pigou

One thing I've always wondered: How does Consumer Reports afford to purchase all those cars (and other expensive items that it reviews)?

> Parnia is currently working with a number of hospitals on a project to investigate out of body experiences. One of the components of the study is to place objects on high shelves in operating theatres, which are only observable from above.

The article has been updated to clarify that this is merely speculative:

> Authorities would not comment on whether the events were connected to Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings. At least one of the suspects in Watertown appeared to be a man in his 20s.

However, the first paragraph still says basically what it said when you posted.

> One suspect in Monday’s Boston Marathon bombings has been captured

Whenever I hear stupid questions like "Do immigrant engineers depress engineer wages?", I'm tempted to say that it's as simple as supply and demand. But supply and demand are not simple things.

On the one hand, an increased supply of engineers (or flaxseed) in the form of immigrants (or imports) will obviously decrease the market clearing price, and anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of economics or engaging in sophistry.

But to the extent that engineers spur technological or industrial advances which benefit the entire ecosystem, the presence of additional engineers in the form of immigrants could actually increase the _demand_ for engineers. A concrete example is the marginal increase in engineering demand caused by an immigrant engineer founding a company.

(You could argue, given the example provided, that another company would have been founded in its absence, or that the company displaced an existing company. However, my intuition is that it's a positive-sum game, and that a successful company would created some marginal demand for engineers.)

Aren't you double-counting here? On net the merchant only loses the merchandise. The net debit to the merchant's account is zero.

Unlike most keyboards which have the ctrl key on the bottom left corner, MacBook Pro keyboards for some reason have the useless fn button at that location, and the ctrl key to the right of that. This makes text navigation with the emacs keybindings (eg, "ctrl+n" and "ctrl+p") even more awkward than it usually is, given that touch typing requires you to stay close to home row.

The solution to both this problem and the uselessness of the caps lock key is just to set the caps lock key to act as ctrl.

http://stackoverflow.com/a/162907

> why are geographically proximate people of more moral worth?

This seems to be the implicit assumption whenever certain segments of the political class bemoan jobs being "shipped overseas". On a local/national scale, inequality does increase as unskilled workers face international competition. But on a global scale, inequality actually decreases as those living in the world's poorest countries see their incomes go up.

In this case at least, a likely explanation for why geographically proximate workers are deemed more worthy is that they are part of the relevant political constituency and the foreign workers are not.

Here's some context behind the essay:

http://www.webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/franklin.html

I thought this was an interesting point: According to Wikipedia[1],

> Franklin did not propose DST; like ancient Rome, 18th-century Europe did not keep precise schedules.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time

To be fair, The proportion of NYT writers and editors that is numerate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more innumerate people at the NYT now than there were 12 years ago.

> Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago.

So...literacy rates are going up? That doesn't sound so bad.

While those are interesting counterexamples, they don't come close to modeling a realistic "age-at-death" distribution. There isn't any such distribution whose median would be significantly skewed by a tiny minority of centenarian outliers. These distributions are basically unimodal with the exception of a some degree of infant mortality, and the average (median or mean) is not located at a thin spot in the distribution (quite the opposite) [1].

[1] http://www.longevitas.co.uk/site/informationmatrix/mortality...

> it ends up being closer to median life span - so an overstated number of centenarians (people over 100) could significantly skew things.

Could you elaborate? Isn't the median always _less_ sensitive to outliers compared to the mean?