The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
From Les Jones:
In the 1988 presidential elections Lloyd Bentsen said “If you let me write $200 billion a year in hot checks, I’ll give you an illusion of prosperity, too.” Man, those were the days. When you could buy the illusion of prosperity for a mere $200 billion a year.
From Captain Capitalism:
If you recall high school economics or college freshman economics (both were the same, colleges just made you pay extra to re-learn what you did in high school) there were “The Factors of Production.”
These factors were essentially the ingredients you needed in order for a business or an individual to “produce” something. There were originally three of them.
Land – you can produce nothing without at minimum some kind of office space.
Labor – the machines will not only not take over the world, they’ll just sit there unless a human spends his or her time running them.
Capital – Nobody is doing nothing until they get paid. And that includes the people who produce the tools and machines you’ll need to get started.A fourth one was entered as they realized even with the above three, nothing would get produced. You needed a leader. An innovator. A man with the plan.
The entrepreneur.
Since there it was commonly accepted that there are three original, but most likely four real factors of production.
However, I would like to tender a fifth.
I’m doing this not to make things more complicated or to somehow be enshrined in the Economics Hall of Fame, but because our economy today practically proves there is a fifth and final factor of production that is required to produce, but is not accounted for in the current list. That fifth component is:
A future.
RTWT.
And then read my February 2009 post, Confidence.
From Robb:
The problem with Libertarianism is the same problem with Communism. Not everyone buys into your fantasy.
It’s…why Libertarians are powerless. Instead of trying to actually do something, they spend more time circle jerking in their purity tests than picking up their bowcasters and going door to door trying to explain their positions and heaven forbid – compromising where they can to move forward.
From the Mistress of Snark once again:
I was going to make some comment about what a master stroke of electioneering it was for Obama to use his bully pulpit to get the GOP to pull its teeth out of his economic Achilles’ heel and go chasing off after the gay marriage issue, but then I realized it didn’t really take any kind of political genius at all. I mean, if you know the dog’s gonna chase the stick, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to throw it in front of the bus.
You bitch about America at the protests, where our police handle you with kid gloves. You pose like little anarchist douchebags in your Guy Fawkes masks (my GOD! These people are ignorant of history!) throw bricks at the cops and destroy other people’s property, and then scream and cry about your civil rights being violated, all while demanding to be more like other countries that would just machinegun you in the streets and be done with it. — Monster Hunter Nation, Hate Mail Response to my Hate Mail! (and I Godwin the hell out of this post)
That’s the last paragraph. RTWT.
For those out there who don’t read XKCD religiously, today’s home-run:
My favorite:
Though physics seems to
promise you a Richard
Feynman-like career,
the Wiki-page for
“Physics Major”
redirects to “ENGINEER”
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Personally, I think Loyalty Day should follow in the footsteps of our ancestors and involve fire. A Big Fire. A Big Fire in front of various State and Federal Capitals, and involving the ceremonial burning of effigies. Dancing and flowers mandatory; drinking and partying encouraged; and fertility rites optional.
To my mind I’m thinking that watching papier maiche versions of themselves burned at the stake every year would go a nice way towards reminding various political critters of where their loyalties better damn-well stay.
— The LawDog Files, Beltane
Can I get an “AMEN!”?
The most recent XKCD:
The rollover text says:
I had a hard time with Ayn Rand because I found myself enthusiastically agreeing with the first 90% of every sentence, but getting lost at “therefore, be a huge asshole to everyone.”
And she’s a terrible novelist. Excellent essayist, but terrible novelist.
Very few people complete a math or engineering major without learning a lot of math and engineering, but it’s entirely possible to major in the humanities and never learn to read, write, or reason with any rigor. The problem isn’t inherent to the subject matter, it’s a symptom of professorial self-indulgence and laziness, together with the lack of external scrutiny, a problem that is much, much worse in humanities than in STEM. – Glenn Reynolds
Zombie visits a lecture on “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” which one commenter accurately assesses as:
“Should we indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies?” and only after five minutes of talking in circles eventually concludes “Yes.”
But that’s not the QotD. This is:
I am concluding forty years of engineering, primarily energy infrastructure, $2.5 Bn in nukes (24), fossil fuel power plants (48) and decades assessing advanced technologies (what is coming, the technical barriers, costs, etc.). These educational practices are alien to me in my ancient education. Engineering and hard sciences (which means truth) demands rigorous disciplined thinking. There is the right answer to the home work, and wrong answers.
Today, in climate change, nuclear safety, fracking, the current technologies controversies, I continually read many articles which can be summarized as, “Cesium 131 will kill everybody in Japan because I hate GE.” I find it irrational.
Read the rest. And see above.