Suppose God told you that you would go to hell if the median human faith of humanity is insufficient when you die. If the median faith of humanity is good enough, then everyone goes to heaven, but if not, than…
Blog Archives
We need a better concept of collective morality to be able to deal with climate change
Posted in Environment, Philosophy and ethics
Part of the campaign to change how people use pronouns is caused by Sapir-Whorf
If people used the pronoun ‘ki’ when referring to the earth, would that make people treat the earth more environmentally? That is the hypothesis of Robin Wall Kimmerer the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. She doesn’t like calling the earth an…
Posted in Philosophy and ethics
The BA.2 Covid variant is spiking. But it is still a good bet that the Pandemic will be over this spring.
Two months ago, I wrote that the pandemic would be over this spring. We are now officially in the second day of spring and my prediction does not look good at first glance because Covid BA.2 infections are spiking in…
Posted in Health
The rise of the Passport Bureaucracy
For most of history, passports and visas were two words for the same thing and in Europe and the US they were only occasionally required during wartime in order to exclude dangerous foreigners. In 1941, the US was again at…
Posted in Globalization & International
What caused hyperglobalization?
Paul Krugman says that transportation technology and free-trade policies caused globalization: …In the mid-1980s, world trade had recovered from the disruptions and protectionism of the interwar period, but exports as a share of world G.D.P. were still back only to…
Posted in Globalization & International
Introduction to Factfulness by Hans Rosling
Below is an excerpt of the Introduction of Factfulness by Hans Rosling that is posted for free use by the publisher, McMillan. Before reading the introduction, please take the test it is based. The test website interface is a bit…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
Steve Jobs got a small part of the Giant Turnip at Apple and a large part of it at Pixar
When Steve Jobs died in 2011, Matt Yglesias said that he was a net-worth failure compared to other computer executives like Michael Dell and Bill Gates: The rivalry between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that dominated the computer industry for…
Posted in Labor, Managerial Micro
Medianism 