These are the ramblings of a young married couple in the great City of Chicago.
Josh Hendrickson says,
If you are like me, you have been quite puzzled by this Bank of America “Keep the Change” scheme that is supposedly designed to promote personal saving.
I am like him. This program has always rung oddly for me.
Alex Tabarrok is also like Josh and I and has good thoughts on it.
Inspired by an add on the train for Lollapalooza, here is my list of potential economics Indie Rock band names:
The Invisible Hand
Market Force
Elastic Demand
Nairu
Fed Funds
The Reasonable Man
Keynes’ Cross
Dead Weight Loss
QED (This is more math, but I like it)
Creative Destruction
Schumpeter and/or von Thünen (Because what German name wouldn’t work? von Thünen gets extra points for the umalut)
Rent Seekers
Tragically Comon
It’s Friday, really, I could go on like this all day. . .
The first disc of Pinky and The Brain arrived this week and I have consequently been reduced to childlike amusement. I don’t know why I didn’t think of putting it on my Netflix list sooner! Add it to your queue. You will not be disappointed.
I was finally able to get all my old Blogger posting into Wordpress. If you want to check out all the old posts they are on the right in the archives. If you want to start at the beginning, go here.
When the average American stops working for the man and starts working for himself. Happy Cost of Government Day!
(HT: Illinois Review)
In this day and age of “rights to abortion”, why assume that it’s a binary choice? Either I don’t want the baby or I do want the baby and desire to avoid miscarriage “at all costs” (I’ll be posting on why I hate this phrase later)?
Maybe the government should be required to provide me with a compendium of the precise statistics on fetal mortality for all activities so that I can properly construct a preference curve. A woman might prefer to assume, say 30% chance across the board that she might miscarry.
Hands down the most frequently asked question about pregnancy I get is “Are there foods you’re not supposed to eat now?” I just answered this again for a colleague of mine and thought I’d share.
Here’s a list from the American Pregnancy Association.
This list irks me slightly less than the warnings I used to receive from WhattoExpect.com. Many of these were formatted as follows:
“Avoid x. X has not been proven to be safe.”
That’s your Null Hypothesis? All things are unsafe until proven safe? Why is nobody telling me to avoid riding in cars? Cars are most certainly unsafe. And why don’t they then give me a list of foods I should eat exclusively rather than a list of what to avoid?
Avoid lunch meat. What a bunch of balogna. *ba dum bum*
UPDATE: I found out this evening that dental work is among the activities not “proven to be safe” during pregnancy. My achy teeth have to wait until after delivery to be fixed. I just wish I had thought to ask before I left work early and traveled out of my way to the dentist’s office.
Zach Wendling (frequent commenter here) has figured out why it is so hard to figure out the Bush Administration:
I was recently watching Reno 911!: Miami, when the answer came to me in a jolt of inspiration. Bush and his senior advisers are not, in fact, stubborn and isolated neoconservatives. They are a highly dedicated and creative troupe of improvisational Surrealist performance artists*. Rather than following some ideological agenda, every aspect of this White House seeks to top the previously held conceptions with ever more outlandish behaviour and policy decisions.
Let’s continue to remember our Independence. Here I give you the scene from the final battle of the Revolution. The Siege of Yorktown. I bet you did not know Joscelynn was one of the Fifers.
This is really an amazing painting from the Hall of Victories at Château de Versailles. If you look close you can see Pres. George Washinton and Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de La Fayette. I would think Friedrich Wilhelm Ludolf Gerhard Augustin Steuben, Baron von Steuben is in there too, but this is French version of history, so I am not sure.
This is not the iPhone. T-Mobile has introduced some really interesting new plans that are more likely to fundamentally change your phone use than the amazing little phone/ipod/atlas/pda/oracle/ED-cure from Apple.
David Pogue’s article really spells out how this is not just a money saving proposition for consumers, but a really brilliant business plan that I think could propel T-Mobile to be the cell market leader. Read the whole thing; it is very well written and .
(HT: Melissa Lafsky at Freakonomics Blog)
