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You make your own, of course! You set up your own mine, you get your own fab, you invent your own chip layouts, and as long as you advertise that it all has been fairly made, the consumers will beat a path to your door. And if they don't, then they simply revealed through their preferences that they're not that interested in the fairness they claim they're interested in.

After all, the market fixes everything, no visible hand required.

The amusing part is that, if markets were simple enough for all of that to work, then Soviet planning would have been much easier too. (See the paragraph starting with "If it’s any consolation, allowing non-convexity...")

This isn't a new idea. Kantorovich (one of the inventors of linear programming) considered this venue of economic optimization himself, but the technology of the day wasn't up to the task and the bureaucracy didn't want to be displaced either. Some of his suggestions inspired the reforms that later got implemented by Kosygin, but the Soviet economy was rather distorted by subsidies at that point, so a lot of those reforms got rolled back.

There was also the fear that linear programming, with its shadow prices, would covertly smuggle capitalism into communism. See also Red Plenty for a half-fictionalized account of Kantorovich's attempts (or the Crooked Timber post, In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You).

Beyond that, there's Towards a New Socialism which is an idea/plan of how to run a socialist centrally planned society with modern technology. It uses sparse linear programming for the plan construction part and is based on sortition for government to diminish the inevitable corruption that comes with concentrating economic power like any CPE does. Would it work? Who knows? It may be interesting in the utopian sense anyway.

Tangentially related (speaking of scientific communism/socialism), there's also Project Cybersyn, the project to use cybernetics to run socialist Chile. That wasn't based on linear programming, though. If linear programming is the neat route, Cybersyn would be the scruffy route. Again, who knows whether it would have worked; if Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is anything to go by, a considerable part of the problem was that of bureaucracy and what the people were used to. Managers didn't use the system because it felt cumbersome to do so, etc.

Aaron Swartz died three years ago today.

If you don't know who Aaron Swartz is, read about his accomplishments. He did more in his short life than most could do in a hundred years. And he was taken from us so soon!

Just look at how our world has changed for the worse in the 3 years since he's been gone. Firefox's share of the market has continued to drop, hitting the mid single-digits. GNOME 3 has essentially ruined the GNOME project. Perl 6 and Rust 1.0 have been released, and both have been huge disappointments. Linux has become unusable for many people thanks to systemd. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have seen tremendous growth, what with how systemd has ruined Linux.

I think that if Aaron was still with us, we would be much better off, rather than suffering so badly.

Aaron, I will never forget you. Aaron, I will always remember you.

I don't know about schools, but laissez-faire economic libertarians have gotten to the point where they actually praise the Gilded Age as the great era of capitalist achievement - or, alternatively, presenting it as "still too much government". I'm not kidding.

If you're looking for some insight on what's going on in the Ukraine from people who aren't insane warmongers, you might start here: Chris Bertram on who to read, what to believe.

At the time Elvis Presley died in 1977, he had 150 impersonators in the US. Now, according to calculations I spotted in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement recently, there are 85,000. Intriguingly, that means one in every 3,400 Americans is an Elvis impersonator. More disturbingly, if Elvis impersonators continue multiplying at the same rate, they will account for a third of the worldâ(TM)s population by 2019.

http://crookedtimber.org/2005/...

Doesn't matter. The headers aren't encrypted; they know what IP addresses are involved. Get enough history, and you don't need the content. Read this (Warning; elementary mathematical concepts involved.)

Laugh, it's funny:
    http://crookedtimber.org/2013/04/17/new-tools-for-reproducible-research/

CT is an academic site--you should see what the researchers over there are saying. Phrases like "doesn’t rise to the level of astrology" are seen.

Couple of good reads regarding LaTeX. 50 Shades of LaTeX: The Pain the Pleasure http://airminded.org/2005/11/18/latex-the-pain-the-pleasure/ http://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/

Being liberal is "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater". Until the "liberals" get power, then everyone who disagrees with them is yelling fire...

That's two people that didn't respond to the question.
Why do you think you have the right to interfere in the voluntary association between an employee and employer?

OK, let me help you out. The relationship between employee and employer is not really a "voluntary association" as much as it is a very asymmetrical relationship. And the thing that give unions the "right to interfere in the voluntary association between an employee and employer?" is a free and fair election among workers deciding to form a union. A union is an aggregation of labor the same way a corporation is an aggregation of capital. And ultimately, it came down to unions forming because there was no other way to fix the situation. At the time of the beginning of the labor movement, the nation was experiencing a similar growing disparity of wealth and incomes, and, as has been proven over and over, disparity in income beyond a certain level creates an inexorable breakdown of social institutions. After a certain level of income disparity, societies become very sick at all levels. There is tons of research supporting this, in studies over 2/3 of a century, replicated again and again. And after three decades of organized attack on the labor movement, similar conditions which led to the necessity of the previous labor movement are starting to arise again today.

If you are really, honestly interested in getting an answer to your question, and in good faith care to learn something about the importance of the right of labor to aggregate, and why it is in both the employer's and the employees' best interest as well as society's best interest, for such aggregation to take place, start with this very recent link.. I'm willing to take the time to provide you with a lot more information, which will answer your questions, but this is a good place to start.

Were you not able to keep the statement "Your argument could be applied to all types of criminals that use force to get their way. Examples:" in your head while reading the examples?

Can you understand that the examples that the original poster was using, about raping "chicks" and beating up homosexuals, and the way he phrased those examples, said more about his own opinions than any argument he was trying to advance? I'm betting you can see how if he really was trying to advance that argument in good faith he didn't have to phrase those examples that way. There is a great deal of subtext in the things people write. All sorts of things get revealed in the words we choose.

Nevermind trying to prove their case using facts. That attempt has failed miserably, and the resulting "science" from these skeptics contain enough big words to fool the average FOX News zombie, but not much of anyone else.

When you don't have the facts on your side, arguments like this are what you have to resort to. This is no different from the e-mail "scandal" from a couple of years ago. Ignoring the facts of the matter and arguing "the facts are wrong because THOSE GUYS ARE BIASED! THEY DON'T AGREE WITH US! THAT PROVES IT!!!!!!" is really all the anthropogenic climate change skeptics have left to argue with, so that's what they use.

According to a survey, 90% of scientists from the relevant fields and 90% of all scientists ascribe to anthropogenic climate change. That is what we call a "scientific consensus", and you don't get a consensus that strong without an awful lot of data to back it up. I know, I know, the good pro-science guys at FOX News and on the Rush Limbaugh show and from the rightist think tanks keep saying this is "bad science", but let's take a look at the "science" the rightists use to make their arguments, shall we?

The most prominent, most cited, and most published climate change skeptic scientist is one Ross McKitrick, who is either an amazingly sloppy scientist, or someone deliberately engaging in fraud in order to promote a purely ideological view. I'll let you read for yourself: http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/.

This guy who either literally doesn't know a degree from a radian or is deliberately doing bad science in order to deceive people is the best of the bunch. The others are even worse. It is on the basis of work by men of this caliber that you conclude that 90% of the scientists on the planet, representing people from every conceivable walk of life, economic status, nationality, set of political views, etc. is part of a vast international conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? I was never entirely clear on what this vast, incomprehensibly complex conspiracy is actually supposed to do.

One of the primary "scientists" behind the original complaints that led to this manufactured "controversy" is none other than Ross "degrees for radians" McKitrick.

Any of McKitrick's mistakes taken individually would be understandable, but after so many of them one can only conclude that either he is making these "mistakes" on purpose to arrive at a particular conclusion or he is one of the most staggeringly incompetent scientists in the world today. Either way, no one rational should be taking him seriously.

McKitrick by the way is one of the most prominent "scientists" cited by the global warming denial crowd, and is one of the only ones to have actually been published in a serious journal (hence his prominent status among deniers).

This really is no different from the anti-evolution movement. It's all bad information and bad logic to support a religion that can't survive contact with evidence, and they even use similar tactics (e.g. fakey journals publishing materials from fakey labs whose funding is obscured by shell companies and whose content is not really meant to fool anyone but Joe Beercan).

You mean like Ross McKitrick? Or do you perhaps mean one of the guys who actually manages to be less qualified, less prominent, and less competent than even McKitrick?

...like creationists every day.

The most prominent global warming denier to publish a scientific work got his conclusions backwards because he apparently doesn't understand the difference between degrees and radians. You could, I suppose, argue that McKitrick made an honest mistake, but the problem is that he makes a lot of mistakes like this seemingly every time he publishes a paper, and this guy is the cream-of-the-cream in global denial "scientist" circles (assuming that by "scientist" you mean "oil company whore").

Of course, if you think there's anything wrong with McKitrick's work, that means you must be part of the vast international conspiracy against oil companies, coal companies, and American conservolibertarians. :D

Your argument makes sense. Here is a comment from a discussion elsewhere:

how many students from non-rich countries do you know who are studying in the humanities? Being "an educated person from a non-rich country" is to a large degree synonymous with "a person from a non-rich country with a science, economics or business degree". So if there's a positive correlation between higher levels of education and belonging to a terrorist organization (which could at least partly be an artifact of selection bias as alluded to in some of the comments above) it shouldn't be a surprise that engineering backgrounds appear to be correlated with belonging to a terrorist organization. But this doesn't mean there's ANYTHING about the "engineering mindset" (whatever the hell that is) that makes one more likely to join one.

Torture is still used because it works, and it works because it's still used? That's some nice circular logic there, Lou.

The only reason it's still used because some people are sociopaths who enjoy hurting others (or they are in search of "revenge"). This is why it's generally associated with Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and North Korea. It's a verifiable fact
that
torture
does
not
work
for
the
reasons
I
explained
previously.

There Are Four Lights!

- Kind of ironic now.

Funny you should mention philosophy papers and wikipedia; crooked timber posted a brief piece a few days ago on David Chalmers's brief attempts to make some contribution to the 'pedia in ~2005:

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/02/04/wikipedia/

(For those who want to read the piece and aren't exactly up to speed on academic philosophy: Chalmers is one of the big figures in contemporary philosophy, and in particular is an important figure in contemporary work on consciousness. For those who aren't up on their cinema: the "Marshal McLuhan" line is a reference to Woody Allen's _Annie_Hall_; at one point in the movie, Allen is arguing about McLuhan's work with some guy in line for a movie, and Allen pulls McLuhan in from off screen.)

I noticed you were referring to an article on arXiv.org. While it may certainly be true, these articles have not been peer reviewed by a scientific journal. Also note that this author appears to have only the single article on the site (which may or may not mean anything - draw your own conclusions).

I think arXiv.org is a great idea - a way for physicists to communicate ideas informally before going through the hassle of getting them published. It's still best to take it all with a grain of salt, as papers here may not be as carefully reviewed as other sources.

Tbe group weblog Crooked Timber had a mini-symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council a little while ago, including a long reply from Mieville.

Tbe group weblog Crooked Timber had a mini-symposium on China Mieville and Iron Council a little while ago, including a long reply from Mieville.

My biggest problem with esr was that he couldn't seem to keep his OSI work separate from his other opinions about the proper place of women, how to treat homosexuals, etc. I respect his right to have those opinions, but I wish he would tuck them away during his very visible tenure as leader of OSI.

Russ has a fairly extreme view on libertarian economics. ("Extreme" because few people believe there should be no public liability laws -- I'd link but the archives are broken.) Fair enough; I sympathize even if I wouldn't go quite as far as he does.

My big question is: will he manage to keep his personal opinions separate from his OSI work? I do not want to hear any more OSI-related statements alluding to gun control. It's not just unprofessional, it's also a bad idea in that you may alienate people who like open source but dislike Rand.

As several commentators have suggested, R is a terrific platform for statistical computing. Here's a link to a blog post that, in part, contains more information about R, in particular links to some of the textbooks (both free and commercially published) that use it to do statistics. R is one of those open-source projects that's absolutely first class but doesn't get so much exposure in the mainstream because it's a bit specialized.

Lots more analysis as well as a thorough (and I do mean thorough) debunking of your chicagoboyz link here.

MT problem: http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001832.html Soooo, it turns out that moving a Movable Type blog from one host to another using MT's "Import" facilities works OK -- up to a point. An unforeseen problem is that the MT installation in our old home had a couple of other blogs running on it prior to the birth of Crooked Timber. This meant that archived CT posts on that system didn't have IDs starting from 00001.html --- they started from 200-odd. Posts on the new host do have IDs starting from 1 (or 31, actually, for other reasons). The upshot of all this is that if links to this blog are currently broken -- e.g., if you linked to a CT post from a few months ago from your blog, that link will still bring you to this site, but to the wrong post. That's not good. Now. What I want to know from the MT whiz kids who read this blog is, can this be fixed? ...

There's always the Top 10 Books I Did Not Read This Year.

Various blogs have been talking about this recently. It seems too early to say who's right here --- the original authors have issued a vigorous interim rebuttal [pdf] of the charges, so it's hard to say what's happening. But let's not let that get in the way of a good bit of enviro-sensationalism, eh?