What in the…
Random duck!
How can we be so sure that humans are the only species that commit voluntary suicide?…
Random piece of trash. Who prepares to evacuate a golf course?!
Still no explanation of why there’s a concrete corn stalk field:
This scared the crap out of me! To fill the tub up, the water comes flyin’ out of the ceiling!
Hi there!
Pseudo-random.
In 2009, CDC published additional estimates of flu-related deaths comparing different methods, including the methods used in the 2003 JAMA study. The seasons studied included the 1993-94 through the 2002-03 flu seasons [9]. Results from this study showed that during this time period, 36,171 flu-related deaths occurred per year, on average.
Questions and Answers Regarding Estimating Deaths from Influenza in the United States, Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), March 12, 2009, http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/disease/us_flu-related_deaths.htm.
The Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA) (5 U.S.C. § 504; 28 U.S.C. § 2412) provides for the award of attorney fees (up to $125 per hour) and other expenses to eligible individuals and small entities that are parties to litigation against the government. An eligible party may receive an award when it prevails over the government, unless the government’s position was “substantially justified” or special circumstances make an award unjust.
Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), United States Small Business Administration, http://www.sba.gov/advo/laws/sum_eaja.html.
…contrary to popular belief, costs of production do not determine prices of goods. Prices are determined by the instantaneous valuations made by consumers and producers bidding against one another. By a process of imputation that flows from the consumer to the producer, prices of goods impute value to the factors of production necessary to make the goods that consumers demand. This imputation of value occurs when producers and entrepreneurs bid for the factors of production (labor and materials) in response to expected future profits, which sets wages for labor and prices for materials. Prices of goods, therefore, determine costs of production.
The Health Czar Can’t Calculate, Edgardo Tenreiro, April 30, 2009, http://mises.org/story/3428.
“Please, treat me like a child. Treat me like a five-year-old,” Sacramento resident David Cooke, 64, wrote in a letter to Congress. “I lost everything when the Dow tanked, and I’m too old to start working again, so why punish me further by explaining in detail the clever ways these investment firms ripped me off and how they’re all going to get away with it?”
The Onion, Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again, May 4, 2009, http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nation_ready_to_be_lied_to_about.
The knowledge of the fact that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth cannot, of course, be used as an argument either for or against socialism. Whoever is prepared himself to enter upon socialism on ethical grounds on the supposition that the provision of goods of a lower order for human beings under a system of common ownership of the means of production is diminished, or whoever is guided by ascetic ideals in his desire for socialism, will not allow himself to be influenced in his endeavors by what we have said. Still less will those “culture” socialists be deterred who, like Muckle, expect from socialism primarily “the dissolution of the most frightful of all barbarisms– capitalist rationality.”34 But he who expects a rational economic system from socialism will be forced to re-examine his views.
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Ludwig von Mises, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften, vol. 47 (1920), http://mises.org/pdf/econcalc.pdf.
Treaty On European Union, July 29, 1992, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/treaties/dat/11992M/htm/11992M.html.
Jury nullification permits a small minority of citizens to invalidate, in the context of a particular case, laws that have been established through the legislative process. It permits a single individual to temporarily thwart the imposition of the law on a criminal defendant by deadlocking the jury and forcing a mistrial. Jury nullification happens when juries, or individual members of the jury, vote to acquit the defendant although the jurors believe that the defendant is guilty under the law… Evidentiary factors are particularly important in both acquittal juries and hung juries. The dynamics of jury deliberations are strong influences in hung juries. The combination of so many variables makes it unlikely that jury nullification plays a dominant role in the large majority of cases.
US Dept of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Nullification at Work? A Glimpse From the National Center for State Courts Study of Hung Juries, Paula L. Hannaford-Agor and Valerie P. Hans, 2003, http://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/Abstract.aspx?id=202473.
Every day, we hear the secrets of life,
Reduced to cheap jokes, poetry and friendly advice.
They’d rather see us all pusillanimous,
Absorbent in their chorus of correctness.
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Any command-and-control regime of regulation creates incentives for getting around the rules, i.e., for regulatory arbitrage. Compared to the first Basel accord, Basel II attempts to be more sophisticated in terms of making capital requirements contingent on fine measures of risk; this is an attempt to cut down on such regulatory arbitrage. Nevertheless, as recent experience suggests, this is a difficult task, no matter how elaborate a risk-measurement system one builds into the regulatory structure.
One complicating factor is the viral nature of financial innovation. For example, one might argue that AAA-rated CDOs were a successful product precisely because they filled a demand on the part of institutions for assets that yielded unusually high returns given their low regulatory capital requirements. In other words, financial innovation created a set of securities that were highly effective at exploiting skewed incentives and regulatory loopholes. (See, e.g., Coval, Jurek and Stafford (2008a b), and Benmelech and Dlugosz (2008).)
…
For example, there have been calls to impose new regulations on the rating agencies… This is the most fundamental message that emerges from taking a viral view of the process of financial innovation–the problem one is trying to fight is always mutating. Indeed, a somewhat more ominous implication of this view is that the seeds of the next crisis may be unwittingly planted by the regulatory responses to the current one: whatever new rules are written in the coming months will spawn a new set of mutations whose properties are hard to anticipate.
Rethinking Capital Regulation, Kashyap et al, August 2008, Prepared for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City symposium on “Maintaining Stability in a Changing Financial System,” Pages 20-22, http://www.kansascityfed.org/publicat/sympos/2008/KashyapRajanStein.08.08.08.pdf.
…using an analogy from Hoenig (2008), instead of attempting to write the most comprehensive fire code possible, we should give some thought to installing more sprinklers.
Page 7
I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.
Remarks by Governor Ben S. Bernanke, At the Conference to Honor Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 8, 2002, http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm.
There are more than 15,000 murders every year in the United States:
Year: 2007
Population: 301,621,157
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter: 16,929
Table 1, Crime in the United States, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 2007, http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2007/data/table_01.html (See also http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm).
…according to behavioral neurologists from the University of California, Berkeley and the Université de Saint-Etienne, France. They have developed a way to identify a hyena by picking out specific features of its giggle.
Identifying Hyenas By Their Giggle, Science Daily, April 26, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090426094329.htm.
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/the-depression-youve-never-heard-of-1920-1921/
When production fell more than in the first parts of the Great Depression, unemployment reached ~12%, the government did nearly nothing, and we were out in a few years, ushering in the Roaring Twenties…
In one crucial respect, the depression of 1920-21 was actually more severe than the Great Depression itself: there was a rapid decline in the price level of between forty and fifty percent within the course of a single year. As Friedman and Schwartz (1963) explain, “From their peak in May [1920], wholesale prices declined moderately for a couple of months, and then collapsed. By June 1921, they had fallen to 56 per cent of their level in May 1920. More than three-quarters of the decline took place in the six months from August 1920 to February 1921. This is, by all odds, the sharpest price decline covered by our money series, either before or since that date and perhaps also in the whole history of the United States.” (1963, pp.232-233.) The wholesale price index during the Great Depression took about three years to fall by the same amount.
Employment and output were however not as severely affected as in the Great Depression. Of course precise unemployment data are not available for this period, but one representative estimate (Lebergott, 1957) puts civilian unemployment at 2.3% in 1919, 11.9% in 1921, and back to 3.2% in 1923. Output figures tell a similar story: one aggregate index (Mills, 1932) indexes production at 125.3 in 1919, 99.7 in 1921, and rebounding to 145.3 in 1923. As these stylized facts indicate, the second unusual feature of the depression of 1920-21 was the rapid recovery in employment and output, in sync with a swift adjustment of the real wage to its new equilibrium position.
…
Overall, the Bernanke-Carey framework seems to highlight some interesting contrasts between the Great Depression and the depression of 1920-21. Despite some extraordinary shocks, the American economy swiftly recovered from the depression of 1920-21. In contrast, the recovery of the American and the world economies from the Great Depression was extremely slow. This would lead us to strongly suspect that wage flexibility during the depression of 1920-21 was markedly greater than during the Great Depression, and this impression is strongly confirmed within the Bernanke-Carey framework of this paper.
Wage Adjustment and Aggregate Supply in the Depression of 1920-1921: Extending the Bernanke-Carey Model, Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics, Princeton University, November 09, 1994, http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/year2.doc.
On March 2, 1932, the Senate Committe on Banking and Currency… was authorized… to make a thorough and complete investigation of the practices with respect to the buying and selling and the borrowing and lending of listed securities and the effect of such practices upon interstate and foreign commerce, upon the operation of the national banking system and the Federal Reserve System, and upon the market for securities of the United States Government, and the desirability of the exercise of the taxing power of the United States with respect to any such securities.
…
In the course of the investigation thus far conducted by the subcommittee a record of more than 12,000 printed pages has been compiled and more than 1,000 exhibits received in evidence. The subcommittee has endeavored to investigate thoroughly and impartially some of the complex and manifold ramifications of the business of issuing, offering, and selling securities and the business of banking and extending credit. It has endeavored to expose banking operations and practices deemed detrimental to the public welfare; to reveal unsavory and unethical methods employed in the flotation and sale of securities; and to disclose devices whereby income-tax liability is avoided or evaded. Its purpose throughout has been to lay the foundation for remedial legislation in the fields explored and in some measure that purpose has already been achieved. During the progress of this investigation, Congress enacted the Banking Act of 1933, the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and several amendments to the revenue act calculated to eliminate methods of tax avoidance described before the subcommitte.
Stock Exchange Practices Report, June 6, 1934, United States Senate, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session, http://www.sechistorical.org/collection/papers/1930/1934_06_06_Intro_to_Pecora_C.pdf.
The Great Depression lasted another 12 years.
The SEC was created in 1934 to “add regulation” and combat fraud. The SEC missed Bernie Madoff’s ~$50 billion ponzi scheme (with ample evidence from Harry Markopolos, an independent investigator).
The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Open Market Committee shall maintain long run growth of the monetary and credit aggregates commensurate with the economy’s long run potential to increase production, so as to promote effectively the goals of maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates.
Federal Reserve Act of 1913, US CODE: Title 12,225a. Maintenance of long run growth of monetary and credit aggregates, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/12/usc_sec_12_00000225—a000-.html.
It has failed in nearly every capacity of its purpose and charter. We’ve never had such huge drops in employment. CPI has exploded. Increased production? Our manufacturing base has withered. What do we create? Word documents?
Before 1913, when the Federal Reserve System was created, there was never as bad of a depression as the Great Depression of the 1930s.
We keep creating institutions which keep failing us when the free market systems before, although imperfect, worked better (Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, never as catastrophic of an economic collapse, etc.). All the while, each government institution complicates and constricts our activities and freedoms.