English:#

It's strange that most people only want to learn either the polite words or the curse words when first considering learning another language.

Spanish:#

Es extraño que mucho gente solo deseamos aprender o los palabras cortés o los palabras reniego cuando primero en vista de otro lingua.

Es extraño que la mayoría de la gente solo desean aprender las palabras cortésas o los tacos cuando considerando empezar el aprender de otra lingua.

Italian:#

È strano quel più di gente solo volono imparare o i paroli raffinato o i paroli odiato quando primo considerato un altro lingua.

È strano che la maggioranza dell gente solo vogliono imparare le parole raffinate o le parole abusive quando vogliono cominciare un'altra lingua.

New Kim Jong the Illmatic#

And again.

Don Boundreaux takes on the idea that people can be "harmed" by trade. Starting with the concept that changing patterns of international trade are just one aspect of economic change and that it is a choice to participate in a market economy, he writes:#

If we identify people who lose their current jobs to freer trade as being "harmed" by free trade, then we should identify any person who loses a job for any reason (save malfeasance) as someone who is harmed by economic change.

But economic change is an inescapable, integral, and vitally important aspect of the division-of-labor economy that produces the prosperity that people are loath to lose even a small sliver of.

Don Boudreaux quotes part of an article on labor market rigidity.#

Moxie links to the I am a Liberal! video.#

Ole links a great election map by county.#

Tom Palmer posts a public-speaking checklist. Bookmark this.#

Bryan Caplan writes about how countries experience economic growth and what factors prevent it.#

Thus, the least pleasant places in the world to live normally have three features in common: First, low economic growth; second, policies that discourage growth; and third, resistance to the idea that other policies would be better. I have a theory to explain this curious combination.3 Imagine that the three variables I just named—growth, policy, and ideas—capture the essence of a country's economic/political situation. Then suppose that three "laws of motion" govern this system. The first two are almost true by definition:

1. Good ideas cause good policies.
2. Good policies cause good growth.

The third law is much less intuitive:
3. Good growth causes good ideas.

The third law only dawned on me when I was studying the public's beliefs about economics,4 and noticed that income growth seems to increase economic literacy, even though income level does not. In other words, poor people whose income is rising—like recent immigrants—have more than the average amount of economic sense; rich people whose income is falling—like the Kennedy family—have less.

Proposed Redistricting#

Slashdot reports:#

spackbace writes "The notorious, mysterious Source Code Club (SCC) has re-emerged, this time selling source code for a Cisco application in another blatant violation of copyright regulations. Believed to be an anonymous collection of hackers, the SCC this week announced in a posting on a group Web site that it is offering the complete Cisco Pix 6.3.1 source code for US$24,000. Cisco Pix is a firewall application providing security, intrusion protection, network monitoring and other services for business and carrier networks."

Gina Smith links to a site that is about holiday origins. But watch out because it tries to download some weird thing to your computer.#

Marcus Epstein on myths about Martin Luther King.#