not absorption learning like other subjects taught in school, nor is it interactive like computer games, texting, and social media. It is a creative activity that encourages the growth of a whole person as an integrated individual: It educates the senses, the mind, and the emotions.”
Art Education Vital in Digital World – Alexandra York, NEWSMAX

“They were heading off into Saturday night by bicycle, as the fading sun threw long shadows across the street. Smartly dressed in a jacket and jeans (for him) and a dress and heels (for her), with nothing but carefully arranged hair adorning their heads.”
What the Dutch can teach us about cycling – Michael O’Reilly, EXECUTIVE STYLE

A Pandora’s box of scholarly microblogging.
The weird and wonderful world of academic Twitter – Glen Wright, TIMES