* Reforming Land Use Regulations. This is one way to put more money in your pocket.
* “Evidence increases for reading on paper instead of screens.” This is not the final word, but it may sway those of you who are debating whether you should ban screens from class, or whether you should hold class in person or online.
* Can small-scale nuclear fusion reactors work?
* Megan McArdle on the absurdities of “affirmative consent.”
* “Survey: Americans have more confidence in Amazon than government or press.” Observation: delivering packages and web services is difficult but also conceptually simpler than epistemology, and arguably the press is delivering epistemology, even though no one says as much. As for government, expectations seem unreasonably high, but, also, we need to work much harder at figuring out why infrastructure is so damn expensive. If most cities could reliably build subways at Nordic costs we’d all love “the government,” or at least local government.
* Re: the above, see also Tyler Cowen’s Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero.
* How ‘safety first’ ethos is destabilizing US society.
* O Oberlin, My Oberlin. On the recent scandal. See also Big Business and that article about trust in Amazon from a few links above.
* “The battle cry of the politically homeless: Anyone moderate with a brain and anything to lose has largely gone silent.”
* “Are Health Administrators To Blame?“, for either high health care costs or high education costs? Doesn’t look like it, though that’s a popular narrative, for obvious reasons. And there are lots of unsourced, attractive-looking graphs on the Internet that blame administrators.
* “In praise of pretty books.” Agreed, and the Thor Power Tools decision is why we have so few pretty books today. As I understand the situation, prior to Thor, publishers could print up a bunch of books and take some kind of depreciation deduction as they sat around in warehouses. Now, publishers apparently can’t do that, so publishers are strongly incented to sell everything they can in a given year. Consequently, cheap books become more attractive.
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