Embarrassing Big Brother
I read today an interesting article on Lew Rockwell’s site about one Robert Kahre. He had arranged to pay his employees in gold and silver coin. He arranged for them to all work as private contractors, and paid them absurdly…
College Isn’t For Everyone
I’ve been spending a lot of cog cycles processing ways to make money doing education. It’s apparently quite difficult. With statements like There is No Profit in Education, No Competitive Advantage to Better Learning. and posts about Why Education Startups…
Minds from Agents
Recently, I came across this SEED article, Divide Midns, Specious Souls; which has this deliciously anti-religious, pro-science quote: Within the wide range of works arranged along the axis of soulism, from Life After Death: The Evidence, by Dinesh D’Souza, to…
Intellectual Land Grab
The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored…
Axiom of Abortion
Recently the ever popular doughnut chain, Krispy Kreme, got in trouble for supporting our new political administration. Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American’s sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free…
Mawwiage…
It’s been 4 days since Californians voted to deny rights to a certain minority of its population. Let’s look at a few of the arguments against gay marriage: It protects our children from being taught in public schools that “same-sex…
Can an Instutition be immoral?
Last night I was embroiled in a long argument with my flatmate about the Government. I used the typical Libertarian claim that the government was an immoral institution because it uses coercive force to collect taxes. Of course, he countered…
The Misinformation of Crowds
I’ve seen much recently piggy-backing on the Wisdom of Crowds. Much of the Web 2.0 seems highly focused on exploiting this phenomenon: Datamining the crowd: Yahoo and Google both have an Answers service that purports to harness the wisdom explicitly….
Audience Question at Conferences
I’ve been watching the videos of last year’s Singularity Summit and noticed that, along with all other conferences I’ve watched, questions from the audience are completely inaudible to the sound recorder. There is a very simple solution that I haven’t…
Intelligence Expelled
Today I read about one of the most ironic events of which I’ve ever heard. You can’t make this kind of thing up. The atheistic PZ Meyers (a biologist and associate professor University of Minnesota, Morris), was kicked out of…