Ryan Cooper

Heh:

I was struggling with this post yesterday—must have rewritten it five or six times. The basic point is that, as far as there is any consensus in economics, there is no danger of serious of hyperinflation. Yet comparisons are routinely made to Zimbabwe to argue against further stimulus, while millions languish in poverty and misery. Like racism, this is a major moral error which should bring shame on those who hold it. Can you think of a better way to put it?

[I'm blogging at Political Animal this weekend, and I wonder what you guys think of this cross-post .] For most of human history racially-based prejudice has been very common. It’s simple, easily understood, and based on deep psychological roots. Generalizing things based on how they look makes a lot of sense most of the time, but taken too far it can lead to monstrous results. Inflation paranoia is like that, on a smaller scale. It’s a simple, intuitive, easily-understood sort of belief which can lead to catastrophic mass suffering. Witness this prediction from Peter Schiff, pointed out by Paul Krugman: SCHIFF: You know, look, I know inflation is going to get worse in 2010. Whether it’s going to run out of control or it’s going to take until 2011 or 2012, but I know we’re going to have a major currency crisis coming soon. It’s going to dwarf the financial crisis and it’s going to send consumer prices absolutely ballistic, as well as interest rates and unemployment. Though...

Really digging this Madeon chap. (As it turns out , he actually just turned eighteen.) Good show:  

The truck and the boat. The first thing you need to know about my kind of river trip is that it's not "whitewater rafting." That boat you see on the trailer is my folks' dory, and it's rigid, made out of wood (though you can also make them out of aluminum, foam, or plastic). Those kinds of boats are more fun, more difficult to row, and especially if they're wood, extremely vulnerable to rocks. If a kayak is like a whitewater motorcycle, and a raft is your sensible Toyota Corolla, a dory would be a BMW. A bit pricey and silly, but well-built and a joy to operate. We also took a raft, which I rowed. Rafts (that is, inflatable boats) are easier to row, a bit cheaper, can bounce over rocks where a dory would get smashed, and can roll up into a smallish size. However, they're also sluggish, often leak, and with new techniques, are approaching parity with the cost of a dory. On the trip one of our friends had built himself a wooden dory from scratch in 2.5...

Just can't get enough of this kid. And I'll stop calling him a kid when he turns 18.

Day I Can't Remember and Wouldn't Want to Well, it was a great trip with my folks down the Salmon. I'll give you a more detailed update in a bit, but in brief it was about a week, we took four dories (here's a picture of one of those), four rafts, and I rowed my own boat (a raft). We started from the Corn Creek put-in and did our take-out slightly above Riggins. It's good to be back, though it was marvelous being disconnected from everything. The Great Electronic Hivemind has a way of denting one's focus that I'm going to try to avoid more in the future. As in this idea of the Slow Web --I like that a lot. Finally, thanks very much to my guest bloggers! You guys are the best. That's the first time I've done that and it worked out rather well, I'd say. More to come soon.