“ I am the ranking member of the Monetary Policy subcommittee in the U.S. Congress, yet I can get more information about the internal workings of the C.I.A. than I can about our central bank. This secrecy is fundamentally wrong
There are many like it But this one is mine.
Nov 20
“ It’s worth spelling this out in full, because I doubt I’ll have the opportunity to talk about numbers this big very often on this blog: Zimbabwe’s inflation right now is somewhere north of 89,700,000,000,000,000,000,000%. At this rate, it might eventually reach 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000%, or one octillion.
Nov 19
“ We have too long taken the view that what we would term to be minor crimes are not important,” [Obama’s presumptive Attorney General] Holder said, referring to current attitudes toward marijuana use
— Obama’s Attorney General on Drugs - David Weigel
That’s the type of Change we need: harsher penalties for marijuana. Good start, Obama!
“ That first replicator took over the world - in what sense? Earth’s crust, Earth’s magma, far outweighs its mass of Life. But Robin and I both suspect, I think, that the fate of the universe, and all those distant stars that outweigh us, will end up shaped by Life. So that the universe ends up hanging quite heavily on the existence of that first replicator, and not on the counterfactual states of any particular other molecules nearby… In that sense, a small handful of atoms once seized the reins of Destiny.
“ Drawing inferences about individual behavior from aggregate data is a classic example of what statisticians call an “ecological fallacy.
—
“The Bigot Belt” - Eric Oliver
Strange, in the past I’ve called it the “economist’s fallacy” since they seem to make it so frequently, Perhaps I should give economists a break, since they just have more opportunities to do so.