Having lived in various parts of urban Asia now for more than a year, from a geek perspective, perhaps the most annoying thing that my friends still talk about is broadband penetration.
Or rather, a couple of them gripe about the relatively low penetration rates of the US versus Japan or Korea.
But let’s put this in perspective. Ignoring the various harebrained schemes the federal government has implemented over the past two decades (I discuss them here and here), an important factor that just about everyone overlooks is geography.
Japan’s main island - Honshu - which 80% of the population lives on, is the size of Minnesota. The continuous urban conglomeration that stretches from Tokyo in the east to Hiroshima in the west is one of the most dense concentrations of urban development in the world. It is the definition of megaopolis.
South Korea is the size of Indiana. Nearly 70% of the population lives in 5 cities. Roughly half of the entire country lives within the greater Seoul area. For a quick illustration of how large this continuous urban development is, right now I live in Suwon a suburban city 30 km south of Seoul. The bus ride into downtown Seoul involves passing town after town filled with nothing but high-rise apartments. It’s like that in all directions.
For some perspective: the population of Minnesota is a little more than 5 million. The population of Indiana is just over 4 million.
In contrast: the population of Honshu is almost 100 million. The population of South Korea is nearly 50 million.
So, my challenge to those that cry about national penetration rates: consult a density almanac.
Country to country is apples to oranges
While both Seoul and the Tokyo areas have 60% or higher broadband penetration rates. So to do heavily urbanized parts of America.
For instance, according to a recent study (pdf) the Bay Area is now at 62%. This is not too shabby considering how spread out it is (depending which areas you count it is roughly twice the size of the Seoul metro).
Which brings us to the assignment I usually give my friends is this: measure apples to apples.
To do this, do not look at penetration in the Midwest or Great Plains which neither Asian country has. Rather, geeks should look at comparably large urban conglomerations.
So for this exercise, the North East corridor is the comparable geographical region. The Boston to Washington DC megaopolis is home to roughly 75 million people. The distance from one end to the other is 400 miles.
This distance is a little longer than that of the road connecting Busan-Daejeon-Daegu-Seoul (the four largest cities in Korea) which is around 400 km. It is also a little longer than that of Osaka to Tokyo (the Kyoto-Kobe-Osaka area is home to 14 million people and the 2nd largest metro after 32 million residents of greater Tokyo) which is about 430 km.
According to the aforementioned study the penetration of a few US cities: Boston is 61%, Washington DC is 58%, Baltimore and New York are 55%, and Philadelphia is at 52%.
In fact, according to the OECD, the US is the largest broadband market with roughly 70 million broadband subscribers which is more than any other country. This also represents around 30% of all broadband connections of the group (which both Japan and South Korea are part of).
Could it be better? Absolutely yes. Should the US government direct any more activity? Absolutely not.
Both the National Infrastructure Initiative and Universal Service Fund have been little more than criminal money laundering endeavors (see here). And both the telecom lobbyists and congressmen that approved them should be charged with fraud. In fact, entrusting politicians to craft yet another system should be curtailed for perpetuity.
Note: here is a recent broadband test I took. For comparison, the chief geek at HowToGeek.com (a friend of mine) lives in Washington D.C. and always has more throughput.
For the Bob Barr activists that keep emailing me: stop por favor. Out of principle I don’t vote or donate to any campaign, not even Ron Paul — a person I generally agree with. Plus, I’ve never really liked Barr let alone his running mate.
And speaking of Ron Paul, I saw this picture over at his CfL site:
Ignoring whether or not you like Paul or libertarianism in general, I find the quote spot on.
While the collapse of the I-35 Minneapolis bridge comes to mind, the fact of the matter is the interstate highway system (which the federal government refuses to deregulate or privatize) has been a state of disrepair for years.
For instance, over the past decade, studies published by the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) have estimated that it will cost $1.3-1.6 trillion to upgrade highways to a “good” condition.
Remember, these are the same highways in which 40,000 people die each year.
Yet as Walter Block recently noted in a podcast, if 40,000 people died on private highways, every human rights or consumer rights activist would be screaming at Congress to do something. But because the roads are already owned and maintained by the government, it is just seen as a fact of life. No one is ever fired or held accountable. And there is no incentive to upgrade or fix the roads because there is no outside competition.
In contrast, private companies have an incentive not to kill their consumers because customers will take their business elsewhere. Furthermore, entrepreneurs would be held accountable for negligence as they are in every other market-based industry.
But let’s ignore road socialism and look back at that quote.
According to the July report from Congressional Research Service the total costs for just the Iraq war is roughly $650 billion. If the troops were magically withdrawn today, the long-term costs for funding healthcare and welfare liabilities for the soldiers would reach more than $1 trillion or even $5 trillion.
If you include Afghanistan then add another $170 billion for a bill higher than Vietnam.
The human toll is at least 86,000 dead Iraqis from coalition-related violence and up to 1.2 million due to a combination of sectarian strife and civil war. And roughly 10,000 have died in Afghanistan.
So, the question remains: is either political party going to solve the quagmire they created? I am willing to bet all of the money I have earned this past year in Asia that neither party will solve these issues.
And that by next election cycle, government highways will still celebrate 40,000 fatalities annually and there will be a sizable presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan (think of Japan, Korea, Germany or Italy for continued US occupation).
The newest one discusses the peaceful rise of China.
And you may also be interested in the “shared” posts in Google Reader. So find me on that.
Also, a shout out to Eric Garris, who fixed a number of little errors in the China piece. It’s the damndest thing, apparently I saved two different copies (a normal one, and a bad ass one) and sent LRC the normal one. It was missing a number of little corrections I’ve made that for whatever reason, never made it into the final draft.
For instance, if you read the Chinese piece, my two versions have two completely different footnotes for number 9. Here is a good nugget that never made the published copy because of my tomfoolery:
According to a recent story by the Associated Press: 130,000 PLA troops “repaired more than 14,600 kilometers, or 9,100 miles, of roads, installed 220,000 shelters and relocated more than 1.4 million people” over the course of two months.
Anyways, the moral of the story is that while it is good to store and backup copies in various places, be sure to title them differently to properly distinguish them.
Note: agh, even one more recent note didn’t make it: China & Russia recently signed a border agreement. How’s that for peacefully handling disputes?
In response to my post on the future of agriculture, several people emailed me a short documentary that looks at rural Japan entitled The Slow Life.
Here is the video hosted at Google:
My major complaint with the video is that it paints the farm life as some kind of magical industry that is on the verge of collapse. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
There are two big reasons why farming as a profession resides in the single digits in the developed world: 1) automation and 2) large, healthy harvests
For instance, in Japan, nearly the entire industry is automated. For instance, the RMAX is a fully-automated UAV developed by Yamaha (Discovery Channel had an episode on one of its variants used in the US for topographical mapping). It fills several roles including the delivery of pesticides and fertilizers. And there are thousands of them flying throughout the Japanese countryside.
In addition not only has the harvesting aspect of farming also been mechanized but the actual crop yields are essentially the highest in the world. Thus less land is needed to produce more crops. And GMOs will further help productive capacity over the next several years.
Back to the video, while some individuals and families may indeed flee from urban centers to live in quieter, nicer smelling regions, their marginal contribution to farming output is negligible at best.
Arguably their futile exercise provides an excellent illustration for why farms have been depopulated over the last several decades: the manual labor is literally backbreaking and subjugates participants to battle all of the environmental hazards that billions living in subsistence want to flee from. The video captures a small portion of the industry and only shows one-side of it.
Oddly enough, I am somewhat pleased by their actions in part because there are fewer hippies left in the cities. Now if only all of the Naderites would jump on that bandwagon.
[Note: the Japanese government subsidizes the industry and outlaws foreign competition -- so land use would arguably different than it is currently (what is so bad about importing a lot of food?)]
Last week I discussed the global trends of Firefox 3.0 downloads. Some people questioned my methodology (12) that I was grasping at straws regarding Iraq. But I believe the following graph, created after 7 days of downloads (20+ million so far), helps put things into perspective.
The first five countries are listed because they have aggregated the most FF downloads thus far. No surprises.
The next grouping is Asia, specifically the eastern part (minus Japan). The two notable surprises are that Taiwan and Singapore.
Taiwan has half the population of South Korea but has downloaded FF 60% more than their Korean counterparts. I attribute this to the fact that FF 3 has not be made available in Korean Hangul yet whereas it has been made available in Chinese. And while I have lived in both Korea and Taiwan (I currently live in Seoul), I still can’t generalize about their surfing habits (they all use Naver though… hate!).
Singapore is another interesting case because its residents have downloaded FF nearly as much as its significantly larger neighbors. Again, I attribute this to the language barrier (Chinese and English are the predominantly used dialects in Singapore). When FF is translated into more languages it will probably be increasingly adopted in those regions.
North Korea is an absolute shit hole, don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Several of my coworkers and friends have had the chance to take tours up there. Things to keep in mind. You are only allowed to take a guided tour in special Potemkin villages (fake tourist villages). You cannot stray away. The infrastructure has completely collapsed since they no longer receive the subsidies and free handouts from their old soviet pals. There is one internet cafe in the entire country, it is in Pyongyang and only politically connected individuals can use it. The sole ISP connects via a filtered satellite connection. That’s it. Hence the big fat zero internet users and FF downloads. And yea, I would personally like to visit it, but the money you spend on the tourist package directly funds Kim’s regime (you know he still operates gulag’s right?).
Anyways, one thing I would have liked to see in the China downloads is a separation of Hong Kong, Macao and the SERs. I would wager that the vast majority of traffic comes from these regions.
The next grouping is the Middle East. The internet user numbers come from IWS.
As I pointed out a week ago, the thing that sticks out the most is that number from Iraq. All of its neighbors have a substantially larger net presence and FF downloads. In fact, the refugee camp known as Palestine has a larger FF user base. Again, I attribute this solely to the fact that war has been terrible to the Iraqi infrastructure and economy as a whole. More on that here and here.
The next group is basically the “Axis of Evil.” Despite the political rhetoric of Bush and Bolton, these places really are run by tin pot dictators or are in a constant state of war. Thus, it is not surprising that their FF numbers are very low relative to the next group: the Commonwealth.
Yes, I think these two groups are a good illustration of dichotomy. Similar sized populations, totally different levels of economic freedom. While I’m not a huge fan of trying to wedge empirical data into philosophical matters, I think this shows the correlation between freer markets versus socialized/nationalized markets.
Actually, lets give the residents of Afghanistan a free pass. They endured a 10 year invasion from the Soviets. During this time the CIA funded the counter-insurgency (the Mujahideen in Operation Cyclone) which gave rise to the Taliban. After the Soviets left, the Taliban ran around blowing up the place. Now the US military, after pursuing bin Laden, have been occupying the war zone for the past 7 or so years. Yea, so not too many questions as to why their FF numbers are really low unless of course you really think carpet bombing sprouts router connections.
Coda: and while I’ll try to do one more update in a few weeks, I doubt the trends will change. Even if some kind of magical worldwide military deoccupation took place, it would take years to build an infrastructure in the various battle-hardened regions, let alone change the socialist policies that stymie innovation and foreign investment. Oh, and if you haven’t gotten it yet, download FF today:
A couple years ago I discussed the world of artificial land creation/reclamation. One of the motivating reasons behind creating your own land is to quote Borat, you get to be the king of the castle.
I mentioned that one of the endeavors being organized involved a (equatorial-based) seasteading group.
It was being spearheaded by Patri Freidman, an engineer at Google (and grandson of Milton Friedman). At the time I didn’t think it would go past the drawing board and shot Patri an email to see what the status was. He cordially replied that it was taking baby steps towards a more public expansion a couple years down the road… and that he would keep me abreast of new developments.
And surprisingly, guess what I just found in my inbox?
Today the Seasteading Institute officially launched. And it has received $500,000 in seed money from Peter Thiel (the co-founder of Paypal and VC behind Facebook).
I for one welcome this concept and wish them the best of luck.
With desalination and solar power, it is conceivable that a group of hardworking, creative individuals could tie together something as simple as barges along the equator. The equator, which is not necessarily the first or only location SI is looking at, is ideal for several reasons.
First, it is located in the doldrums and as a result, very few storms pass over the area. In fact, only one hurricane/typhoon in recorded history (Vamei) has ever meandered near the equator. And based on satellite measurements, waves typically range no greater than 3-5 meters in height. Thus, if the location is placed in international waters (200 miles) the structures should be able to outlast most of what mother nature throws at it without having to worry about climate being diverted by land masses.
Second, the equator receives more daylight year round than any other spot on Earth. Therefore, inhabitants can use solar panels to effectively power electrical equipment including desalination machines and hydroponics stations. While the quantity may be impractical to rely on as a cash export, it could provide most of the caloric intake for the residents.
Third, if placed around -120 E, the community would be in the same time zone as the West coast, such as LA or Seattle. As a result, they are conveniently available to provide tax-free outsourcing services such as web or software development. This is an idea that was tossed around by a couple of firms, one of which (SeaCode) wanted to anchor a cruise ship off the coast of California and fill it with programmers who would be paid tax-free for their labor.
As a libertarian this appeals to me on many levels as well, however a small word of caution. Even as the logistics appear to be conquerable, one factor that will always remain a variable are blue-water navies such as those operated by the US or the UK.
Operating gambling websites like Antingua does or hosting adult material like Sealand did has incurred the wrath of politicians that unfortunately enough, control carrier-based task forces.
But then again, this assumes a cynical sort of realpolitik, something that never occurs in reality, right?
As the saying goes, if there is a will, there is a way. And I think Patri has both. After all, if large oil platforms are designed to be nearly self-sufficient why couldn’t other usable designs be concocted and implemented?
Stepping off the plane, the oddest site I saw in Taipei and now in Kaohsiung was people wearing face masks. I saw a few in Seoul last year, but they were the exception and usually only used by meter maids.
Some of the masks are designed with bright colors, scary faces, or even cartoonishy (e.g., Hello Kitty). Some people don’t even bother taking them off as they stroll along the boulevard — talking through the cloth to shopkeepers whom manage to comprehend their muffled voices.
So why do they wear them?
Here the pollution is seemingly godawful compared to what I was bombarded with in Dallas. The reasons are numerous.
You can partially place the blame on externalities of factories across the straits in China or even on the local ones (there is a nice smelling one right next to the HSR terminal in Zuoying).
And because cars are expensive relative to disposable income, nearly everyone drives a scooter. And because they’re trying to save money, they don’t exactly buy the most expensive filtering system.
My coworkers mention that living in Bangkok is far worse, as is most of SE Asia and India. And those that grew up in LA didn’t notice a big transitional difference either (never been, so I can’t say).
However, as incomes increase and infrastructure is built (e.g., more subway lines, more buses, bigger/stronger roads) it is likely that scooter owners will move to alternate, cleaner forms of transportation. In addition, private property owners may begin to litigate this issue under the terms of trespass.
And no, I still don’t wear a face mask because I’m too cool. And yea, that is a picture of me parking the ol’ beast at a cafe. The trendy Ferrari jacket was later stolen by an anonymous coward : (
Remember that terribly awesome ’80s flick with John Cusack — Better Off Dead? Do you think the paper boy(s) in the film ended up as shareholders of Bear Stearns?
Peter Lynch aptly suggested that the easiest and perhaps most profitable way to jump into the stock market was to “invest in what you know.”
I follow the tech industry, it’s what I know.
However, unfortunately during the credit crunch and continued dollar devaluation, major portions of the industry will be hard hit with lower demand. And as TechCrunch recently noted, start-ups and venture capital firms are being hit hard with liquidity issues: 20% of Valley Startups Can’t Get to their Cash.
And because the Fed continues to lower rates, the dollar will continue to lose value relative to other currencies. Thus, anyone holding dollar-denominated assets will end up as net losers each and every day. In fact, over the past 6 weeks, the dollar has reached a new low against the Euro, the Pound and even Gold.
With that said, there are still profitable diversification strategies that can put you in the black over the next few years.
The following is a list of financial experts I recommend if for no other reason than the fact that they understand how monetary and fiscal policies can negatively effect the value of your assets:
Jim Rogers - he’s spent years traveling the world (see “Adventure Capitalist“), doesn’t trust the Fed devaluing the dollar and is thus bullish on commodities, oil and precious metals. See his recent interview on CNBC and the other books he has written.
Doug Casey - like Rogers he has lived and worked in dozens of countries, looking for profitable ventures to take part in. For further reading visit his archives at EscapeArtist and LewRockwell.com.
Peter Schiff - see my interview with him here. He accurately predicted the housing bubble, credit crunch, decline of the dollar, rise of gold/oil and a slew of other financial metrics. Namely because he fully understands how the Fed distorts financial markets through open-market operations (e.g., change in the interest rates). In addition, Schiff’s own investment firm also looks for global, non-dollarized ventures to invest in. You can read some of his opeds at Safe Haven.
DealBreaker - is an extremely popular financial blog that was founded and run by John Carney who happens to be a fan of free-market everything and is also critical of Fed manipulation and bank bailouts. His brother, Tim, recently wrote an interesting book on these topic as well. Also, you’ll like DB if for no other reason than it helps keep you up to speed with the lingo used in that industry.
Paul Kedrosky - in the past he has worked as a venture capitalist and financial analyst. He operates a popular blog and always has some interesting insights (I’ve either quoted him or used his info in a number of my own articles: 123). While he may not be a libertarian or free-market purist like most of the others listed above, he is contrarian in his own way (and travels too).
If you’re interested in seeing what dollar doomsayers are investing in, here is a recent thread discussing individual portfolios.
And lastly, here is a very interesting debate between Peter Schiff and Art Laffer (namesake of the Laffer Curve). It should be noted that the debate is 18 months old. Laffer certainly looks like an idiot now:
Five months ago I mentioned that David Ditzel, cofounder of Transmeta and chip engineer extraordinaire, was looking to invest/develop in a new chip design.
This past week it looks like he’s settled down with a little company called Intel.
If it weren’t for a looming recession, I might be a bit more bullish on the cool gadgets he’ll be able to bring to market.
As a side note, you might be interested in the debate between rasterization and ray tracing that pits Intel against discrete GPU makers like Nvidia. For instance, see the latest shot by the chief scientist at Nvidia over at PC Perspective.
Adroit polymath Michael Shermer had a chance to discuss his new book at Google recently. While you might not agree with everything he says, he raises some interesting points regarding evolutionary biology, technology and why humans began to trade thousands of years ago.
Over the past few years I have discussed the half-truths that proponents of publicly-financed stadiums promote in their press releases. [See: 123]
I currently live in a city of 1.5 million that is set to host the World Games next year. The various sporting events are sanctioned by the official Olympic committee as it is used as a proving ground for new Olympic events in the future.
While one of the stipulations of hosting the World Games involves not constructing new stadiums (the facilities already have to exist), somehow that message was mistranslated to the politicos here.
A couple blocks away from my school I can see the construction crews walk around on the scaffolding of a new taxpayer-financed stadium. While the ballyhooed Solar Stadium is relatively “green,” I can think of a million other useful things that could be done with that money, including: give it back to the taxpayer.
Yesterday, in an op-ed with The Philadelphia Inquirer professor Rick Eckstein makes the case for why building stadiums never generates the revenue promised by its proponents:
There’s only one problem with this scenario. It’s not true. Never has been. They do come, but cities are not saved. Over the past two decades, academic research has generated literally hundreds of articles and books empirically challenging the alleged economic wonders of new stadiums, even when they’re part of larger development schemes. I have been studying and writing about publicly financed stadiums for more than 10 years and cannot name a single stadium project that has delivered on its original grandiose economic promises, although they do bring benefits to team owners, sports leagues and sometimes players.
There are many reasons why this same song and dance plays out. Arguably the number one reason is that only privately financed endeavors have the incentive to design and develop an enterprise that is profitable.
On the other hand, government construction projects do not have to be effecient or even profitable because they are financed by faceless taxpayers who are typically disenfranchised and unable to reverse the political tide.
For the record, while I enjoy watching and participating in athletic events, I don’t think it is fair to use taxpayer funds for - anything in general - let alone entertainment purposes.
If the political class is going to dole out the dishonest revenues on public projects, how about filling in the potholes on Fumin, Yucheng, Mingcheng or Boai? Or investing in dust-blocking barriers that can be placed around construction zones? Or actually completing the metro? What point is there of hosting tens of thousands of tourists and athletes when the surrounding infrastructure falls apart under the current load?
For more on sport subsidies, see the following Cato publications: 123 (all in pdf).
Ever wonder what every Intel CPU looked like between the years of 1971 and 2007?
Here is the Intel 4004 processor from 1971:
It operated at 108 KHz, has 2,300 transistors and was fabbed at 10 microns (or 10,000 nm)
And this is latest Penryn model from this fall:
It operates at 3+ GHz, has 820,000,000 transistors and was fabbed at 45 nm (or .045 microns)
Thus, in less than 4 decades, chip frequency has increased 30,000x and transistor count has increased 350,000x. All of this was crammed into an area 222x smaller than the original 1971 base part.
As I stated in What is wrong with Moore’s Law, this is a good illustration of engineering innovation in the form of extreme miniaturization. These numbers alone do not prove that the processor is any better at calculating formulas or conducting any productive utility.
What fanboys should do is produce the following numbers for every Intel or AMD processor: Watts per MIPS and FLOPS. And take that and adjust the retail sale price (USD) for baseline inflation (1971).
Despite the steady decline in the value of a dollar, I suspect that the technical numbers have increased exponentially, just as the die-size has decreased geometrically.
Like many children in industrialized countries, most of them have an MP3 player of some kind and all of them have a relatively new computer at home.
Yet, unsurprisingly, none of them could explain how Giant magnetoresistance (GMR) has changed their listening or viewing habits.
GMR, of course, is the quantum effect that was discovered twenty years ago and whose productive applications involve playing with fuzzy dice: within the world of electrons and magnetism.
It is essentially the parallel version of Moore’s Law applied to the world of hard disk space and is named after professor Mark Kryder of Carnegie Mellon University.
Of bits and bytes
Geordie Rose recently linked to a story about several old disk drives and other computer gizmos made over the past 50 years.
However, one that did not make the cut was the IBM 305 RAMAC.
It weighed one ton and had a capacity of 5 MB. That product is just a tad bit different than the 4 pound, 750 GB drive you can pick up at the local computer store for under five benjamins.
Speaking of rapid changes, last week Popular Mechanicspointed out, that capacity of drive space has increased 50 million times over the past five decades.
And as mentioned above, Mark Kryder was also interviewed last week by PM and he noted that capacity increases a whopping 40% each year.
So where does this all lead?
As Charles Stross predicted this summer, probably to the digitally powered omnipresent world in which every person uses a lifelog, that chronicles every second of your life in full high definition audio and visual. All in a device smaller than an iPod.
I guess that will make you think twice about looking at the low-cut v-neck or midriff of your female coworker. Or maybe you will do it that much more…
[Note: back in 1997, my brother brought home a new 2.7 GB hard drive. He asked me how on earth he would fill it up. Suffice to say that the typical installation of Vista requires ~15 GB]
I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.
Case in point, economist Guido Hülsmann recently had his 1000 page masterpiece published this month. It covers the life and times of Ludwig von Mises, an economist whose wiki entry hardly does him justice.
Incidentally enough, I met Hülsmann in the summer of 2004, the dog days of August to be exact. I was attending an economics seminar in the quite countryside of Auburn, Alabama.
The first real encounter actually involved me giving him a reverse bearhug, preventing him from running away. While I struggled to subdue the energetic German, several other economists-in-training grabbed one of those orange water coolers that dot the sidelines of sporting events and doused him with a cold shower (Daniel D’Amico of GMU was another one of the culprits).
That’s certainly one way to become acquainted.
Later that evening I bumped into him at a local bar whereupon he hid any visible signs of animosity and shared stories over the finest imported beers (Heineken I think). A friend of mine that works at the parent Institute hosting the seminar mentioned that Hülsmann had just capped off the finishing touches on the first real biography of Mises. So, quite naturally I asked Hülsmann what it was like tackling such a monumental task.
He looked at me and said he was relieved it was over, due to the arduous work involved.
You see, while he his research activities had been funded by various donors, he was a one-man army tackling a intercontinental subject matter that most contemporaries would have several other researchers assisting with. In fact, if you check out the acknowledgment section of the book, you will see the numerous experts that had to be contacted throughout the globe, to effectively perform this exhaustive and original exposition. And for the most part, he did it alone.
Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or Hans Hoppe and Hoppe was very busy with other projects.
Which brings me to a friend of mine, B.K. Marcus, who is acknowledged for his services in Hülsmann’s opus.
About a year later, around the same time I was writing my first piece on the FCC, I was introduced to a polymath, a genuine autodidact through attorney Stephan Kinsella. It turns out that this fellow traveler was in the middle of proof reading and editing Hülsmann’s tome — a full-time job in and of itself.
Anyways, over the following weeks and months we exchanged messages over IM, some of which pertained to the laborious task at hand. He mentioned that there were various pieces of information that unfortunately stood the test of time. For instance, in describing the collegiate culture Mises grew up in, Hülsmann notes:
Student life was generally organized through fraternities, which tended to segregate based on place of origin. This provided newcomers to the capital city with a network of their countrymen for mutual support; it also introduced them to established former members who could later be helpful in finding suitable employment. But the fraternities often degenerated into associations dedicated to excessive collective alcohol consumption, and tended to glorify violence and a militaristic lifestyle, with variants of a half-baked nationalistic ideology. (p. 65)
And based on my own first-hand experience with modern fraternities, these observations do not seem to have faded over the past century.
A mobius strip
In many ways, the debut of the book has completed a circle started three years ago. At that time I was juggling two different graduate fields, neither of which truly captivated me. One I finished, the other I put on hold.
However, I also befriended a number of the students and kept in touch with several of them, including four others who were the same age as me. Two of them are now finishing PhDs in economics (one at U of West Virginia, the other at GMU), one is getting a PhD in political science at U of Colorado at Boulder and the other is finishing up a PhD in history at UC Riverside. And all of them are passionate about their concentrations (three of them are even partial towards the Austrian School).
So, should someone call Vegas to find out the odds on one of them writing a tome, or has the interweb ended the age of really thick books?
[Note: Picture #1 takes place just after Hülsmann got soaked. #2, Hülsmann is sitting to my left as is Andrew Neumann who is at the U of West Virginia. The guy in front of me is David Veksler, webmaster of Mises.org and fellow Aggie. #3 was just an excuse to make me look popular]
Prior to World War I the intelligentsia of Europe and most of the academic world spoke German. Yet, while hundreds of the greatest minds may have shared the same dialect, in some cases this seems to be the only commonality they had with one another — as their philosophical beliefs and theorems diverged in the most polar of ways. This of course is no different than with the lingua franca of today, English.
For instance, economist Ludwig von Mises, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Adolf Hitler were all born and raised in Austria at around the same time (Wittgenstein and Hitler were a mere six days apart).
That said, I found the following picture of interest:
I couldn’t tell you much more about Wittgenstein aside from the material gleaned from his wiki entry (although one of my “logic” professors was a proponent of ol’ Witts theories); to me he seemed like just another logical positivist and socialist — philosophies diametrically opposed to the a priorism and liberalism espoused in Mises’ Privatseminar.
It would be curious to know how the two men (Witt and Hitler) would interact with one another, say in 1940, 50 or so years after that picture was taken. Wittgenstein’s family was Jewish and eventually migrated to parts of the West (both America and England), and Wittgenstein himself was opposed to the Nazi regime. [Note: Mises, who was also Jewish and an ardent critic of Nazism, was forced to flee to Switzerland and America, and had much of his corpus confiscated by the Nazis and later the KGB]
And as an added bonus, here are two strange bedfellows:
The backstory on the image above can be found in the National Security Archive at George Washington University. It eerily foreshadows to the Cheney’s 1994 interview with C-SPAN regarding the aftermath of Iraq after Operation Desert Storm.
See also: Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action (PDF)
I recently bumped into a couple of stories that are about a year old now, detailing one of those grandiose 5-Year Plans that are reminiscent to Soviet-era master planning.
This time the guilty party is the Ministry of Education in South Korea.
They plan on spending $51 billion of taxpayers ducats to invest in English education programs — a kind of ‘chicken in every pot‘ scheme or ‘robot in every home‘ kind of deal.
So, instead of allowing the residents to keep their money and finance education as they see fit, the technocrats (”Great Deciders”) have decided to throw money at an artificially created quagmire.
Also, in continuing the story from the other day, according to my co-workers it is illegal for someone like myself to teach pro bono, even at an orphanage. Because it is not part of the E-2 visa.
Draconian labor laws? Free-market in labor? Maybe this is why foreign businesses have been shunning the peninsula…
Having lived in various parts of urban Asia now for more than a year, from a geek perspective, perhaps the most annoying thing that my friends still talk about is broadband penetration.
A couple years ago I 
Second, the equator receives more daylight year round than any other spot on Earth. Therefore, inhabitants can use solar panels to effectively power electrical equipment including desalination machines and 
Stepping off the plane, the oddest site I saw in Taipei and now in Kaohsiung was people wearing face masks. I saw a few in Seoul last year, but they were the exception and usually only used by 
My coworkers mention that living in Bangkok is far worse, as is most of SE Asia and India. And those that grew up in LA didn’t notice a big transitional difference either (never been, so I can’t say).
Peter Lynch aptly suggested that the easiest and perhaps most profitable way to jump into the stock market was to “invest in what you know.”
Over the past few years I have discussed the half-truths that proponents of publicly-financed stadiums promote in their press releases. [See: 
Or so said a professor I had 8 years ago.
Of bits and bytes
So where does this all lead?
I wonder if there is any kind of common advice guidance counselors give to kids that want to write tomes — the really thick books that everyone references but no one reads.
Did I mention that there were only two people really qualified for the job? (You basically had to be a professional economist fluent in the tongues of Mises, not the least of which is German). So it was either him or 
A mobius strip
I recently bumped into a 