Quotulatiousness

May 17, 2011

Who’s going to feed Fluffy if you get taken up in the Rapture?

Filed under: Media, Randomness, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:43

Sorry, of course I mean when you leave for your seat at the right hand of God. For a small advance fee, you can be (relatively) certain that Fluffy or Rover will be seen to by After The Rapture Pet Care:

In case you hadn’t heard, Judgment Day is pencilled in for 21 May and any Christians among you who hadn’t made provision for your pets’ wellbeing after the Rapture had better pull your fingers out before you take your place at God’s right hand and your poor moggy is left stuck here on Earth staring at an empty bowl.

Make no mistake, this is serious. Harold Camping, the 89-year-old founder of Family Radio, has spent years scouring the Bible for evidence of just when it’s time for believers to pack their celestial suitcases. True, they had to unpack again back in September 2004 following Camping’s first shot at naming the big day, but he assures that this time it is “absolutely going to happen without any question”.

So, you’re ascending to eternal glory and your cat’s litter needs changing. It’s an upsetting thought for any true follower of Christ, but help is at hand in the form of another creature absolutely guaranteed to be left behind by the heavenly mass exodus: the atheist.

November 16, 2010

The plagiarism market

Filed under: Bureaucracy — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:59

If what “Ed Dante” writes is true, lots of writers are missing out on a rich — unethical — opportunity:

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else. …

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? …

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

Read the whole thing.

October 7, 2010

The sad tale of the used book hunter

Filed under: Economics, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:04

By way of Walter Olson’s Twitter feed, a story of real life arbitrage — the Confessions of a Used Book Salesman:

I make a living buying and selling used books. I browse the racks of thrift stores and library book sales using an electronic bar-code scanner. I push the button, a red laser hops about, and an LCD screen lights up with the resale values. It feels like being God in his own tiny recreational casino; my judgments are sure and simple, and I always win because I have foreknowledge of all bad bets. The software I use tells me the going price, on Amazon Marketplace, of the title I just scanned, along with the all-important sales rank, so I know the book’s prospects immediately. I turn a profit every time.

I’m pretty sure I first heard about the practice of shopping for books with laser scanners in a story on NPR, which, as I recall it, disparaged their use as classless. And, really, it is precisely this. The book merchant of the high-cultural imagination is a literate compleat and serves the literate. He doesn’t need a scanner, because he knows more than the scanner knows. I fill a different niche — I deal in collectible or meaningful books only by accident. I’m not deep, but I am broad. My customer is anyone who needs a book that I happen to find and can make money from.

My economics side says this is a good thing: connecting buyers with their desired purchases. My bibliophile side says this is somehow morally wrong . . . or if not precisely wrong, then tainted or shady. I’m not sure how to reconcile my feelings.

May 19, 2010

Haute stoner cuisine

Filed under: Economics, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:00

There are so many restaurants now that some of them can even specialize to serve tiny demographics . . . like “restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.”

Even preschool teachers unwind with a round of drinks now and then. But in professional kitchens, where the hours are long, the pace intense and the goal is to deliver pleasure, the need to blow off steam has long involved substances that are mind-altering and, often enough, illegal.

“Everybody smokes dope after work,” said Anthony Bourdain, the author and chef who made his name chronicling drugs and debauchery in professional kitchens. “People you would never imagine.”

So while it should not come as a surprise that some chefs get high, it’s less often noted that drug use in the kitchen can change the experience in the dining room.

In the 1980s, cocaine helped fuel the frenetic open kitchens and boisterous dining rooms that were the incubators of celebrity chef culture. Today, a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested.

December 16, 2009

QotD: The importance of markets

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

America debated three strategies during the Cold War. The Right wanted “roll back” — dreams of Patton driving his tank into Red Square. The Left wanted détente — which is French for “surrender.” The country loosely followed containment, a program outlined by George Kennan in 1946, which argued that the political contradictions of the Soviet state would eventually cause its own demise. America had but to be patient.

Kennan may have been the first to realize that a society based on Communism would not survive politically, but it was Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 work Socialism, who demonstrated that any such society could not survive economically.

When a collection of free individuals — the market — is willing to pay a price for a product that creates “excess” profits, it signals producers to provide more of that product. If the market does not support a given price, producers are forced to redeploy their assets for more pressing social needs. Similarly, if a factor of production, such as labor or capital, changes in price, producers instantly react, sending signals — through the prices of intermediate goods — down to the consumer. Prices effortlessly allocate society’s assets to reflect consumer preference and adjust to accommodate the ever-changing availability of scarce resources.

Mises argued that governmental interference in prices, through taxation, subsidies, and regulation, complicates this process — affecting not only the consumption of final goods, but also the economic calculations that are necessary to provide intermediate goods and services. Higher-order division of labor fails. Poverty results. For example, while Chinese and Russian central planners were busy setting quotas for steel mills, there was no method for consumers to signal that they preferred food — and millions starved to death.

Dan Oliver Jr., “Socialism in Stages: Even soft, incremental expansions of government produce poverty”, National Review, 2009-12-15

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