Premium Milk and Construction Workers: ‘Brands, like water, find their own level’. I love this line.
Horror and Freedom: Unmitigated fundaes. You know, this is probably why Professer Myers is left-liberal.
Free Trade in Landing Rights
June 29, 2006The post linked to above is simply and lucidly written, and comes up with a solution to a problem. If that’s being nerdy, then we need more nerds around.
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Indie Rock and Homeopathy
June 26, 2006This comic strip reminds me of homeopathy: just as homeopathic medicines are supposedly most effective when they’re infinitely diluted, indie bands are most credible when they’re infinitely unknown.
While we’re on the two subjects, Questionable Content has become one of my favourite comic strips, and I strongly recommend you go read it right from the beginning. And where homeopathy is concerned, this article by Professor Richard Dawkins is excellent reading. Of course I recommend you read that too.
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Tank Boy
June 12, 2006Interesting learning: the import duty on motorcycles is 105%, 135% on cars, but zero on tanks.
Damn. Now I want a tank. Fortunately, the internet is a wild and wonderful thing, and it turns out that these people have tanks for sale.
But they only have Czech manufactured Soviet tanks. What a shame. I would have liked a Panzer IV.
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Pankaj Mishra
June 12, 2006Readers of Maajorly Shadymax Arbit Fundaes are obviously too intelligent to be taken in by this Pankaj Mishra editorial, which manages to contradict itself repeatedly and also indulges in some very selective reporting of facts.
To take just one of the contradictions, Mishra first claims that when China adopted free market policies, the result was a 25% inflation rate in the late 1980s, and even says that the Tiananmen Square protests were not for greater democracy and accountability, but against rising prices (So was the Goddess of Democracy actually the Goddess of Low Prices?). But he then goes on to say that China’s adoption of free market policies is undermining European economies through cheap exports. You can’t have it both ways. Why do ‘neoliberal’ policies cause inflation in the 1980s, but 15 years on, with greater adoption cause deflation? And why are rising prices bad in China, and falling prices bad in Italy?
Tim Worstall has a rebuttal up on his blog. It makes some very excellent points about the things not mentioned in the editorial, and leaves Mishra looking pretty silly.
I disagree with Worstall’s opening paragraph, though, where he says Mishra seems to be suggesting that India and China need a healthy dose of socialism. Actually, Mishra’s beef with free market economics is not that it doesn’t work, but that it is a Western idea based on Western values, and thus unsuitable for India and China. If you were to take this to its logical conclusion, socialism is also ruled out as it too has Western origins. Mishra would presumably be satisfied if India and China were operating under pre-imperialistic conditions. Of course, this would mean scuppering democracy, free speech, the university system and bringing back untouchability, sati, absentee landlords, and foot binding, but at least these are homegrown concepts.
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Singapore Police Arrests PETA Activist Dressed As Bear
March 18, 2006Nothing I can say about this will be funnier than the headline and the photos.
Link via Tomorrow
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About Time
February 22, 2006Someone has finally written a Master’s Thesis on IITM lingo.
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Hallmarks of Economic and Social Progress
February 15, 2006
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The Irony is Slaying Me
February 10, 2006The World Trade Organisation ruled on Tuesday that European restrictions on the introduction of genetically-modified foods violated international trade rules, finding there was no scientific justification for Europe
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It Isn’t Just…
February 10, 2006It isn’t just Reliance Infocomm which tries to cheat BSNL. BSNL employees do the same thing. So who’s to blame- Reliance, or the stupid system of tariffs and cross-subsisdies that sets up arbitrage opportunities like this in the first place?
It isn’t just airports which are seeing private participation and development. The MMRDA has received fifteen tenders for a new bus terminus to be run on a build-own-operate-transfer contract. Which should hopefully answer Dilip D’ Souza.
And it isn’t just Jayalalitha who nationalises industries to give political rivals a poke in the eye. The Andhra Pradesh government has just handed all the well-managed dairy cooperatives to the bureaucracy. Once again, the political rivals will eventually come back to power, and it’s the consumers and dairy farmers who’ll get shafted.
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