Today is the anniversary of the first walk on the moon. In honor of that, here is a great segment from the fantastic book A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts, summarizing Kennedy in a 1962 speech on why we were going: In the past sixteen months, as Kennedy’s vision had […]
Archives for July 2009
Raising Taxes by a Certain Percentage Does Not Mean Tax Revenues Will Rise by the Same Percentage
A good analogy of this fact from the Wall Street Journal: Mr. Rangel and House Democrats are also banking on the idea that raising tax rates by 20% will raise 20% more tax revenue, but that’s like telling Wal-Mart it can raise prices by 20% and get 20% more profit. When taxes on the rich […]
More Apollo 11 Pictures
Here is an excellent series of Apollo 11 pictures that were sent my way. They cover before the launch, to the launch, to the return. Really well done.
Forty Years Ago Today We Took Off For the Moon
It is still incredible that we went to the moon — and returned our people safely home. This is an achievement to be celebrated both in itself and for what it represents — that we are a society that is willing to do big, bold things. Here is a short recap and some photos (via […]
The Housing Boom and Bust
Thomas Sowell’s new book, The Housing Boom and Bust, would be worth a read by those wanting to learn more about the housing bust and its role in the current financial crisis. From the Amazon product description: This is a plain-English explanation of how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of […]
Cost Versus Efficiency in Health Care
From economist Greg Mankiw’s blog: Advocates of government-run health insurance like to point to Medicare’s low administrative costs (which, as I noted yesterday, is a controversial claim). But even if that factual claim were true, the argument would hardly be dispositive as to the greater efficiency of a publicly run system. As I put it […]
On The Declaration of Independence
With the fourth of July coming up, it’s a good time to review the Declaration of Independence. The Two Best Paragraphs in the Declaration The first two paragraphs in the document give you an entire philosophy of government in themselves: When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve […]
Phantom Traffic Jams Explained
From Fast Company: “A team of MIT mathematicians has developed a model that describes how and under what conditions such jams form, which could help road designers minimize the odds of their formation.”
The Safety of Airplanes
Two major airline crashes in the last month is tragic. Fast Company has an interesting article on “why, in the 21st Century, do aircraft keep plummeting out of the sky?” I gave some of my answer last month in my posts on why airplane crashes happen and the role of communication styles in airplane crashes, […]
Back from China
I’ve made it back from China and spent the last week or so catching up on some things. It was an excellent trip. I really like China and its people, and we learned a ton. One of my colleagues on the trip is an incredible photographer. If interested, he has posted some of his pictures […]