After a dizzying expansion, the BRIC bubble appears ready to burst. Share prices in Brazil, Russia, India and China — the so-called BRICs — have been declining sharply because of the global credit crunch and military tensions, likely forcing Japanese retail investors to change their investment strategies. In the past year, the Shanghai A-Share index [...]
Read more →Three Great Social Contractarians: Hobbes, Locke, and … Blackbeard? A Guest Post By PETER LEESON Peter Leeson, the BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming book “The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates,” blogged here earlier this week about U.F.O.’s and dominoes. This is his [...]
Read more →http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/080804/0421781.html Just smartcards, but…
Read more →Let’s talk about the wedge issues. These are the four big issues where Americans do not agree with each other, and cannot either change their minds or agree to disagree. The first wedge issue is abortion. Either an abortion is a murder or it isn’t. If it is, abortion clinics are neighbourhood death camps. If [...]
Read more →After fretting for the past five years or so about how to keep the economy from overheating, Beijing is now faced with the novel problem of how to keep it from cooling. “If you’re sitting in Beijing, you’re saying, ‘We’ve already lost two percentage points of economic growth. How much more are we going to [...]
Read more →The Factor e Farm tractor marches forwards: And the Icelandic Fab Lab is operational!
Read more →Inspired by US Military to be 30% robotic in 12 years. Version 1 is here. Version 3 is here. A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. (cite) The war against the Iraqi government was short, [...]
Read more →Inspired by US Military to be 30% robotic in 12 years. Version 3 is here. Billions of dollars of R&D money are going into robots designed to win the war that the Founding Fathers imagined the population might one day have to fight against the government, and the clock is ticking on the complete destabilization [...]
Read more →About the same population density as the US, also. Guptastan now, more than ever. A 100km x 100km area is all we need, and with cheap solar getting more available day-by-day, a “desalination state” seems like the hot tip – work on a dry coastline where currently there are few or no people. We’d need [...]
Read more →Every decision can be made by the person or group best qualified to make the decision, modulo the cost of acquiring context. Fluid access to expert opinion is a huge factor, from telemedicine to crop health to technical support – it’s expertise on tap, help on the hard bits, and “what do you make of [...]
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