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It seems I’ve been channeling the Bursar this evening. Are you looking for a prestigious internship for your teenage child? Are you worried that, despite your best efforts to make Junior respectable in public, the interview skills aren’t quite where they need to be? Do you think s/he would benefit during a college admissions interview [...]
Archive for the ‘Wretched excess’ Category
May 13th, 2013
May 1st, 2013
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama Administration’s effort to change outrageous and wasteful food aid rules that line the pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies. The more you look at the absurd policy preventing USAID from purchasing food locally for famine relief, the worse it looks: it wastes money, it prevents getting food to people [...]
February 1st, 2013
In his most recent post, Matthew Kahn describes me as someone who believes that people want to keep up with the Joneses. But I’ve never felt comfortable with that way of characterizing people’s concerns about relative income, because of its apparent implication that inequality wouldn’t matter if only people could learn to ignore negative emotions [...]
July 6th, 2012
Category: Science and its methods, Wretched excess
A Feynman diagram explanation of the Supreme Court
March 27th, 2012
From the Associated Press (h/t Sullivan): “If the government can do that, what else can it do?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, referring to the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. He then questioned whether Congress could also require individuals to buy vegetables, such as broccoli. There is a straightforward answer to that [...]
January 28th, 2012
Category: Republican Party, Wretched excess
Mitt Romney usefully points out that his tax rate is more like 50% than 15%, because the corporations from which he got his capital gains paid a corporate income tax of 35%, more or less. Good point! Anyone whose income comes from the private sector can add 35% to his actual tax rate, and should [...]
November 24th, 2011
Category: Personal moment, Wretched excess
No this is not the RBC crew. A prize for the best caption, though.
July 2nd, 2011
Here is some new level of nuts. It’s not what I expected to reflect on first after two weeks of exploring the soybean/corn/cattle/forest frontier in Brazil, though there are two distant links. For some obscure bureaucratic reason, sunscreen costs about five times as much here as in the states, so I was the bearer of a bunch of [...]
May 26th, 2011
Category: Woolgathering, Wretched excess
…as we depart from our normal non-partisan objectivity to point you to John Cole’s collection of titles for the Sarah Palin movie, because they are a stitch. Samples: Mooseferatu Driving Miss Crazy The Woman Who Knew Too Little The Iquitarod Citizen Vain to which I humbly add Mirth of a Nation Halfbaked Alaska
January 27th, 2011
Category: Wretched excess
Not the first academic to think the thought. Too bad he didn’t leave things at that.