Ed Cottrell

  • An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

    Techmeme linked me to this amazing Bill Gates e-mail rant. It’s gratifying to know that even the creator of the operating system finds it infuriating, especially when it just took me 10 minutes to reconnect my old laptop to my 802.11g (WiFi) network. I mistyped the WEP key, allegedly, either in the first box or…

  • Obama, Burkeanism, and Chicago

    Redstate has a post by Pejman Yousefzadeh, Barack Obama: That Burkean Chicagoan [ed.: link updated to an archived link because the original was broken], that I found very interesting and right on the money. I think Obama’s association with the University of Chicago has somehow been widely interpreted as a signal that he is actually somewhat…

  • This Is Stupid – And You Can Quote Me On That

    The Associated Press wants to charge bloggers $12.50 to quote five words from AP articles. See this rate chart for the evidence. I’m not sure which is more frustrating – that the AP has so little respect for the value of a free exchange of information in a free society, that they have so little…

  • Starve the Beast

    Economics professor Greg Mankiw shares some interesting thoughts, citing Paul Krugman, on why Bush’s tax cuts may result in smaller government in the next administration than we would get otherwise. This is likely true, no matter which candidate wins. Krugman, however, calls this a “poison pill,” a way of sabotaging a takeover or transfer of…

  • Killing the Economy – One Drop at a Time

    Thankfully, the Republican party, for all its failings in the last few years, has still some concept of fundamental principles of economics. The Senate blocked a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a tax much like many of the taxes that prolonged the Great Depression in America long past its end elsewhere. Thank goodness for…