A couple of months ago I posted some links about 3-D printing and related technologies, here.

Why is all that bandwidth needed, anyhow? A one-page text memo requires very little bandwidth. It would seem that lots of images, video, PowerPoint presentations, etc are being sent back and forth across the continents, indicating an excessive level of micromanagement.

Important to note that oil and gas have vastly different transportation characteristics. Oil is fairly economical to transport by sea; gas, not so much as it must first be liquified. Numbers being quoted for gas ocean transport vary but seem to mostly be around $3/million BTUs.

The transportation economics suggest that nat gas is better used domestically rather than exported. The CEO of Dow Chemical has been demanding a protectionist policy on gas exports to maintain his low-cost feedstock advantage; I think he'd do better to be worrying about the nat gas demand, and consequent price impact, of the power generation shifts from coal to nat gas.

Rose Wilder Lane, the writer and libertarian political thinker, visited Russia in the early 1920s when she was still a Communist. She was attempting to explain the benefits of central planning to one skeptical village leader:

He shook his head sadly.

It is too big – he said – too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.

It seems almost impossible to explain this insight, which of course prefigures Hayek, to the average liberal or "progressive."

Stephen Bishop..."The Chinese state has created a motorway and railway infrastructure in much the same way as Eisenhower created the inter-state system.  This clearly helps those private initiatives to bear fruit."

Actually, it appears that, in the railroad arena, the Chinese state has over-emphasized prestigious passenger-transportation projects at the expense of vital freight-rail projects. (One Chinese railway expert, in making this point, actually used the phrase "playing with train sets" to reflect that attitude of certain government officials)

Matede...."Maybe the GOP should start a dating website, where conservative men and liberal women could meet."

I am reliably informed that many, many liberal women *explicitly specify* on their dating profiles that they will not date men who do not have a strong commitment to "social justice," etc.

I suspect that in many, if not most cases, if they met a man they were sufficiently attracted to this requirement, like many other checklist options, would be dropped...but they would have to meet in some way other than on-line, given the profile specifications.

I think that Rachel's explanation is part of the story...but here's another important aspect: the political views of many people are strongly influenced, in lots of cases primarily driven, by a desire to fit into their crowd or herd.

Single women are surely more influenced by their peer groups than are married women, and probably are on the average more influenced by their peer groups than are single men. So a political belief shared by 55% of the relevant herd is likely to quickly become a political belief shared by 75% of the relevant herd.

I'll be curious to see whether this headline gets change (I took a screen capture) and also whether the blame for the headline should be attributed to AP or to Yahoo.

Headline a couple of hours ago on Yahoo story from Associated Press:

Mother of bomb suspects found deeper spirituality

From the CBO study:

"..the deficit is projected to dip as low as 2.4 percent of GDP by 2015. In later years, however, projected deficits rise steadily, reaching almost 4 percent of GDP in 2023. For the 2014–2023 period, deficits in CBO’s baseline projections total $7.0 trillion. With such deficits, federal debt would remain above 73 percent of GDP—far higher than the 39 percent average seen over the past four decades. (As recently as the end of 2007, federal debt equaled just 36 percent of GDP.)"

The projections take into account the expected SS and Medicare deficits, which are not considered in the current "deficit" numbers...they probably should be, just as a corporation is required to carry reserves against expected product warranty costs, even though those costs may not be actually incurred for years.

Also, the linked article does not consider state & local deficits...either direct accounting deficits, or the actual costs which will be incurred as a result of unrealistic rate of return assumptions for pension plans.

"Must peace and wealth produce times like ours?  Must they produce ennui?"

When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. Well, they were going to destroy it again, were they-this garden Earth, civilized and knowing, to be torn apart again that Man might hope again in wretched darkness.

--Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

Sebastian Heffner's memoir Defying Hitler bridges WWI and WWII and vividly describes the environment in Germany between the wars and the rise of Naziism.

Haffner was a young child during WWI, he found it all very exciting as reported in the newspapers and was stunned and disappointed at the defeat. He experienced the street violence of the post-war era, the Great Inflation, the good and bad of Weimar culture, the rise of anti-Semitism and the corruption of legal institutions. Very highly recommended; I don't think there's anything in this book that wouldn't be appropriate for 7th and 8th graders. My review is here.

The Cruel Sea, by Nicholas Monsarrat, is a novel about convoy escort duty in WWII. The author was himself a Royal Navy officer. Very well-written.

Kofola..."Regrettably, the elite privilege linked to attending one of the Ivies does not seem all that much less among conservative institutions. It most certainly does not among Republican Party institutions."

While there is too much credentialism in American business, there is far less than in government, academia, or the "nonprofit" sector.

Hostility to free markets among "progressives" benefits many of them economically by further swelling the size of those institutions where there credentials are overly valued, while suppressing those institutions that are more concerned about pure performance.

More than 40 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote:

One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers.

The “unwillingness of American society to accept this claim”…elite education as the primary gateway to power and wealth…has been greatly undercut since Drucker wrote. And “progressives” have been among the main under-cutters.

Connections and admission preferences are a very real form of wealth, in terms of their impact on an individual's future earning stream, but note that they are not taxable..via either gift or inheritance taxes...in the way that an ownership position in a factory, store, or farm is taxable.