Stable Genius Liberal

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Zamboni on Flickr. Whenever Zipcar asks how they can improve, I always respond with the same two word response. Zamboni Rentals.

Criminals don’t turn violent. They stay that way.

The rate of violence peaks at 24 months, declines steadily through adolescence and plunges in early adulthood. But as Dr. Tremblay and Daniel S. Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, found in a pivotal 1999 study, a troublesome few do not follow this pattern.

This is worth reading.

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Bitcoin May Be Following This Classic Bubble Stages Chart – Forbes

Plant intelligence

In a recent experiment, Heidi Appel, a chemical ecologist at the University of Missouri, found that, when she played a recording of a caterpillar chomping a leaf for a plant that hadn’t been touched, the sound primed the the plant’s genetic machinery to produce defense chemicals. Another experiment, dome in Mancuso’s lab and not yet published, found that plant roots would seek out a buried pipe through which water was flowing even if the exterior of the pipe was dry, which suggested that plants somehow “hear” the sound of flowing water.

I’d like a vegan’s opinion on this. If plants try not to be eaten, when is it moral to eat them? When is it moral to raise them with the purpose of eating them?

I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying… Continue reading Untitled

For First Time, Anti-Terrorism Law Used to Have Americans Protesting Keystone XL Pipeline Arrested | The Dissenter

In an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, two individuals locked themselves with a bike lock inside one of the multiple revolving doors that lead into the atrium

Anti-terror laws will be abused to toss non-violent left of center activists in jail. It will never be used against right-of-center groups.

Voucher-mania: Conservatives have exactly one answer for all spending questions

it is probably only a matter of time before some ambitious young right-wing intellectual devises a scheme of personal defense vouchers, which individuals could choose to spend on U.S. military services, foreign armies and navies, mercenary gangs or, perhaps, to bribe the enemy into sparing him or her.

Gingrich vs. the Right on Apartheid: What Would You Have Done?

Where were the masses of conservatives opposing Apartheid?

Gingrich puts on his historian hat and puts Mandela in context. Coates adds:

Newt Gingrich was among a cadre of conservatives who opposed the mainstream conservative stance on apartheid and ultimately helped override Reagan’s unconscionable veto of sanctions. At the time, Gingrich was allied with a group of young conservatives including Vin Weber looking to challenge Republican orthodoxy on South Africa.

Worth a read.

Aaron Greenspan’s interesting critique of bitcoin

No one has ever reasonably proposed that instead of using possession of water as a store of value that we should use consumption of water as proof of prior possession, which is then assigned value. The incentive to consume enormous, wasteful amounts of water would be too strong. Yet this is exactly how Bitcoin works: you are rewarded with new coins once your computer has consumed a certain amount of electricity (measured by the complexity of computing hashes of data, which takes time). Worse yet, the amount of electricity required to be wasted to earn a reward predictably increases, which means that the more Bitcoins one wants, the more one has to waste.

So bitcoins have value because they used to be electricity? I really don’t see that making sense but the idea is interesting.

Why did austerity fail? The Poor Behave Differently From the Rich

models failed to predict the consequences of the austerity programs that several European countries adopted in 2010. It turned out that actual people didn’t behave like the imaginary proxy. Economists are learning that the poor and the wealthy respond differently to austerity and stimulus. This could present challenges to politicians. If people behave differently, then policy might have to treat them differently.

Austerity was doomed from the start.