Dumb Tweets

I just had to delete Brad De Long from the list of people I was following on twitter because he keeps retweeting some guy named Noah Smith. Noah Smith accused Tom Murphy of underestimating the size of North Dakota by a factor of 400. Murphy said that the area of North Dakota was about the same as a square with sides of 425 km. North Dakota is pretty much a rectangle with height of 340km and width of 545 km. Hard to see how he could be off by a factor of 400.

Earlier he said a paper by Michael Bordo and Joseph Haubrich was "bullshit." He appeared to be suggesting that the paper said there were financial crises in 1972 and 1982. The table on page 23 of the paper clearly states that there were not financial crises associated with those business cycles.

I don't know who Noah Smith is or why Brad De Long keeps retweeting him, but I'm not going to waste any further time or energy reading them.

Free stuff

One of my favorite books on American Economic History, Robert Higgs' The Transforamtion of the American Economy, 1865-1914, is available here. Thanks to the Mises Institute and Bob Higgs.

Informal Rules and Food Trucks

Planet Money has a great podcast about the food truck business in New York City. It discusses regualtions that make every parkinjg place illegal, how vendors identify good spots, the economics of location and how it is influenced by product differentiation. But my favorite part was the discussion of informal rules that govern the use of parking spots: If someone has been in a spot for 10 years that is his spot; if there is already a taco truck on the block, don't park your taco truck there.

RIP Levon Helm

http://youtu.be/-VShpcqd3zE

Reply All

Don't use it. This morning I received an email regarding attendance at a conference that I am not planning on attending. It turns out that it was sent to a list of people who should not have received it. I then received over 40 emails from people who were hitting reply all. First, a number of people thought it was necessary to inform everyone that they did not know why they were receiving the email. Then other people started replying to all that they should stop replying to all. These were professors at places like the LSE, Univ. of Chicago, and USC. Can't we all just hit delete?

Saudi Women and the Olympics

Saudi Arabia plans to send zero women to the Olympics this summer. What will (should) the IOC do? 

Good news for me

From the Wall Street Journal