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Posted: May 15, 2008, 1:00pm Eastern Daylight Time by CalculatedRisk
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The report in yahoo news presents an odd twist in relation to government regulation and testing. For me it brings to focus the less than idealogical intent of our current administration. The Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 12:59pm Eastern Daylight Time by rdan
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As regular readers will have noted, The Emirates Economist has a new favorite human browser, Chris Blattman. More links today via Blattman:
1. Tackling corruption gets tougher every day. Blattman points to a post at Global Integrity Commons about corruption in Nigeria, and in specific, "a discouraging trend of Nigerian lawmakers [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 12:59pm Eastern Daylight Time
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If this video doesn't motivate you to jump on the next raft to Finland, I don't know what will.
The worst part is not that the narrator admits the country is yet another dying experiment of socialism, but that the director convinced the participants to smile and be happy about [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 12:49pm Eastern Daylight Time
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A letter writer provides valuable insight into the relationship between government spending, property taxes and rental rates (before the era of rent-control) in the May 15, 1908 NYT :I am a native-born New Yorker, have lived in many sections of... [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 12:03pm Eastern Daylight Time by cdepken
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Corporations in the early 1900s are often depicted as being callously indifferent about the safety of their employees (even more so than today), famously described in Sinclair's The Jungle and Thomas Bell's Out of this Furnace. As Sam Peltzman and... [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 11:57am Eastern Daylight Time by cdepken
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"[A] recession is a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."
National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) The Federal Reserve reported this morning that industrial production declined 0.7% in [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 11:49am Eastern Daylight Time by CalculatedRisk
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Logging on to my Citibank account this morning, I found this, which recapitulates an email I received a few days ago: 
The link takes you here, to a letter which simply begs for parsing. But before we get to the (ahem) substance of the letter, it's worth asking [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 11:04am Eastern Daylight Time by Felix Salmon
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Yahoo! has 8 "sure fire hires": jobs that, targeted by today's college students, apparently will make the career search a bit easier right out of college. I'm no career search analyst or job market forecaster, but I noted how 4 of the jobs specifically listed economics as a useful [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:54am Eastern Daylight Time by Phil Miller
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This video reminds me of a time John and I were at yet another thrilling academic conference. I was in the midst of a typically amazing presentation when I was rudely interupted by some inane question. After wittily embarrassing the unnamed, but famous, questioner, I calmly walked to the [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:50am Eastern Daylight Time by Tim Haab
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One of our readers asked the following: "Sorry if this hijacks the thread, but among the living Austrian
economists, who would you say have had the most impact on the
mainstream of the discipline? And has their influence been due to
uniquely Austrian insights or could their most influential work have
been done by [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:43am Eastern Daylight Time by Peter Boettke
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From Environmental Capital: Are environmental goods—be they polar bears, tropical forests, or clean
air—best preserved with a dollar sign on them? Or does the attempt to
put a price on everything lead to knowing the value of nothing?
...
At the heart of the debate is whether the same tools that can determine the [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:38am Eastern Daylight Time by John Whitehead
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Guido Hulsmann received the following:
I must congratulate you on the fine writings and historical revelations in your book on Mises-Last Knight of Liberalism.
My grandfather had fought under his command in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI. The losing side has relatively few historical texts written in English. [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:21am Eastern Daylight Time
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Here’s the most recent guest bleg from Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations. His past blegs can be found here.
Last week about 100 people responded to my blegging for examples of famous computer proverbs. In general, proverb dictionaries are filled with traditional sayings like "A stitch [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:17am Eastern Daylight Time by Stephen J. Dubner
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Number of comments: 1 | Peter Klein |
The always-interesting and provocative Mark Cuban (yes, him) suggests a “Coasian” strategy, based on side payments, for beating Google in the search-engine wars. If I understand correctly, the strategy works like this. Websites have the option (through robots.txt protocols) to prevent their inclusion in search engine databases. [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:14am Eastern Daylight Time by Peter Klein
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Roger Koppl has a column in the new online and print editions of Forbes, called "What's Wrong with CSI". The editors also run this accompanying editorial. From the opening lines of Roger's column. Forensic evidence is foolproof, right? It's how... [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:07am Eastern Daylight Time by ejlopez
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Personal seat licenses, or PSL's, are a text-book example of the so-called "two-part tariff", a pricing scheme where consumers pay for a good in two installments. The first part is a flat fee where people essentially buy the right to buy a product. The second part of the tariff occurs [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:02am Eastern Daylight Time by Phil Miller
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We have previously reviewed the Uncle Sam's withholding tax data as a read into the overall health of the economy.
The most recent data point (March 13) shows W/H tax reaching a 23 month low. But we don't like to rely on any single data point, especially one from [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 10:00am Eastern Daylight Time by Barry Ritholtz
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...to judge by the most
comprehensive study on the reliability of forensic evidence to date,
the error rate is more than 10% in five categories of analysis,
including fiber, paint and body fluids. ...DNA
and fingerprints are more reliable but still not foolproof....a 2005 study in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
suggests a [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 9:45am Eastern Daylight Time by Alex Tabarrok
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 Although I believe that taxation is theft, I would gladly support any tax reform plan as long as it substantially lowered tax rates or the total amount of taxes collected. I am not a critic of the FairTax because it doesn't do enough; I am a critic of the [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 9:43am Eastern Daylight Time
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From TerraPass: Dear newsletter subscriber,
Just today we launched our petition opposing the gas tax holiday proposed by Senator Clinton and Senator McCain, and already we've gathered 1,000 signatures from citizens who want to send a strong message that this policy is bad for the environment and bad for America.
Will [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 9:39am Eastern Daylight Time by John Whitehead
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John LaPlante sent me this note on tradable holidays: The real problem with holidays is that they are illiquid. You can’t
trade them very well, which is why roses cost so much on Valentines Day
and the price of a swiftly-dying severed evergreen increases prior to
Christmas Day and drops immediately afterwards. Here [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 9:36am Eastern Daylight Time by Phil Miller
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Sitting on the other side of the world, I’ve felt rather removed from budget commentary, though I’ve found much to agree with in Nicholas Gruen’s called for harsher cuts in middle-class welfare (can we means-test the first homeowners’ grant too?), Andrew Norton’s call for fewer cuts in basic statistical provision [...]
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Posted: May 15, 2008, 9:23am Eastern Daylight Time by Andrew Leigh
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A law enacted in 1970 to help find laundered drug money is now getting a renewed enforcement push from the IRS as it looks for taxable cash stashed in other countries.
