This LA Times story about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner (so called because it’s still a dream – let’s get the last drop from that joke before it goes into service) and the role of outsourcing is fascinating. It is partly built on a paper by a senior Boeing engineer which makes among other things, this…
Read More 787: the plane Milton Friedman built, and about as well as you’d expectSultan al-Qassemi kicks in a data point to the ArseDex. Apparently Libyan agents are distributing flyers in Guinea and Nigeria calling for mercenaries to fight for $2,000 a day. Yesterday, loyalist thugs cost $500 a day in Libya. Even with the huge supply of potential thugs in sub-Saharan Africa’s demobilised militias being available, the ArseDex…
Read More the CIA decided they wanted Roland dead, so that son of a bitch Van Owen cut off Roland’s headThanks to reader Koranteng for this data point. You may recall this post about the market for thugs in Egyptian politics. Specifically, when the government needed arseholes to attack the protestors, it had to pay four times per capita GDP to get them. In Libya this week, it is said that the government is using…
Read More Market forces live: ArseDexDaniel Davies‘s post about arseholes, and more formally about the importance of the reactionary mob as an institution, has been a well deserved hit. Here’s something interesting, though. Fairly serious rumours reckoned that the arseholes were being paid as much as $68 a day. In theory, if an arsehole was on duty 340 days a…
Read More Cash rules everything around me (but perhaps less than you might think)Things to do this week: withdraw all my savings from ING Direct and take them elsewhere. Seriously, read the whole thing.
Read More I want nothing to do with your company ever againA thought, while writing the last post. Thinking about international politics invariably involves a lot of rational-choice stuff, or rational-choice at one remove. Although this may not make sense in a platonic game-theory way, how do so-and-so’s interests, preferences, and meta-knowledge of their own situation have to differ from yours to make it work? They’ve…
Read More survival of the survivorsI really need this book. It’s already on order. Relatedly, Chris Dillow points out that managerialism doesn’t work any better in the negative sense – cuts – than it does in the positive sense – spending, or at least, that as I’ve said before, if you believe the state is by definition incompetent to allocate…
Read More the big computerWell, ha ha. But I do think we should note that David Cameron’s appointment as Prime Minister was greeted by the markets with a dramatic spike in the price of gold, not usually seen as a vote of confidence. Here’s the data, at Felix Salmon’s; as he points out, trying to map events in consensus…
Read More Flushing the cacheI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in DarfurI briefly touched on South Sudan’s new instant brewery yesterday. A associated, rather than strictly related, development is this startlingly weird Reuters AlertNet story; OK, so there’s been a riot in a refugee camp in Darfur. Right. People have been killed. Not good. But a riot by people who lost money in an investment fraud?…
Read More Pyramid schemes in Darfur