Posted in Entrepreneurs, Religion on Sep 2nd, 2012
Please feel free to weigh in. In your religion, does your holy book appear in the pews/aisles/shelves at your version of Mass? As you know I am Catholic and I cannot remember any time in my entire life seeing a Bible or even just a New Testament in a church. As an additional thought this […]
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Posted in Entrepreneurs on Aug 4th, 2012
I read recently that Amazon.com is working hard to get same day delivery to customers. I am excitedly awaiting that, as I am same day delivery of groceries. I once worked for 4+ years in a small retail establishment, and we quietly told ourselves that we were "better" than Amazon or even our Big Box […]
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I may just turn this blog into a news feed. It all speaks for itself. I wonder if its because companies have to beg for government permission, and then pay a hefty bribe, to get permission to hire more employees: The city council in Menlo Park, Calif., is set to approve a deal that will let […]
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Grading’s got me tied up, and Coyote’s on a roll. Here is his retelling of the now (in)famous life of Julia. Do read the whole thing. And someone please try to defend the “opposing position” if you can even characterize it as such. I am all ears. By the time Julia called it quits, she […]
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I strongly recommend reading Alex Tabarrok’s short e-Book Launching the Innovation Renaissance, which I will blog on shortly. Professor Tabarrok blogs it a little today, here is the entire thing: We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century […]
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One of my favorite essay questions assigned to students in my environmental economics class requires them to think about how government ownership and management of National Parks differs from alternative arrangements. I do not wish to write my version of the essay here. I do want to make a few observations. First, you would be […]
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Abraham Gesner’s New York Kerosene company, in 1856, began to make kerosene for the purposes of illumination. When it brought that product to market, it did not advertise itself as, “having the potential to save the whales,” though indeed that was its effect. When it did the research on this fuel, it was not the […]
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Just remember what happens in a market when a product is a failure, it disappears, often spectacularly, and with much pain to the entrepreneurs. However, it’s a lesson learned. You don’t get the good stuff (like Cherry Coke) without having the intense trial and error that produces and weeds out the bad, like New Coke. […]
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Posted in Education, Entrepreneurs on Sep 19th, 2011
Marcus Winters contributes to the growing literature demonstrating that K12 teacher effectiveness has nothing to do with their credentials: Modern research on teacher quality makes clear that the factors used to determine a teacher’s compensation tell us little to nothing about how well the teacher will perform in the classroom. That consistent finding has (or […]
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I see this one quite regularly: Seems to make sense. But we are not “running out of” farms. Nor are we running out of food. For example, we grow three times as much grain today than we did 50 years ago … and do it in roughly the same amount of land. Here is Matt […]
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