Presently watching Jon Huntsman on <i>The Charlie Rose Show</i>, talking about China, past and present.  Actually putting a “tone” on his pronunciation of Chinese names.  Plus, even more importantly, offering intelligent insight on the subject.  And he was among the first dominoes to fall in the Republican nominating process?  Facepalm.

I think left libertarians risk watering down their message by adopting a coercion-centered understanding of the meaning of freedom. The types of (non-LITAS) libertarian and progressive rhetoric that have played a large role in influencing the development of my worldview tend to make heavy use of the term “social controls.” In the progressive case, social…

Most likely it’s been there for years, but I just noticed that at the bottom of Yahoo! search results it says “Powered by Bing™.”

“I’d hate to think what a university run for profit would be like. Even Sovietisation would be preferable to that.”—Steve “[David] Graeber deserves to be on the Sunday television shows in the US, but of course, that is not going to happen. The middle managers know to stack their shows with Republicans and corporate Democrats…

Bryan Caplan never fails to demonstrate why the philosophy of libertarians and other conservatives is ‘kick ’em when they’re down.’ If, on the other hand, you’re poor and powerless, standing up for yourself is normally disastrous. If you have little to offer, you have to rely on the goodwill of others. And one of the…

Business is as business does, and if you’re not the paying customer, you’re the product being sold. If you’re on wordpress.com, you will now be able to view your statistics only at wordpress.com. It doesn’t appear to affect functionality beyond the need for many of us to reset some bookmarks. I guess it’s just the…

“What would happen, though, if networks actually supplanted markets—if people stopped leveraging the unique contextual information they possess to game markets and instead shared it compulsively, without a view to undermining competitors but out of a quest for social recognition? Do we have to have markets providing an incentive to exploit information to make that…

Below is one side of a handbill found in my mailbox. It advertises the course offerings of Dominican International Institute, which bills itself as “the most affordable & innovative in Higher Education…” Half (15 of 30) courses listed on their “mini-catalog” (but there are a total of more than 600 courses) are under the heading…

The trouble with professional networking is professionalism. Networking for activist purposes is an unalloyed good. To the extent that there’s currently rivalry between the amateur and professional realms (software, journalism, encyclopaediae, others?), I’m definitely rooting for the amateurs. Admittedly, I was once one of those “I want to be a professional when I grow up”…