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(Greenwich Mean Time.)
Archive for December, 2010
December 31st, 2010
Category: Uncategorized
“How did this happen to us, this lack of intelligence? We read the wrong things. We read the sports page, the financial page, even the entire newspaper. We don’t read the tone of a person’s voice, don’t hear the sound of a person’s ego being crushed…. Create a marriage that lasts because it is a happy one….” Marital advice from my father, delivered twenty years ago.
December 30th, 2010
Category: Education policy, Management
In the last few days, I got to read the comments on my previous post about QA in education; reviewed the work of a bunch of graduate students in a quantitative methods course, in response to the assignment “for your final project, find a problem for/context in which one or another of the models we’ve [...]
December 30th, 2010
Category: Technology and Society
This is the kind of thing that makes sensible people tear their hair about government. Thinking about bureaucrats in DOT taking three years to make a decision worth maybe half a day, having spent a couple of decades to even engage the question, through all of which millions of drivers outside the US have been [...]
December 30th, 2010
Category: 2011 Democratic Agenda, The Dysfunctional Senate
Ending filibusters of executive branch appointments is such an obviously a good idea that no one is pushing it.
December 29th, 2010
Category: Drug Policy
A recent court ruling makes it appropriate to follow up on my August post about drug tourism in Maastricht and its externalities An EU judge has upheld the legality of Maastricht’s proposal to restrict “coffee shop” sales to Dutch citizens. This decision probably saves the coffee shops as a social experiment in the long term [...]
December 29th, 2010
Category: Agriculture, Drug Policy
This story about the Oakland City Council’s decision not to go forward with a plan to let private companies start enormous “medical” pot farms has two intriguing subplots. First, the Alameda County Attorney advised the members of the council that it was not clear whether they would be immune from federal prosecution if they approved [...]
December 28th, 2010
Zombie idea department: the “natural market distribution.”
December 27th, 2010
It’s a bad day for the national conversation when conservatives like James Joyner and Conor Friedersdorf start parroting Tea Party talking points.