do it for your country
doing an econ assignment on the asian financial crisis: didn’t know that thailand–after running down their foreign reserves (which precipitated the crisis)–even encouraged people to hand over their gold jewelry to be melted down (economist). almost as good as melting down woks for steel in the great leap forward.
class auction
Wharton takes it one step further, allowing students to sell their courses (for points) to other students. It’s all done through a Web site. Buyers and sellers are anonymous, so buddies can’t make deals. Wharton also uses a second-price auction in which the highest bidder wins, but he or she pays the amount of the second-highest bid. Economists like the … Read More
israeli woks
The Israeli government has limited the number of visas for foreign restaurant workers to 500, and will reduce this number to zero next year. seems to be targeted mainly at asian workers, particularly thai, chinese, japanese and indian restaurants… and the Israeli Ethnic Restaurant Association is trying to appeal this decision to the supreme court. “We feel an Israeli can … Read More
super tuesday
everyone talks about california, but what about american samoa? (I like how they refer to the rest of the country as the Mainland.)
there you go
a storybook on development.
bartleby & co
a charming book by enrique vila-matas, consisting entirely of footnotes about writers of the No: that is, all the writers who have decided it was better – for whatever reason – not to write. fn 9) If Plato thought that life was a forgetting of the idea, Clément Cadou spent his whole life forgetting that he once had the idea … Read More
ayiti: the cost of life
unicef’s online game this time: your goal is to help the Guinard family get an education and improve their lives.
god bless america(n tv)
because I’ve had constant access to multiple tvs lately, I’ve been watching quite a bit of cnn. amazing. actually, I’m not sure I’m supposed to be laughing so much when watching the news. no, I never really thought about “what jesus would REALLY do” when it comes to buying. the commercials about christian persecution in communist countries are great: “they … Read More
an empire wilderness
by robert d. kaplan two passages strike me, each within a page from one another. have been thinking lately of Belley’s lecture about corporate totalitarianism: when efficiency/rationality overrides all other values, individual liberties start to fray… “It’s nonsense to think that Americans are individualists,” Dennis Judd, an urban affairs professor at the University of Missouri’s St. Louis campus, told me. … Read More
UNCCC blog
Wednesday, 12 December, 3:00 p.m. — Yesterday it was penguins. Today it is snails. The complaint was that governments were moving at a snail’s pace in addressing climate change. And an update: the jackets and ties worn this morning have not lasted. By afternoon, most participants all looked like NGOs again. and here are some korean polar bears (CBC story … Read More