24
Sep
2015
Potpourri
==> If you were bothered by my pontifications on the Ahmed clock case, don’t read Gene Callahan.
==> Richard Ebeling doesn’t view low interest rates as tonic for an ailing economy.
==> ZeroHedge on Mark Spitznagel–we ain’t seen nothin yet. (Sung to the tune of Sinatra’s, “The Worst Is Yet to Come.”)
==> Ben Powell (full disclosure: he’s head of the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech–where I now work–so you will see me treating him very gingerly no doubt) on Trump and immigration.
==> I translate Scott Sumner’s EconLog statement into a Sumnerian framework. Profundity declines.
Perhaps he was trolling school officials, as this author contends, and it may be a legitimate thing to do but there are better ways and venues. However, this reminds me of when the Navy Seals were probing the security of the ship I was on. After repeated attempts to scale the sides and use other stealthy methods to gain entry they finally settled on disguising one of their operatives as the pizza man. Surprisingly he made his way to the bridge and inside the box was a note that said boom. Beware the pizza man. Mission accomplished.
I agree that if this is what was going on, it may not have been the best approach to making this point.
Mr. Callahan,
In your blog you said: “if that is what Ahmed did, then it looks quite possible that he (perhaps with parental prompting) was deliberately trolling school officials.”
I agree that is does look like trolling on Ahmed’s part. But, I just can’t get my head around the “with parental prompting.” Ahmed’s dad may well be a radical activist crusading against islamophobia but, when I try to picture a father saying “Hey, son, why don’t you make something that looks like a bomb and bring it to school and let’s see what happens!” it seems extremely improbable IMHO. Much easier to picture a kid thinking he might score points with dad for doing something that draws attention to dad’s political hot buttons. It’s also easy for me to picture a dad rabidly defending his son’s idiotic actions in public but then in private telling the boy “you idiot, don’t you realize the risks you took?”
Interesting point. Imagine how a father might feel, thinking on the one hand that he’s a pillar of the Muslim community, while on the other hand his son gets caught play-acting at being a terrorist. He’d be embarrassed. He might even be in denial about it and seek to externalize the blame he can’t bear to impose on himself.
I never bought the ‘his dad made him do it’ part. The theory just seems too ridiculous with no evidence behind it.
So did you treat Ben violently before?
Ask me when I stopped beating him.
When did you stop beating and strangling and harpooning him?
If Ben Powell doesn’t like Trump’s views on immigration then he should just move to Somalia.
Guys, do you feel its time for a rate cut? You know, to delay the next recession? 🙂
Also, I think your translation actually increased Sumner’s profundity.
It’s true; demand for credit is astonishingly low.
The real issue with immigration is that 70%+ of new immigrants vote for one party. As far as I know, only White gentile Americans vote mostly Republican. Keeping out immigrants is essential to preserving a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. The real questions about immigration are political and social, not economic. I, of course, freely agree that immigration generally has no economic impact on non-immigrants, especially in the long run.
*no direct economic impact
They should take those zero interest rates and cut them by half.
Won’t stop the next recession, but would fool a lot of people.
I think they should give a toaster to everyone who takes out a loan
You don’t think those zero rates are available to normal people do you?
True. I just got 3% on a car loan. Funny thing back in 2007 I got 5%. I guess I should have called the FED and got the loan from them!
And I have the perfect business slogan for them: FED loans, cause zero is as low as we can go!
I suppose they could bring back regulation Q…
“I, of course, freely agree that immigration generally has no [direct] economic impact on non-immigrants, especially in the long run.”
Cheaper labor enables more competition among producers, leading to more abundant, cheaper goods.
On a related note, regarding the Minimum Wage:
All data that would be relevant to the Minimum Wage debate would necessarily have to entail the suppression of employers’ desire to pay their employees a lower wage.
This is why, no matter how much employment increases under the Minimum Wage, it will always be the case that employers would hire cheapre labor if they could.
No amount of data could disprove this; The relevant data *presumes* that those that could be hired at a lower wage are being prevented from being employed by the government.
To say otherwise would be to say that employers are willing to suffer losses operating a business for which consumers are only willing to pay so much. That is, employers get paid the same amount for what they produce no matter the amount of their costs.
And since the whole point of a business is to make a profit (businesses are not charities) in terms of the employers’ foregone opportunities, any loss that the employer might be willing to eat in the short term is just that – it’s unsustainable, because the point is to make a profit as assessed by him.
Also, it’s not the case that workers make businesses profitable, such that they should be considered the backbone of a business.
Actually, it’s the consumer that pays the employer for his productivity, and the worker is only useful insomuch as he reduces the costs of production.
Just didn’t catch the reference there where Ahmed claimed to be the inventor of the first clock.
You know Steve Jobs took a Xerox mouse, put it in a box with slightly nicer curves, and he did claim to have invented something and there’s a bunch of people out there treat him as some sort of bloody legend. Talking about trolling and where you get with a bit of publicity.
Tel, c’mon. Ahmed referred to the thing as his “invention,” didn’t he? Nobody critical of his story is saying that he claimed to have invented the clock.
The irony here is I actually would have done nothing but criticize the cops in this story, except for the flood of non sequiturs coming from Ahmed’s fan base.
The guy is getting hauled up on terrorism related charges and the biggest gottcha anyone can think of it that he offhandedly referred his “invention” (no actually a specific claim to anything) but apparently didn’t jump a sufficiently high bar to be allowed to use that word. You can now be branded a hoax bomber if you might perhaps be passing yourself off as slightly more inventive than some other people think you actually are.
Did you know that putting the same device in a different box is protected under US Patent Law?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
I’d say that the bar you have to jump to use the word “invention” is astoundingly low (ridiculously low), but as it turns out Ahmed’s usage was within the official definition. The kid could have made a genuine claim to an invention with full Patent Law protection, if he had been bothered to fill in the paperwork and pay the necessary fees.
None of which is of the slightest relevance to either terrorism or security of course.
Tel wrote:
The guy is getting hauled up on terrorism related charges and the biggest gottcha anyone can think of it that he offhandedly referred his “invention” (no actually a specific claim to anything) but apparently didn’t jump a sufficiently high bar to be allowed to use that word. You can now be branded a hoax bomber if you might perhaps be passing yourself off as slightly more inventive than some other people think you actually are.
Tell us another one, Tel! I love fiction.