A CEO, a homeless man and Paul Krugman are sitting in a kitchen together. The CEO is baking cookies, but Krugman keeps turning off the oven and kicking the CEO in the shins every time he returns from the grocery store. He takes takes most of the cookies, dividing them between himself and the homeless man, and says "that greedy asshole wants to keep those cookies and is wasting limited resources, making us fat, poisoning us with natural gas fumes and is sure to burn down the house any second now. Let's go sit on the couch and watch Dr. Phil while we wait for that greedy jackass to make more cookies. I'm going to punch him in the penis if they aren't done before the next commercial brea...

According to 2008 Department of Justice data, there were almost 13 times more men in U.S. prisons than women, and data from the Death Penalty Information Center show that there were about 65 men on death row for every woman in 2007. In other...

Excerpted from Wired Magazine:Having to manually unlock a car door.Remembering someone’s phone number.Getting lost.Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.Using a road atlas to get from A to B.Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch...

Once upon a time, in an imaginary land far away, there lived a group of people on an island. These people lived happily and traded their very tasty cheese with neighboring islands for other things they needed, like spices and wine.One day a neighboring...

HT: Mark PerryThe chart shows the acceptance rates for whites, Asians and blacks to U.S. medical schools from 2005-2007, based on different combinations of undergraduate grade point averages (GPA) and scores on the Medical College Admission Test...

Health care is both a luxury and a necessity. Most of us feel that there should be health care for those that cannot afford it, but do not realize that government manipulation is a large part of our failure to make reasonable health care available...

My opinion, based on examining many hundreds of corporate balance sheets, is that many CEOs are overpaid.  They are overpaid for the same reasons that politicians are overpaid and corrupt. The owners of government (citizens of the country)...

Elicitation of the relaxation response is actually quite easy. There are two essential steps:1. Repetition of a word, sound, phrase, prayer, or muscular activity.2. Passive disregard of everyday thoughts that inevitably come to mind and the return...

Public run businesses have the unique ability to enjoy higher incomes by failing. It's a never ending cycle of running a business poorly, blaming the failures on lack of funds, and receiving more funds. Case in point, the US public school system....

The currency we use today is asset-backed, but it's not obvious to us. Most dollars come into existence when a bank makes a loan for a home, car, or business, all of which are assets and back the currency. A bank creates money with every loan, but...

It seems intuitive: Increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles - or anything else that runs on gas - should lower the demand for oil. It was with precisely that expectation that Congress enacted the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)...

George Washington did not have wooden teeth. According to a study of Washington's four known dentures by a forensic anthropologist, the dentures were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, and human and animal teeth (including horse and donkey...

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A few people have asked me to explain this to them again after reading my other note on the accuracy of medical tests.Here is a nice summary: If your mammogram is positive, how likely is it that you actually have breast cancer? They’ve done surveys...

Why all the fuss about China? Hint: It's because China is competing with US tire and toy makers who are lobbying government to place tariffs on Chinese imports, and are so far successful in promulgating propaganda that makes it sound scary that...

Life can be cruel. It is our job (in defining gov't) not to talk about how life should be, but think about how we can make life best for all members of society, especially the poor.Capitalism, which uses our own greed and selfishness to keep cruelty...

How does anyone imagine that the government can “keep insurance companies honest” and to make sure everyone gets coverage, when medicare is currently leaving sick and dying old people out in the cold almost three times more often than the best private...

Imagine we travel back in time to a primitive cave-dwelling tribe. They have no money and trade pigs for cows, a knife for some honey, etc. The tribe is doing well but is having trouble trading. Sometimes a farmer wants to buy something smaller...

A 2006 article by Henry G. Grabowski and Y. Richard Wang in the peer-reviewed journal Health Affairs makes plain, the lion’s share of new chemical entities (NCEs)—that is, genuinely new drugs—are invented in the United States. Between 1993 and 2003,...

The British Medical Journal recently published a study that examined the data of nearly 2 million breast cancer screenings and found that of 2,000 women screened regularly for ten years, one will benefit and avoid dying from breast cancer, but ten...

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Imagine a world with two neighboring towns, Fairfield and Ottumwa. Fairfield makes very high quality chairs, Ottumwa makes very good cheese. What would happen if the chair maker in Ottumwa asked everyone to "buy local," and get their chairs from...

Jasper Kirkby gives a great lecture on our current understanding of climate cycles and explains very clearly how cycles of the sun, earth's orbit, wabble, and relative position in the galaxy affect temperature on Earth. The most fascinating...

Female participants, who were joining a discussion group about the psychology of sex, were either accepted into the group (control condition), had to go through a mild initiation, which involved reading aloud sex-related words, or had to go through...

Behold, the sad state of college "learning" today, where teachers with room temperature IQs educate by creating meaningless assignments with little or no educational value.  Students are asked to compare and contrast "strength" with the...