Monday, November 18, 2013

Highly linkable

We start with a cool invention: the invisible bicycle helmet.

James Altucher bundles some great life advice in this collection of lessons learned while day trading.

Grantland has two right down the middle: one on maximum overdrive coming to baseball and another on the coach who never punts (a theory after my own heart). While never is probably not the optimal strategy, as the authors mention, the current state is sub optimal from a winning perspective.

As long as we're bucking conventional wisdom, here is something to put in your pipe: popular hysteria about crack and meth is just that--hysteria. Mark Perry shows the way pointing towards an article in the NYT by friend of free thinking John Tierney.

But I thought we should just say no; that drugs = total life destruction was a fact. Well, facts aren't always so factual. Here is a completely different example from Russ Roberts where he shows Simpson's Paradox. One would think that if every sub group of a larger group saw a decline in a measured factor that the larger group itself must exhibit a decline as well. Doh! Not necessarily and importantly not in this case of supposed income inequality.

They're about to start paying you to live in Switzerland--and paying well: ~$2,000 per month just for calling the land of cheese and chocolate home. I like the idea of a negative income tax. I like the idea of largely replacing the social safety net with fixed cash transfers. I think it is a third or perhaps even second-best solution. But $2,000 per month? We've gone from supplement to substitution really fast. Sure it might spur entrepreneurship, but do we really want someone leading the life of Riley starting a business, using capital? Oh, we don't.

One thing all those Swiss might start doing is going to college. But what is the value of that anyway? Here is one version of the debate from the Bleeding Heart Libertarians. Here is the same but Muppetized.

Finally, in most situations where a dispute from within a fraternal order (and one that is not like the typical world) is made public, there is more there than what at first meets the eye. Such is the case with the Miami Dolphin's locker room hubbub suggests Russ Roberts.

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