Monthly Archives: March 2010

Keep America Weird

A great bottom-up conversation between Reihan Salam and Chris Hayes: The key parts: Reihan Salam:That’s what I find most vivid and exciting, and it’s also what I find most important, because it also involves going beyond the nation state. It … Continue reading

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Pro-Immigration, Anti-Startup Visa

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes a strong case against the startup visa: Investors already have too much power in the investor-entrepreneur relationship. If this act is passed, fundraising won’t just affect an entrepreneur’s company, but his or her life. You have to … Continue reading

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Kling on Halberstam

Arnold Kling has posted his list of influential books. The first one is The Best and the Brightest, the book I’ve been blogging about the last few weeks: My take-away from that book might be described as “The Exclusive Country … Continue reading

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Books that Influenced Me

Matt and Will are tough acts to follow, but here is my list of books that have most influenced me, in roughly chronological order: Free to Choose: My father had this on his bookshelf, and it’s the first serious book … Continue reading

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The Distance between Knowledge and Authority

Reader Bob Hawkins left a really excellent comment that I’m going to quote in full: There’s also the fact that the civilian departments don’t take their war responsibilities seriously. The military ends up doing jobs that are theoretically the responsibility … Continue reading

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Expertise and Influence in Military Policy

To effectively oversee a massive, complex institution like the US military, you need a massive, hierarchical institution composed of people whose job it is to understand that institution. The military itself has an officer’s corps that performs this function. No … Continue reading

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Knowledge Was Power in Vietnam

In the last few posts in my Vietnam series, I argued that American foreign policy was crippled by the fact that senior officials were fed a steady stream of misinformation. Positive news about the war flowed easily up the chain … Continue reading

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Free Software is about Freedom

Cord Blomquist did a good post over at TLF about the USTR/open source software issue. It set off a lively debate in the comments that, I think, reflected a common misconception about what free software is and why it’s valuable. … Continue reading

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Album Sales a Trivial Fraction of Metallica’s Revenue

Via Techdirt, David Levine spots an interesting breakdown of Metallica’s revenues: Along with touring revenue — the band pulled in $22.8 million from 55 arena shows reported to Boxscore that drew more than 968,000 fans — Metallica sold 694,000 albums … Continue reading

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Will Smart Phones Disrupt the PC?

Eric Raymond predicts that smartphones will disrupt the traditional PC market: Here’s what I think my computing experience is going to look like, oh, about 2014: All my software development projects and personal papers live on the same device I … Continue reading

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