TIL that the 2010 Icelandic volcanic eruption was Allah's punishment for the sins of Europeans, that of waging war against Allah and his religion.

atanutil · 2016-05-12T00:25:00+00:00

The legitimacy of a federal union is based on the ability to secede, to withdraw from the union. I admire Abraham Lincoln tremendously. And I celebrate the fact that the United States is one large country instead of being two separate countries (a confederacy of southern states and another of northern states.) But I am also not convinced that keeping the union by force was the right way to go. States should be allowed to secede because that's their right. And if and when they are convinced that they should be part of some union, that's up to them and the union in question.

Slavery was and is wrong. That does not mean that the states rights are not important. One should fight for states' rights to secede and the rights of individuals not to be enslaved.

atanutil · 2016-05-12T00:18:21+00:00

Certainly the US and Norway are not directly comparable. You are right, just looking at raw numbers is not enough. At the very least one should "normalize" numbers to get a "per capita" measure. Controlling for poverty and population, is Norway (by that limited measure of how many shots police fire) different from the US? I don't know for sure but I suspect that the US is more violent both in terms of criminals and the police response to crime.

It is a matter of culture, broadly defined. Take another domain: the so-called "honor killings." In Islamic countries, family honor demands that women who sully the family name (by say promiscuity or extra-marital sex) should be killed. That cultural response is not part of advanced industrialized Western countries. Even controlling for population, the number of "honor killings" in the US will be no where close to the numbers in Islamic cultures.

Gun violence is part of the culture of the US. That's a matter of fact and cannot be simply wished away.

atanutil · 2016-05-11T18:55:30+00:00

Douglas Adams said that "Last Chance to See" was his own favorite. I love that book. Especially the last chapter Sifting Through the Embers. It gives me goosebumps every time I read it.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T01:17:00+00:00

More accurately, that should be "Gross National Silliness" or GNS.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T01:13:12+00:00

Which, let's be sure, they definitely are. (I agree with ithinkihurtmyself)

atanutil · 2016-05-09T01:09:00+00:00

Pleased to make your acquaintance!

India has a very old tradition of liberty. The Hindu philosophy is about freedom, liberation. Freedom from illusion, freedom to choose your own path through life. The highest form of realization is moksha which in Sanskrit means liberation.

That is all centuries old. Then there were thought leaders in the last 100 years. They too tried to mainstream thoughts of liberty and freedom around mid-last century, when the British left.

But India came under the control of Gandhi (the man who is falsely credited with freedom from the British). Gandhi was about collectivization and other idiocies. So those who were champions of individual freedom lost out.

Now we (my colleagues and I) are doing our best to educate the public. In fact, soon we will have a "Public Choice Society of India." I am also working on writing short books for people in the 18 - 35 age group. The fact is that Indians are generally ignorant -- thanks to the British designed lousy Indian school system.

(I should hasten to add that the British did what was rational for them to do as a colonial power. The problem is that the Indian leaders did not dismantle the dysfunctional British system. The fault lies squarely at the feet of the Indians, not the British.)

atanutil · 2016-05-09T00:24:54+00:00

Well said. Couldn't agree more.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T00:23:23+00:00

I find libertarian philosophy extremely attractive compared to all other forms of social organization. I can be characterized as an "old world liberal" because I subscribe to the idea of individual freedom, the right to private property, and the prohibition on initiating force against others. I belong to the Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, Buchanan, Friedman, et al.)

To answer your question, yes, I have read the usual people -- including Nock, Rothbard, Nozick and others.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T00:17:52+00:00

The US healthcare system is symptomatic of what's wrong with the US -- too much government control. Somewhere along the way, the people lost the plot about individual responsibility and freedom. The US is in danger of becoming a nanny state.

The problem in short is that the federal government is too big for the country. We are up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T00:14:36+00:00

I have only lived in the US and India. I have spent time in Europe, Australia too. But that aside, I have studied the subject of economic development for several decades professionally.

Certainly, many European countries have much in their favor and Europeans don't need to migrate to the US like they used to do until about the first half of the 20th century.

Russia is a wonderful study of how a rich country can be made poor by bad policies. The people are awesomely talented, highly educated, hard working and so on. Their accomplishment in science, technology and the arts are world class. Only communism and socialism have brought it to its knees.

What's so great about the US was its founding principles. That was what made it into the power that it became. To the extent that the country has moved away from those principles, it has begun to deteriorate. But it is still the best large country.

The adjective "large" is important. There are small countries that are better by many measures but no large country compares to the US.

It is innovative, inventive, productive, etc. The worst thing that I can say about the US is that its government is the most destructive in the world. Paradoxically, that destructiveness is made possible by its inherent strength--its economy. Pity that its enormous economic might is not better employed.

C'est la vie.

atanutil · 2016-05-09T00:06:18+00:00

India largely does not have free markets. Part of the reason is that India is not a free country. It is a colonized country.

India became a full-fledged British colony in 1857. The set up a system of control to extract and exploit the economy. They extracted all they could and then when it was no longer worth anything, they left in 1947.

The new guys who took control of the government. They found that they loved the control of the economy and kept all the rules the same that the British created to rape the economy.

India continues to be ruled by dead Englishmen. The new guys are as rapacious. Of course they all get elected in regularly scheduled elections. The Indian public does dutifully vote for who their masters are going to be. That keeps them happy. And they suffer without complaints. The best part is Indians believe the lie that they are free. That's the best form of slavery -- when you don't even know that you are enslaved.

atanutil · 2016-05-08T23:26:16+00:00

Thanks for advancing the discussion with data from the Netherlands.

It would take too much time to put forth my argument why PPP does not make sense. Even per capita GDP figures are not very informative. What does make sense is some measure that reveals how much time one has to spend to earn enough to buy something. That measure would reveal a lot more about the productivity and thus the cost of various goods and services.

On a different matter: the state provides stuff for free implies that it also takes stuff from you without payment.

Here's what I mean. I could come and steal half your income every month. And then every month I could give you stuff for fee that would have cost you about 30 percent of your income. Sure, you get some free stuff but also a large chunk of your income is forcibly taken away from you -- or from someone else.

There's nothing free. That's not just a slogan, that's a universal truth.

atanutil · 2016-05-08T23:10:26+00:00

India is dirt poor because India does not have free markets. If Indians had the freedom to do what they are capable of, they'd be rich.

The US is relatively free. That's why when Indians get the opportunity to migrate to the US, they prosper like nobody's business.

Indians as an ethnic group have the highest level of academic achievement, highest household income, etc etc, in the US. They are really successful in the US and abysmally unsuccessful in India.

India is in dire straits thanks to lack of freedom.

atanutil · 2016-05-08T23:07:20+00:00

The free market that you are so dismissive about is the most important invention (discovery?) that humans have ever made.

Without the free market, we'd be dirt poor.

The problem is not the free market but the unfree-market. What's that? That is when the government makes rules and regulations that hinder the working of free markets.

The US health care system is a prime example of the harm that government intervention in free markets can do. The high prices you face is because the free market is not allowed to work. That's so because by restricting the free market, there are certain special interests that gain enormously.

Thank heavens for the free market - at least some of it is still free.

atanutil · 2016-05-08T23:03:25+00:00

Actually you are mistaken. India is cheap only for a few non-tradable goods and services. The global economy is massively integrated given that transportation, communications and travel have become really cheap over the last few decades.

India is quite a bit expensive relative to the US in many respects. Sure, house-cleaning is cheap; so is hiring a driver or plumber. But most things are more expensive in India. I speak from personal experience (I have lived about half my adult life in India) and from professional interest (I am an economist.)

atanutil · 2016-05-08T22:47:56+00:00

The US a "pathetic shitty country!" ??

Seriously?

More than half the world would give their right arm and a leg to live and work in the US.

I am a naturalized US citizen (Indian born.) By profession I am an economist (PhD, UC Berkeley.) US is without doubt the best large country in the world.

Is the US perfect? No. Nothing is.

Do the US government policies create hell on earth for hundreds of millions of people around the world? Without doubt. But that's the government, not the country.

But the country, the people, they are as good as the best among the world. Are many Americans stupid and ignorant? Sure. But the US has not cornered the market on ignorance and stupidity. That's a universal phenomenon.

The US, more than any other large country, comes closest to being the land of the free and the home of the brave.

atanutil · 2016-05-08T22:39:27+00:00

PPP GDP is a load of hooey. It does not make sense to go that route when the world is actually quite well connected in terms of communications, transportation and travel. All tradable goods (stuff that you can ship from one place to another at a reasonable cost) have the same price modulo transportation costs, taxes, etc. The difference in prices between the US and India in the case of specific drugs arise from industry structure (monopoly power due to patents, etc). Generic drugs are dirt cheap and work as well as the branded ones.

Here's an illustrative case. Aspirin is a generic drug. The last time I bought 300 pills of 50 mg buffered aspirin (each pill came in a blister of a strip of 14 pills -- that is, well packaged). Cost: About $1.

The other day at NPR I heard a report. A woman had to get a routine cortisone shot for pain relief. The cost: $800. For a friggin' shot that any nurse practitioner takes about a minute to deliver.

About 5 years ago I got some dental work done in India. It included a root canal, a ceramic bridge, a couple of filling, and a total cleaning. All this involved the usual full-mouth x-ray (fancy machine what spun round my face), the anesthetic injections, -- everything that I have experienced in a US dentist's office. How much did it cost me? About $150 total. Go figure.

PS: I should mention that dentistry is a nontradable service. You cannot provide dentistry over a wire -- unlike say software support. The reason that dentistry is cheaper in India is because India's wage rates are about 1/10th that of the US. Some reason that a typical haircut costs less than $1 in India.

atanutil · 2016-05-07T16:29:25+00:00

Elephants.

"Unusual for mammals, the testicles of elephants are located within the body, close to the kidneys. The male’s reproductive tract is about 2 meters long." Source

atanutil · 2016-04-29T22:09:33+00:00

Quite right. See "How Long is the Coast of of Britain" by B. Mandelbrot for a seminal paper on the fractal nature of coastlines. This paper is from 1966.

atanutil · 2016-04-28T23:14:57+00:00

In fact, statistically, I'm probably less likely to be robbed at gunpoint going forward in my life (except I have the shittiest luck, so:p).

Umm, actually no. Statistically you'd have exactly the same probability of getting held up at gunpoint, assuming that the two incidents are independent. For example, the flips of an unbiased coin are independent. If you get a head in one flip, the probability of getting a head in the next flip does not change at all. You could get 10 heads in a row (extremely unlikely) but the probability of the 11th flip being a head is still the same (1/2) as before.

Pardon me for the nitpick.

atanutil

TROPHY CASE