Can you start the baby on soda too early? « Criggo

If there is one thing that I hate; its being told that something is inevitable…

“I first encountered the Chicago theory in law school. The Chicagoists somehow read into law a market efficiency component that was never there. I recoiled against it — not because of the libertarianism, which I embraced. Rather, it seemed a backdoor way to circumvent democracy, and force into the legal system rules that were never debated, voted on, or agreed to by a representative government. I found the extremist legal theories of Judges like Richard Posner and Frank Easterbrook intellectually repulsive. They were undemocratic, anti-representative government. When I told a professor that the law and economics movement was an attempt at a political coup, he laughed and said, try to stop it.”

RIP Chicago School of Economics: 1976-2008 | The Big Picture

Why can’t they produce something like this themselves…

Monopoly Repackaging | Andy Mangold

…they come out lower than Zimbabwe…

GDP growth forecasts, 2009 | The Economist

“I was thinking about the three-year rule while reading about Malcolm Gladwell’s observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert at something. If you really throw yourself into a job, you’ll spend 60 hours a week working. That’s 3,000 hours a year (allowing for vacation), which means you’ll hit the 10,000 hour mark a few months after your third year.

So maybe that’s where the three-year rule comes from. You’re now expert at what you set out to master. Great. Now go do something else.”

The Long Tail – Wired Blogs

When I read the book I thought that the idea behind the 10,000 hours was to get good at something and then use that knowledge. What The Economist and the media in general seems to favor is getting good at something and then doing something else.

The other version of this is that you learn a foreign language, say Italian, but then only travel to Spanish speaking countries. Or you learn a new instrument ever three years but never perform. 

I think that this explains something that we all know deep down. Whenever we read an article about a subject that we know well we believe that the article is wrong. However, we believe articles about subjects that we don’t know.

Fighting Liberals: Old Shoes- UPDATE

I can imagine the lorry loads of shoes arriving each morning.

Wonderful, just wonderful!

I wonder where mine is. I’d love to know where my donated OLPC went and who is using it.

“It seems so ugly, the way this has gone down — but there’s no way to break with tradition in a nice way.”

Daring Fireball: That He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying

Oh, how true!

Bike parking system in Japan – Boing Boing