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Thre cable TV service run by crimunals in Rio´s favelas was much cheaper than its legal successors.
Archive for December, 2011
December 15th, 2011
December 15th, 2011
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Psychology
Alec Baldwin was recently thrown off an airplane because he considered his computer game important enough to delay everyone else on board from getting to their destination. These sorts of celebrity temper tantrums surprise no one. We are used to famous actors, writers and musicians behaving in extraordinarily selfish ways. It’s not just anecdata: Psychiatric [...]
December 14th, 2011
Category: California Politics, Drug Policy
Following our debates here about the price of marijuana, I thought I would flag for people’s interest this piece by Michael Montgomery. His reporting indicates that after dropping lower than $1,000 pound ($62.50/ounce), Northern California prices for the latest harvest have now rebounded to $2,000-$2,500 a pound ($125-$156/ounce). I suspect normal market forces, bad weather [...]
December 14th, 2011
Category: Elections 2010 and 2012
Jonathan Bernstein is skeptical of the Newt surge, noting correctly that we have already had a failed Bachmann surge, Perry surge and Cain surge. Fair enough, but as I wrote in August when Perry was being hailed as the next big thing: I am less sure than many observers that Rick Perry will sweep aside [...]
December 13th, 2011
Category: Popular Culture
But in the 1930s and the war years, a liberal-minded film mocking ordinary people would have been a contradiction in terms. Tom Carson at American Prospect wonders how left-wing Hollywood writers and producers went from being on the side of ordinary working Americans to viewing them with contempt (though he cites Roseanne and The Simpsons [...]
December 12th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
A recent member of President Obama’s CEA offers some wise Congressional Testimony here concerning adopting rules for evaluating whether regulation passes a cost/benefit test. The Economist magazine reports that Honduras may adopt Paul Romer’s ideas for creating new rules for a Charter City. The news isn’t all bad.
December 12th, 2011
Category: Britain, Financial crises
After initially making positive sounds about David Cameron’s veto at the EU summit, Deputy Leader Nick Clegg has reversed himself and gone all in for European integration. He sees the UK’s future and the continent’s as fundamentally linked, and it at least once sense he is certainly right: The outcome of the EuroMess will likely [...]
December 10th, 2011
Category: Uncategorized
I’m writing a short paper on recent trends in risk exposure so I went to this webpage to learn some facts about motor vehicle deaths per mile of driving. We know that crime and pollution risk have both fallen sharply in big cities over the last 20 years but did you know that fatalities per [...]