Viewing profile — rubiety

Whenever I'm frustrated, I entertain the thought of penguin farming in the Falkland islands.

If smoking is a problem for non-smokers, would it seem like a simpler solution to give non-smokers face masks? Why should the burden of the negative externality lie on the recipien…

Yep. "Genetic Fallacy" more specifically. Very widespread.

Room and board is double-counting. You'd ultimately have to pay for that anyways (college or not), so it's hard to attribute that entirely to the "cost of college" - it's not a net…

This anecdote does nothing to detract from the central point, stated again: "Billions of people live fulfilling lives without ever stepping foot in the United States."

Gotta love how the absence of state laws restricting what contracts between private individuals can include is described as being "the most repressive". Ultimately these clauses ar…

San Diego. I moved here on a whim a bit over a year ago after traveling all over the country on JetBlue flying places. San Diego just seemed to have an incredibly high quality of l…

Does anyone care about living in a city that's just plain nice to live in? Everyone's so concerned about whether a city is conducive to start-ups they miss out on evaluating qualit…

This is very true, repeated often by economists, but nobody listens. It's so ironic this is so often pointed out, since the reality (increasing marginal revenue product of labor) i…

You're missing the point - the TSA watch list is checked with the name you bought the flight under. You can then change that name to the name that matches your ID. The TSA does not…

They definitely don't look. Several itineraries have multiple legs, and the TSA only ever looks at - much less scribbles on - your first leg. Even that aside, you can easily get a …

The point of going dark is to announce to bystanders the peril. Everyone who reads Hacker News already knows the peril...

"The sad fact is that America is no longer a country that makes things, and as a result we no longer find ourselves in a position to employ people in positions that are actually wo…

2. I claimed "money is a veil", not "money doesn't matter". People focus too much on money when discussing macroeconomics and the effects of complex changes in the economy, and not…

1. "provides cheaper supply for a demand" - Nice ;-). I'm not disagreeing with you that if it's free there is no market. But that's an entirely different question from asking wheth…

I think what you're trying to say is that technological progress brings highly increasing returns to intelligence such that one person has the capability to produce an extremely hi…

I'm not even sure where to begin on your confusion here. 1. Firstly, efficiency concerns the ability to more with less. Zero is less, and there's no reason why zero is substantivel…

Wow, you should be embarrassed. Read the rest of the comments and see my real reply to the original article - posted 10 minutes before yours. It's also hilarious that this comment …

All the more ironic that the next item in my feed reader is, "The Problem Began When the Invention of the Spear Reduced the Price of Food": http://cafehayek.com/2011/05/the-problem…

Yet another absolutely classic example of both the "lump of labor fallacy" and "make work bias". When are we going to starting teaching more Economics and less Literature in high s…

His definition for "ephemeralization" is "doing more with less", which is strange since my academic background in economics teaches me the word for this is nothing more than "effic…

Sounds like someone isn't testing their code. "one would need to write tests to catch in ruby". You're damn right you need to write tests to catch problems in Ruby, as you should p…