Free kibbles

ECONOMY:

Robert Murphy does a great job exposing Paul Krugman as a self-serving, history-rewriting fruit loop, again, but he admits that nobody got all the predictions about the economy right. This just shows the futility of central planning. It's impossible for any human being to know enough to centrally plan any aspect of the economy. A central planner would have to be omniscient.

EDUCATION:

In an article about the collapse of the higher education bubble, we get a hint of the economic carnage to come:

"In 1990, the financial sector was less than 7.5 percent of the S&P 500. By 2006, this sector had grown to 22.3 percent of the S&P, and that year the financial sector constituted 45 percent of the index's earnings."

We can expect the financial sector to collapse back below seven percent, down to where it was before Nixon ended the last vestige of the gold standard. That's going to wipe out a lot of people. As for education:

"In the United States, 80,000 bartenders as well as 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees. Nearly a quarter of all retail salespersons have a college degree. In all, 17 million Americans with college degrees are working at jobs that do not require a bachelor's degree."

People will wake up and refuse to go hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to get a degree then be stuck in those jobs. This article doesn't make it sound like the bubble has popped. It sounds like it will pop soon though.

HEALTH CARE:

Zoo keepers are poisoning apes with grains just like the establishment poisons people with them.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Netherlands introduces in-car electronic system to track environmental impact of driving and tax accordingly.

POLICE STATE:

It sucks that any time somebody sees an unattended briefcase, everybody gets all scared.

WAR:

Argument claims dropping atomic bombs on Japan didn't help end the war.

US military building up to box in China. Remember how that worked out with Japan?

FOREIGN POLICY:

Opposition accuses Syrian navy of shelling city, killing 21.

POLITICS:

Pawlenty withdraws from the presidential race after his poor showing in the Ames straw poll. That's too bad. I'd like to see him keep drawing votes from other establishment candidates.

If somebody has evidence the Republican establishment rigged the straw poll to defeat Ron Paul, they should publish it, not make accusations without evidence.

Analysis claims that after the straw poll, it's a three person race: Romney, Perry and Bachmann. I guess we're supposed to believe Pawlenty was a major candidate even though he never polled in double digits and couldn't raise a dime of money. I also guess we're supposed to believe Ron Paul isn't a major candidate despite polling in double digits, raising lots of money and basically tying with Bachmann in the poll. The disdain the establishment has for the people always impresses me.

Obama's approval rating drops to 39. Ouch.

MISC:

Intel is intentionally slowing down its processors so people will purchase software updates to speed them up. This commenter gets it right:

"It's like I'm being scammed at purchase, and scammed again at upgrade time."

This tells us that Intel is making many more fast processors than it can sell at a high price, at first. This doesn't bode well for AMD.

Group concludes Bing is more effective than Google, but the data doesn't support that conclusion. It's just as likely Google and Bing users have different habits. Either way, I prefer DuckDuckGo.

I would love to see the death of boot up delay, but I haven't seen it yet.