Friday Link Salad

[chris_gerrib]

Because they're cluttering up my web browser, that's why.

1) The California Vikings?. Actually, evidence suggesting that some of the American Indians came by boat.

2) One of the things that is becoming apparent to me is that advanced civilizations tend to be much more efficient in their use of resources, including energy. Exhibit # 5343? using CRT tubes as light bulbs. (I think I got this from jeff_duntemann.) On a related note, geothermal energy without breaking rocks. (I think this is a jaylake find.)

3) The most detailed account yet of the Bin Laden raid. Per the article, OBL was running into a bedroom when he got shot.

4) When dealing with pirates, sometimes you just gotta shoot up their boat.

5) I frequently disagree with Megan McArdle, and she's made some really bone-headed mathematical errors in her posts. However, when she says there's no magic privatization fairy dust that will make any government function work better if privatized, I have to agree with her.

6) Via Making Light, I found this fascinating, although long, article from 1987 pointing out that the Mississippi River is desperately trying to change course and the US Government is desperately trying to stop it.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think there's a simple test for this: if X goes out of business because it can't make money - will something replace it? Or is it gone? And if it goes, does that have a significant effect?

The other question to ask is if the private sector want it?

Taking Postal Services, as an example, I often here how DHL could run the US post office better... well sure they could, they're owned by the German Post Office after all. But what you don't hear as much is how little DHL (and FedEx, TNT and all the others) want to actually run Postal Services. They want to cherry pick the postal services they want to run and screw the rest of it.

Likewise the examples in McArdle's post are all similar - if a private prison goes bust you can't exactly shut up shop.

Or, if your bank failing will take the whole of western civilization down with it, you can't really let them go.

We mucked around with a lot of stuff in the 1980s that hadn't ever been tried in an advanced industrial society and we're really only just starting to grasp the impact of those decisions. Likewise, economics and history isn't much of a help because what worked for the US economy in 1911 or 29 or 54 doesn't really give us a lot of a guide to what works when you've a lot more people, a completely different demographic split and a lot less tolerance for un-necessary pain and suffering.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Yah, I knew that about the Mississippi, but I'd forgotten. It's the same problem as the Sumerians &c. had in Mesopotamia: No “Nile Valley” holding everything safely in place. Instead the Euphrates & Co could and did wander all over that plain like rills on a windowpane. So does the Missus Hip. It's only mattered in the last hundred years or so.