Lynne Kiesling Here’s a fascinating visualization of data center power use at Boing Boing: Note that over 10% of data center power use is for Facebook, with all of those updates and photos … as noted in the article: The company’s data centers range from from 10,000 square feet to more than 35,000 square feet, …
Michael Giberson An NPR Morning Edition story, “Indie Truckers: Keep Big Brother Out Of My Cab,” reports on a change of attitude at the American Trucking Association toward proposals for mandatory electronic logging of long-haul truck movements. This month, an industry group called the American Trucking Associations, which represents thousands of trucking companies, dropped its …
Lynne Kiesling Following up on Mike’s post yesterday about pandering politicians and their 2011 edition of the recurring petroleum price witch hunt … Others have weighed in on the idiocy of this “Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group”. Let’s start with KP’s go-to energy finance economist, Craig Pirrong: … it’s an opportunistic effort to …
Lynne Kiesling On Wednesday morning Planet Money’s Jacob Goldstein was on NPR’s Morning Edition discussing the role of credit rating agencies in the economy, in the wake of the signal earlier this week from Standard & Poor’s regarding their assessment of the quality of U.S. Treasury debt. The statement itself had only a fleeting negative …
Why Do Credit Rating Agencies Still Have Any Credibility? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve been enjoying the new videos available at LearnLiberty, all of which give clear, insightful discussions of fundamental concepts of classical liberalism (including economics). My highlight of the day is Tom Bell’s “Can order be unplanned?” [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPICY2SXgn0] The answer is yes. Here Tom explores the rich intellectual history of the concept of spontaneous …
Lynne Kiesling This article in the Wall Street Journal last week got less attention than I expected (perhaps because of budget, Libya, etc. news). It’s a very good analysis of bureaucrat v. bureaucrat competition between the DOJ and the FTC on which agency will take the lead in prosecuting antitrust cases: Both agencies are charged …
Michael Giberson Last Friday, April 15, 2011, Mark Edge, of the Free Talk Live radio show, interviewed me on price gouging. Generally speaking, we discuss the recent article on price gouging appearing in Regulation magazine, and we agree that even if price hikes after emergencies are troubling, there just isn’t a better way to manage …
Lynne Kiesling Last May I wrote about Next, a new restaurant in Chicago from chef Grant Achatz and his business partner Nick Kokonas. In that post I focused on the two innovations in the proposal: selling tickets concert style rather than having a reservation system, and using dynamic pricing for reservations/tickets at different times on …
Next Restaurant: Pricing and Ticketing Innovation Redux Read More »
Michael Giberson A letter to the editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: The Interstate 95 express lane authority is price gouging! The express lane toll increases dramatically relative to traffic congestion, roadway emergencies and increased demand by motorists. A merchant who increases his prices during a weather emergency and times of increased demand can in …
A Once-stable Price Now Responding to Demand Changes Brings Price Gouging Charge Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As we contemplate an impending federal government shutdown and the restriction of government activities to “essential” services, shouldn’t we be asking deeper questions like why we spend so much taxpayer money on “nonessential” services? Jacob Sullum asks that question in Reason and provides some arguments for reducing spending (and thereby the future deficit) …
Government Shutdown: Shouldn’t We Be Asking Some Deeper Questions? Read More »
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