Goin’ To Santa Monica
I’m off later this morning to a Liberty Fund conference on the works of Armen Alchian. Posting as possible. But heck, I’ll be in Santa Monica, right near the beach. Nothing personal, but …
Netflix
Here’s an interesting story about Netflix, complete with an inane quote from “choice paralyzes us” Barry Schwartz. I love Netflix. What Schwartz and the other choice nannies in the world fail to appreciate is that having this choice, while increasing my options, makes my life so much more relaxed and my entertainment options so much …
Hitchens And Edmund Burke
While I’m blathering on about The Atlantic, I recommend Christopher Hitchens’s review of a new edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. I have not always liked Hitchens’s writing style, which sometimes has veered into too much pompous asperity for my taste. But I love his long-format book reviews like this one. I …
Wired Interview With Steven Levitt
The April issue of Wired had a nice little interview with economist phenom Steven Levitt.
Electricity Reform In Mexico?
So I was in Mexico last week, conveniently enough while Mike was posting our blackout report commentaries, speaking at a conference sponsored by the Mexican Congress on electricity industry reform. Mexico’s industry is state-owned, and is a substantial drag on the coffers of the Treaasury, which has amassed a large debt with the electric company’s …
Cafe Hayek, And “Perfection”
Not surprisingly, I am really enjoying Russ Roberts’ and Don Boudreaux’s Cafe Hayek. Take, for example, Don Boudreaux’s recent post on Kerry’s reinvocation of the misery index, a 70s concept that should have, like Seals & Crofts and Hall & Oates, stayed in the 70s: One of my most powerful memories of the 1970s is …
The House Curse Is Lifted
The curse is gone. No, not the goat or black cat curse on the Cubs (for all we know that’s still there!) — the KP house-buying curse. In the past two years we’ve tried 3 times to buy a house: 1. 1924 Chicago bungalow, beautifully renovated, 2 blocks from current location. Got a contract. Inspection: …
Carnival Of The Capitalists 19 April
Now, your Carnival of the Capitalists … (note: next week’s host is Venturpreneur). Send your posts to capitalists-at-elhide-dot-com. Given that we’ve just survived April 15, and given that it felt to me like I’d been beaten about the head and shoulders, I thought we’d have a flurry of tax day posts. But only one person, …
Getting Reliability
The most obvious lesson learned from the blackout report is that the electric power industry and its regulatory organizations are better at diagnosing system failure ex post than at divining ways to foster growth of a self-correcting, self-reinforcing, and dynamically reliable system. The blackout report does an excellent job of diagnosing the recent failure, and …
Connecting The Dots In Transmission
If we want a robust and reliable grid, then we have to think about how to manage and operate transmission. This question has been a core component of restructuring debates over the past four years, and disagreement over the organization of transmission operations continues to be extreme. But transmission is crucial to the development of …