Tim Worstall

At the GI.
Globalisation makes recessions less frequent and less painful when they do occur.

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At The Business.
Interesting new book on banking crises and what’s going wrong with Russia.
 

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Snigger.
I am, truly, in touch with my inner toddler.

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Dr. Rant:

it turns out that it didn’t occur to the DoH boffins that hospitals might need to replace some of the doctors part way through the year.
Yes, incredibly the Big Brains failed to consider that some doctors get sick, get pregnant, or (if they have any sense) emigrate and that they do this throughout the [...]

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The Fed may also be inflating to reduce the real size of mortgages. If it can be proven that Ben is explicitly doing this, I’ll petition to have him canonized.

I’m not sure about the canonization but it would indeed be a way out of the housing slump. A decent burst of inflation (say, 10-15% total [...]

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So, erm, books are being pirated on the net. The Society of Authors proposes that:

She suggested four possible sources of income at an industry discussion on copyright law last week: the Government, business, rich patrons and the public. Government funding could take the form of an “academy” of salaried writers.

Seriously? Bureaucrats paid to write books? [...]

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Sounds, erm, different:

Max Mosley, one of the most powerful men in world sport, was under pressure to resign as boss of Formula One’s governing body last night after he was exposed enjoying a Nazi-style orgy with five prostitutes.
Jewish groups condemned the behaviour of Mosley, 67, whose father, Sir Oswald, was the leader of the British [...]

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Brown has a reasonable number of intelligent women in his cabinet,

He does?
OK, allow me to be a little less sexist. Does Gordon Brown have a reasonable number of intelligent people in his Cabinet?
OK, I’ll wait…..

Blogworld is the future, and it will not be resisted; but at this stage in its development, it seems dominated by [...]

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Ooops!

A German town is subsiding after authorities drilled underground to harness "green" energy.
Staufen, in the Black Forest, was proud of its innovative geothermal power plan that was supposed to provide environmentally-friendly heating.
But only two weeks after contractors drilled down 460ft to extract heat, large cracks have appeared in buildings as the town centre has subsided [...]

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Here.

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Those bloggers who have or were thinking of doing a POD book (myself included).
Looks like life just got a little more complicated.
It used to be that you could use any (rather, many) of the various POD publishing housaes and still end up in the Amazon catalogue.
Amazon seems to be flexing some market power: use Booksurge [...]

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Alex picks up on a fun story involving the flogging of very dodgy ammunition by a bunch of 20 year olds to the Pentagon’s client forces.
What makes it all the more fun for me is that my buddy was the underbidder on that contract. Several times in fact. Clearly too expensive as he intended (and [...]

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At the ASI.
Hedge Funds going bust: great, the system’s working.

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Over in the Independent.

Mobile phones could kill far more people than smoking or asbestos, a study by an award-winning cancer expert has concluded.

Wow! Gosh, how could that happen?

It draws on growing evidence – exclusively reported in the IoS in October – that using handsets for 10 years or more [...]

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I’ve been muttering this to all and sundry for some time now. Of course, I find that someone said it before me, and said it better too:

A certain amount of public spending is necessary to perform essential government functions. A certain amount of public works — of streets and roads and bridges and tunnels, of [...]

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Hello! Mr. Adams,
Mr. Adams I just want to tell you that I don’t really appreciate you making a mockery of my faith. I used to think that your comic strip was funny, now I think it is very disgusting and not funny at all. I have found your last comics strips in reference to [...]

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From today’s Dilbert.
"Congratulations, you’re the first human to fail the Turing Test".
 

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Via, we get this.
Absolutely stunning stuff.

Now if 64 kg of uranium can poison seventy thousand people. How many people will two thousand tons kill? The numbers are staggering, that’s more than twenty eight thousand Hiroshima’s. Forty percent of the Gulf War veterans are on “Gulf War Syndrome” disability from uranium poisoning. Seventy Three thousand of [...]

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Excellent:

What’s really going on? What’s going on is that perhaps $6T of mortgages with a duration of a decade that had been priced at a 1% per year chance of default (with a 1/3 value haircut in the event of default) are now being priced at a 4% per year chance of default. That’s a [...]

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This is how speculative bubbles get solved.

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