To borrow an idea from Tyler Cowen, here’s a really interesting sentence:
After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else.
That’s from a Felix Salmon blog post on Charles Komanoff’s study of the externalities associated with driving in New York. Since my spell checker doesn’t know the word “externalities,” I’ll link to its definition as well.
Here’s Matthew Yglesias explaining why many Senators are not experts on public policy:
Senators and members of congress have extremely time-consuming jobs, and the job is basically to fundraise, to travel a lot, and to hustle on behalf of the interests of donors and parochial local interests.
This is one of those everyday economics lessons that I think comes in handy in many phases of life. I used to work fairly regularly with people who were consultants for enterprise software companies. What I soon realized was that the core competency for these people was not software development skills or even product expertise but rather willingness to travel. Most of them just showed up and then spent most of their time asking people in the same office questions we could have asked them.
Daniel Jalkut posts on the disadvantages of the GPL. He argues that the viral nature of the GPL is off-putting to some developers who may otherwise contribute to a project that is licensed under a BSD-like license. That’s completely true. But it’s also beside the point. The GPL is explicitly and intentionally political. The goal is to force more software into the open source world.
The political nature of the license is certainly going to alienate some people, but any true advocate of the GPL will be completely OK with that. Knowingly choosing the GPL means you’re willing to take the “bad” with the good. The problem Jalkut describes has more to do with people who mistakenly equate “open source” with “GPL”.
Developers need to study the licenses before they choose one to release their software under. I’m not sure the GPL is the ideal license for WordPress, but clearly it hasn’t hindered its success. Complaining about the GPL’s encumbrances is sort of like complaining about the fact that when you buy Sierra Club merchandise, part of the money funds environmental causes. That’s the whole point.
Matthew Yglesias makes a good point about all of the compromising taking place in Congress when it comes to health care reform. A bill that appeases “moderates” may not be appealing to voters. Health care reform that does not relieve people from their dependence on their employer for health insurance is not interesting to me in any way. I’d like to see coverage for the uninsured, of course, and a bill that reduces the rate of growth in health care costs is necessary, but what I want is for people to be able to go out on their own and purchase health insurance at a reasonable price.
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Dave Smith just emailed to let me know that the theme I’m using is vulnerable to a cross-site scripting attack. He’s detailed the fix here, which I’ve applied. If you’re using depo-skinny, you’ll want to fix it as well.