Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Jewel City Seafood Market and Restaurant in Huntington, West Virginia on the Ohio River is first-rate. It reminded me of how Legal Seafood used to when I was a student in Cambridge in the 80’s, except cheaper and less shiny.

Here are three alternatives:

1. The decider will become a member of the society randomly. Currently, he
does not have any tastes of his own.

2. The decider will *not* become a member of the society randomly. He keeps
his own tastes.

3. The decider will become a member of the society randomly. He keeps his
own tastes.

This mural is from the library of the Ohio Supreme Court in
Columbus.

Sending email messages at a scheduled later time was supposed to be a feature built into Thunderbird 2.0 but wasn’t. Thereis a great plug-in, though, at http://www.unsignedbyte.com/?page_id=4:

Send Later Extension [SL8TR] sl8tr.xpi

Install it, and then compose a message, and then look in FILE, SEND LATER.

I will use this for my weblog.

To see what you’ve got scheduled, go to the server’s DRAFTS folder, not the local one. The time given is the time of writing, not the time of sending. To see the time of sending, go to VIEW and HEADERS and click so you can see ALL the headers for each message, not just the normal ones. The time-of-sending info is in the header.

I’ve long thought that it’s foolish to keep university grades secret with the hypersecurity of the Buckley Act. Why not post student names and grades, so the students can find them out easily? (especially before email made this less important) Why should a slacker be entitled to keep his D a secret? Why shouldn’t the top student get public recognition? Isn’t it good for students and professors to be able to find out that a particular professor gives all A’s?

England is more sensible, as this BBC report explains:

For 300 years students at Cambridge University have learned their exam results from public notice boards.

…

Until recently, the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICA) published all interim and final results in a Saturday edition of the Times newspaper.

This led to many anxious students cutting short their Friday evening fun to seek out an early edition of the paper at a late-opening corner shop. Saturday’s hangover was either tinged with relief or despair.

The institute still publishes its results in the Times, but now also offers text message and e-mail.

I was glad to see this sign at the Jefferson Memorial requesting people to
show respect.

Doug Wilson has wise things to say about the similarity between liberalism and evangelicalism:

The similarities between modern evangelicalism and liberalism are striking. Both emphasize an experience with Christ over the truth about Christ. Throughout history, some of course have made the opposite error, that of holding to bare propositions instead of holding rightly to the truth — but in our century few have gone in that direction. Our tendency is to exalt personal experience over dogma. Indeed, I at first hesitated to use the word dogma because in today’s climate, it is a dirty word. Taking all this together, I like to tell people that Christianity is not a relationship; it is a religion. Of course it is a religion with a covenant relationship at the heart of it. God promises to be our God, and we will be His people. But the liberal (and modern evangelical) emphasis is on what we are pleased to call a personal relationship (meaning private relationship) — and not the biblical notion of a public covenant relationship. When the relationship becomes “personal,” the truth that undergirds it becomes equally “personal.”

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This is a picture of a Best-Western Hotel in Cincinnati that has a
drive-through window for checking in and out. What a great idea!

Sorry about the gap in my posting. I was out of town, and couldn’t get my posting program to let me in. I’m back home now.

Typesetting has been moving to the developing world in the past ten years. That seems natural: it requires a lot of moderately skilled labor and little capital or propinquity, since files can be sent over the Internet. But maybe the trend will reverse. I’m seeing from personal experience that the Third World lacks one crucial input: dependability. (more…)

One of the many stupid things about Windows is that despite the overwhelming amount of useless stuff on the Control Panel, there is no way to see which programs start up automatically when Windows boots, or what different processes are for. Googling, I found a thread with a good post by Pete C. , who recommends the two programs Autoruns and Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel, both of which seem well-designed and easy to install.

Here’s how the SAT scores of Indiana’s undergraduates generally and business majors in particular compare to other universities with top undergraduate business programs. As you can see, Indiana is one of the few places where the business majors are the university’s elite— and our undergraduates are distinctly worse than our competitors’. That shows we have extremely high value-added.

The placement of Yale Economics PhD’s last year is something I wish people at Indiana’s business school appreciated. Notice how many are going to consulting firms. That is not a bad place for PhDs to end up, for themselves or for the world.

Someone just told me that Sharon Brehm has been elected president of the American Psychological Association. This press release tells about it. It has 150,000 members, so I guess it is a professional association more than a scholarly one. I was surprised that she was so prominent in her field, so I used Google Scholar to look at her and Stanley Wasserman, one of the highest-paid psychology profs at Indiana. Her influence seems to come from textbooks and from an importance book co-authored with her ex-husband (guessing?) on an idea he pioneered, plus Intimate Relationships. Then there is a very sharp dropoff. I checked Stanley Wasserman too, and see that he is a logit and networks expert, so maybe I should get to know him. (more…)

I wonder how hospitals and doctors calculate their accounts for bad debts and for charity? If they do it the way I suspect, bad accounting is raising health care costs by discouraging out-of-pocket payment in favor of insurance. Here’s the reason.

Suppose a hospital provides a bypass operation as charity. The accounting question is how this affects income and costs. The way I suspect it is done is that the hospital reports 0 income and reports the list price of the operation as a cost. Thus, if the list price is $100,000, the operation has reduced the hospital’s profit by $100,000.

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Amnesty International has long had the dubious policy of equating executing criminals with suppressing human rights. Now it’s added legal abortion as another human right— including partial birth abortion and actually condemns the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. Recall that criticizing that decision for being too anti-abortion means they actually support the Supreme Court’s policy of allowing viable babies to be aborted– that is, the baby may be killed even if it could survive the birth, so long as its umbilical cord hasn’t been cut yet.

Not only that, but AI has decided to keep this change of policy quiet. It’s announced the new policy only on a members-only website and said that there are to be no public announcements. AI also says it will deny it is pro-abortion– rather, it is only in favor of removing any penalties for abortion.

For details and links on this, see First Things.

I was at Harvard Law School for the American Law and Economics Association meeting last weekend. I unfortunately forgot my camera, but I can at least report on the clever new green-colored toilet handles there. You push them up for a small flush and down for a large
flush, thus economizing on water. MR tells me these are well-known in
Japan. It is completely superior to the foolish US regulation that
some years ago required new toilets to have water tanks of inadequate
size. That regulation is one of my examples of how liberalism and
ugliness are allies. Another is the requirement for handicapped
bathrooms. Liberals think society must be forced to make bathrooms a
bigger component of all buildings, and a dirtier one.

I thought it would be useful to post, for those who think election fraud does not occur and that U.S. Attorneys who are slack prosecuting it are not derelict in their duties, some evidence on that from Washington and New Mexico. Later is material in more depth, but here is what prompted me to look further– the New Mexico case.

That inquiry focused on the woman who had submitted the registration applications in the names of the teenagers and at least two dozen others. … under federal election law, Mr. Iglesisas said, prosecutors would have had to prove that the woman, who had been fired for other reasons, had falsified the applications with the intent of influencing the election. Mr. Iglesias said “it appeared she was just doing it for the money.”

So U.S. Attorney Iglesias’s opinion seems to be that one shouldn’t prosecute a hit man for murder, since he was “just doing it for the money” .

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I wondered what Robert Bennett, Mr. Wolfowitz’s lawyer, would have said if he were allowed to speak at the two-hour meeting of the World Bank’s board. Below, he tries to get the message across via the Washington Post: call off your smear campaign and its false charges, or we will start making some true charges of our own, and you’ll regret it (more politely, but I am sure just as definitely). He who lives in a glass bank shouldn’t throw stones.

Bennett indicated that he is prepared to launch a major counteroffensive if the “rush to judgment” against Wolfowitz is not slowed down. “Let’s open up all the deals for people at the bank, deals that members of the board have for their staff . . . if that’s where they want to go,” he said in an interview.

The board barred Bennett and Riza’s attorney Victoria Toensing from speaking during yesterday’s sessions. “One of the points I would make, if they let me talk, which they won’t,” Bennett said before the session, “is they’ve simply got to de-escalate this thing.”

Any theory of what is going on at the World Bank should try to explain the following facts :

1. Paul Wolfowitz decided to move from the Defense Dept. to the World Bank, a curious choice. (If he just wanted money, the private sector would have paid him more, with less hassle.)

2. People at the Bank were anxious to prevent him from having professional contact with his ladyfriend, Miss Riza, and insisted on a stretched interpretation of the no-romance rule (stretched because she would have been several ranks below him— he would not have been supervising her, or even her boss, directly).

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