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, …
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 …
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 »
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 »
Lynne Kiesling As if Mike and I haven’t given you enough nudges to go read Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, here’s another one: Don Boudreaux has a lovely column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that introduces the work via the question of whether economic incentives are sufficient to understand and explain human behavior and economic growth. What …
Lynne Kiesling Last week, Chicago craft brewery Goose Island agreed to be acquired by Anheuser-Busch, which purchased a 58% equity stake in the brewery. Goose Island founder John Hall argues that the deal enables Goose Island to make investments to increase capacity, an investment necessary for continued profitability. He recognizes that some may be skeptical …
Goose Island: What if Acquiring Capital Cannibalizes Your Market? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In the Chicago Tribune, economist Allen Sanderson riffs on the same faulty “dependence” logic that I mentioned briefly last week: I speak, of course, of our complete dependence on coffee that we are importing mainly from Brazil and Colombia. It’s time to wean ourselves from this harmful addiction. My “Coffee Independence” proposal is …
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