I conjecture that the case finally reached a human being, whether due to my efforts, someone else's efforts, or random chance. The response ...| daviddfriedman.blogspot.com
I'm speaking at Libertycon in Tbilisi on April 20th, will probably | Ideas
I now have a substack and| Ideas
As most of you probably know, I started a substack a few weeks ago. So far I have kept both blog and substack going, although most of my posts have been on the latter. The question is whether there is any reason to continue to do so. Are there readers of the blog who can't, or for some reason prefer not to, read the substack? Are there people who would find the blog but not the substack?| Ideas
I am going to be in Lisbon on April 22nd and 23rd, speaking at Oxford about a week later, probably Dublin at some point, flying home about May 4th. If anyone would like to set up a talk sometime between April 23rd and May 4th and is prepared to pay my expenses let me know.| Ideas
Hume's law or Hume's guillotine[1]| Ideas
The 2022 Human Freedom Index is out, combining ratings on economic and personal freedom. The ten freest countries, in order, are: Switzerland, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. | Ideas
Part of the reason Republicans want less immigration is that they expect immigrants, once they become citizens, to vote for Democrats. That is also, in the view of many Republicans, part of the reason Democrats want more immigration. | Ideas
I decided to set one up, both to get more people reading what I write and to give me an incentive to write more — in recent years I largely shifted to commenting on other people's blogs or forums. The URL is:| Ideas
For the past several days, USA Today has had a post up with the headline:| Ideas
[Spoilers for the third book]| Ideas
This post is for fellow fans of the Scholomance books. I have been reading and rereading them — I find them addictively good — and in the process have picked up a number of what appear to be inconsistencies in the world building. | Ideas
This time it took less than a week. But the message telling me the account was back still contained no explanation, no apology, and the clear implication that I had done something wrong and had to be careful not to do it again.| Ideas
As I mentioned recently, Amazon-KDP has for the second time shut down my account, which means that my self-published books are mostly no longer available. The exceptions I know about are the Kindle of The Machinery of Freedom, which was put up on Amazon by my agent not by me, the print copy of Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, which I put up on Barnes & Noble the first time this happened, and any kindles that Amazon hasn't yet noticed and taken down.| Ideas
As I mentioned in my previous post, Amazon-KDP has shut down my account, which means that my self-published books, including the print versions of The Machinery of Freedom, are currently not available. When I went on Amazon to check I discovered what appears to be a pirate edition. The page says the publisher is Harper&Row, who published the first edition in paperback. What it actually is is the second edition, published by Open Court, I believe only in paperback. The page shows it without an...| Ideas
Amazon KDP cancelled my account some months ago with the claim, never explained, that I | Ideas
As I have mentioned here before, I have been working on a critique of a recent Nature article| Ideas
I plan to attend the SFL Libertycon in Lisbon on April 22nd and 23rd and am interested in setting up other talks in Europe. My usual policy is to limit speaking trips to about two weeks. Libertycon could be at either the beginning or the end, so possible dates are from April 10th to May 4th.| Ideas
One of my chief criticisms of Rennert et. al. 2022 is that it calculates the cost imposed by an additional ton of CO2 by summing costs from now to 2300 while almost entirely ignoring technological change, in effect assuming technological stasis. That raises the question of how one ought to model technological change in trying to calculate costs over a long period of time. My initial response was that you can't do it, that any estimate of effects centuries in the future is a wild guess, scienc...| Ideas
Henry George and his modern followers propose an LVT, a land value tax, a tax on the site value of land equal to what the rent on the land would be in the absence of any improvements. From an economic standpoint, the chief attraction of the LVT is that, since it is taxing something in perfectly inelastic supply, taxing it does not lead to any inefficient economic decisions. The site value does not depend on any decisions made by its owner, so a tax on it does not distort his decisions, unlike...| Ideas
As mentioned in previous posts, I am working on an article criticizing Rennert et al., a recent Nature piece that calculates a cost of carbon by summing costs from now until 2300. One of my criticisms is that, given the rate of technological change in recent centuries, we have almost no idea what the world will be like in 2300, what features of the climate will be costs or benefits and by how much.| Ideas
In my previous post I sketched my criticisms of Rennert et. al. 2017, a recent Nature article that attempts to calculate the total cost imposed by an additional ton of CO2. I have now written an article on the subject that I plan to submit to the EPA in response to their request for comments on Rennert and have webbed the current, I think almost final, draft. | Ideas
Comprehensive| Ideas
KDP is again willing to do business with me and now offers a hardcover option, so it occurred to me that I might want to publish some of my books in hardcover as well as paperback, kindle, and audiobook formats. I plan to start with The Machinery of Freedom and thought it would be worth collecting opinions here on which, if any, of my other books I should bring out in a hardcover version.| Ideas
My previous series of posts describes the sequence of events. They sent me an email saying that, because I had multiple accounts and my accounts were connected with one that had violated their guidelines, they were terminating my account, would not permit me to open another, would not pay me royalties accumulated between the last payment and the date when the account was terminated. All of the books of mine that I had self-published vanished from Amazon.| Ideas