September 2009 Archives

He was just seven years from breaking his father's longevity record for barbering, the bulk of it done at Chicago's famed Palmer House hotel.

"Dad told me to be a milkman," Young said. "Said I'd meet a lot of women."

Young's skills go beyond combs and clippers. The shop walls are lined with his art: oil paintings, pastels, portraits in pencil. They are the work of a first-rate talent, not just a pretty good amateur. Young has shown in area galleries but is unsure how many works he'll churn out in his retirement.

"The muse comes and goes," he said. "I can't really say what I'm going to do."

I can attest to all that. His art hangs on the walls of the otherwise dingy barbershop, and it is top notch stuff. He told me once he'd not want to earn a living that way, as he has no interest in drawing or painting on command.

 Dozens of homeowners in Arapahoe County are being told to pay hundreds of dollars in back taxes or face liens on their homes.

At least 100 residents in the Sorrel Ranch development are getting bills for two years' worth of metro district back taxes.

Arapahoe County Treasurer Doug Milliken admits the county made a clerical error and didn't assess homeowners the full amount.

"It's a terrible time for this to happen, and I wish I could do more for them," Milliken said.

One homeowner told CBS4 he's "extremely annoyed that we've been put in this position."

If the tax bills aren't paid in full in the next 45 days homeowners will have to pay interest as well. Some of the bills are for as much as $1,600.

A 55-year-old metal detectorist has unearthed the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, archaeologists said.

The staggering discovery, on private farmland in Staffordshire, will redefine perceptions of Anglo-Saxon England, experts predict.

Terry Herbert, from Burntwood, Staffordshire, came across the hoard as he searched a field near his home with his trusty 14-year-old detector.

Experts said the collection of more than 1,500 pieces - which will be officially classified by a coroner as treasure - is unparalleled in size and may have belonged to Saxon royalty. The hoard, believed to date back to the Seventh Century, contains around 5kg of Gold and 2.5kg of silver, far bigger than previous finds - including the Sutton Hoo burial site.

It may take more than a year to value the collection and, given its scale, the financial worth of the hoard cannot be estimated.

Awesome. You can see several hundred pictures of the loot here.  Things like this -

 

I commonly meet economists and other social scientists who will tell you about the implications of their latest research, yet if you ask them other questions they will respond in hushed tones of the most severe agnosticism.  For instance they will refuse to answer Robin Hanson's question about identifying large inefficiencies in the contemporary United States.

Now, if such agnosticism truly represents their actual views as human beings, that is a perfectly defensible stance.  Yet I find that many (most?) of these same people will hold very definite political views and act on them in their private lives.  They will support candidates, donate money, condemn colleagues who don't hold similar views, and so on.  In other words, they are not really agnostic on all those other issues, they just don't want their personal views subject to full analytic scrutiny.  They bifurcate the personal and the political.

This is one of my pet peeves.  It is defensible to be truly agnostic.  It is also defensible to believe that general principles of economic theory and empirics and ethics allow us to have "all things considered" policy views on matters we have not studied closely.  It is not defensible to hold such views but, under the cloak of a not-really-meant agnosticism, refuse to put them on the social science table, so to speak.

(I find that bloggers hardly ever suffer from this problem.  In many ways the core of blogging is a willingness to apply what you know to every problem you encounter, and see how good a job you can do of it in a more or less integrated fashion.)

 

Blending his trademark humor with tragic individual stories, archive footage and publicity stunts, the 55-year-old launches an all out attack on the capitalist system, arguing that it benefits the rich and condemns millions to poverty.

"Capitalism is an evil, and you cannot regulate evil," the two-hour movie concludes.

Capitalism is based on human rights. To deny individuals the right to trade freely - that is to participate in capitalism - is to deny individuals their basic human rights. Let's be blunt: Michael Moore is campaigning against human rights.

To begin with, even if the president delivered an openly politicized speech, which he won't, your kids would survive the unpleasant experience. Most of our children have not yet been transformed into complete idiots by public education.

Moreover, if your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, they will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Who do you think they will be dealing with when they need that hip replacement in 60 years?)

Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies, the less inclined one is to trust him.