Month: March 2012

Media credibility

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect:

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories.

You read with exasperation the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Peak lawyers

The era of 20-somethings blindly stampeding their way towards law school seems to be finally, mercifully drawing to a close.

if lawyers want to have a place in society that is not just leeches, they need to remove friction from transactions by automating contracts and thus lowering risk. law practice employs far too many humans and is far too manual.

Against Checks

The Fed could kill checks but isn’t. the 19th century checks business is not just embarrassing but hugely inefficient and harmful for the economy.

IFT — the ability for me to pay you, and for you to receive the funds within minutes, rather than having to wait until the following business day — is already a fact of life in many countries around the world, from India to the UK. Where it doesn’t already exist, you can be pretty sure that someone is working hard on a plan to make it happen. Except in the US, where no one seems to have even started the process yet.

checks, just like smallpox, can be eradicated. the obvious way is to slap a surcharge on them to reflect the true cost.

Tax Enforcement

how you can get a modicum of tax revenue in a cash-only society. take note, italy / greece.

China has crowdsourced tax enforcement, by potentially rewarding citizens with a cash reward for asking for all of their tax pre-payment receipts, and using them up by scratching off the prize areas. The cost of this massive force multiplier is vanishingly small, as all they are offering is the chance to win; I have only ever seen one winning ticket in the past couple of years, and it was for about 2 kuai. Still, it is a nice cultural touch to the end of a big meal, everyone sitting in a circle, scratching their fapiao to see if they won a prize for playing the part of a Chinese tax enforcement agent.

Non-frivolous crowdfunding

Petridish lets you fund promising research projects and join first hand in new discoveries. World famous researchers post projects and expeditions that need your help to get off the ground. Each project has a minimum threshold it must hit in pledges, or it will not be funded. Backers in successful projects join the team and get insider rewards such as: Early access to news about progress and findings, souvenirs from the field, acknowledgements in journals, naming rights for new discoveries, or the ability to join an expedition in person.

a kickstarter for actually useful science instead of “films”.