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Bernardo Aparicio Garcia writes about live in Pablo Escobar’s Colombia.

Adam Ozimek takes issue with the idea that macroeconomics is all about the confirmation of priors.

Michael McShane looks at Tiny Schools. The questions about scalability seem valid, but I would love for us to have a regime to enable them.

Contrary to my view a decade ago, I think there may be a justification for public spending on stadia and the like (at least, so long as we allow professional leagues their extortion), but according to a new study it really isn’t so.

Noah Feldman talks about how the Soviets stole a Van Gogh.

Here’s a year-long road-trip you can take if you are insanely passionate about 70-degree weather.

The Greeks say “No Smoking sign? I don’t see no No Smoking sign.”

Fewer Americans are getting married in churches.

Oooh, and annotated map of Middle-earth!

Maybe we would have better infrastructure if it didn’t cost so much.

If you walk a mile in someone’s shoes, you will… become judgmental as hell.

Creepy-arse stuff like “spiders the sizes of puppies” are supposed to be in Australia, not the Americas!

Norwegians are all about ghost-hunting.

David Frum says that the trade-off between security and liberty is a false one. As does Reason’s Ronald Bailey, though in markedly different ways.

How prisons fleece prisoners and their families.


Category: Newsroom

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9 Responses to Linkluster Daniel Webster Western Beltway

  1. Murali says:

    The thing about shared experience reducing empathy should have been obvious. Facing a challenge and overcoming it puts one in very roughly the right position to be able to evaluate the extent to which the alleged difficulties a person is facing are a matter of the actual obstacle itself or a matter of a character defect of the person in question. At the very least we can tell ourselves that. What happens when we don’t share the experience is that we do not wish to be inappropriately judgmental It’s also unclear as to why it isn’t the case that people who are currently facing a challenge tend to exaggerate the challenge and make it to be bigger than it actually is. What reason is there to think that people’s current assessment of the challenge is more veridicial than those of people who have successfully overcome them. It would seem that people who are currently facing the challenge may just lack the requisite perspective.

    • I was disappointed in that article because the experiments, at least as the article described them, didn’t really match people who had the same experiences:

      1. The polar plunger who “chickened out.” The experiment subjects, from what I can tell, didn’t chicken out. The experimenters should’ve asked people who hadn’t plunged what they thought of Pat.

      2. The unemployed person who resorts to drug dealing. At least in the article’s summary of the experiment, they didn’t ask people who had to/chose to resort to drug dealing, but simply other people who had had unemployment problems.

      3.The bully experiment doesn’t seem to differentiate between those who “handled it well” and those who “lashed out violently.”

  2. Chris says:

    One of the dirty little secrets of our prison system is that many leave it in debt to it because of the outrageous costs we place on them while they’re inside. Since it is difficult for them to get jobs, and impossible for many to get good jobs, once they’re out, that debt is extremely difficult to pay off, and the state can garnish their pay to get it, which leaves them with little incentive not to use less legal methods to get by.

    • trumwill says:

      Never gonna forget when I lived in an apartment complex with a bunch of just released convicts. Kinda drove home how worthless our system is for all involved. Worst of multiple worlds. I’ve come to really dislike our parole system (from both ends).

  3. oscar.gordon says:

    I get Frum’s point, but he completely fails to address to proven problem, that the watchers just can not help themselves from keeping their attentions focused on the bigger problems, and can’t help themselves but to meddle in the mundane.

    When the NSA can keep its attention solely on actual terror threats, and not sneak notes to the DEA or FBI for things it learned without a warrant, then Frum might have a leg to stand on. When the NSA is not looking at captured dirty pics, then we might be able to trust them, etc.

  4. Michael Cain says:

    Infrastructure (and rail in particular, since that seems to be most of the examples) in the US would be a whole lot cheaper if the government(s) had control of the rail right-of-ways. One of the light-rail lines in Denver has been pushed off indefinitely because the rail company that owns the existing right-of-way that runs in the right place pretty much said “Eight billion dollars, up front, for a limited-time lease.” As opposed to, in any of the European countries, the government just telling the freight part of the rail system, “We’ll be putting in electric power and running passenger rail down this stretch, you’ll need to adjust your schedules accordingly.”

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