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I’d just like to point out that if you search for “electric clipper” on google images, there is a picture of me with a hole in my hair on the first page. Woohoo! But, if you add an ’s’, I am lost in obscurity.

I would like to voice my support for retiring the US penny. It is a waste of time and metal. I have a jar containing virtually every penny that has passed through my hands for the last year, and it is not worth enough for me to drive to the grocery store and deal with the change counting machine. I’m certainly never going to count them myself, nor am I going to carry them around and spend them. I only save them in the jar because I can’t bring myself to throw away money. If your purchases are rounded to the nickel, would you ever even notice? For that matter, I could get behind retiring both the penny and the nickel at the same time. The dime is small enough to cover any cash transaction, and it is a nice even metric 1/10th of a dollar.

But the penny is a no brainer. It has outlived its usefulness. Sorry Abe.

As in Pigovian Taxes, of course. I’d like to throw the term around like I know what I’m talking about, but the truth is I just learned it and had to go to wikipedia to figure it out. It comes from Greg Mankiw’s post, The Pigou Club Manifesto. It’s almost two years old, but it’s new to me, so I thought I’d echo it again.  An argument for taxing gas consumption. He also has a more recent post about why the much more popular “windfall profits” tax on oil companies is NOT just as good.

I’d like to add road tolls as a much better way to pay for highway systems. They are paid for by taxes anyway, but the up front lump sum has no effect on people’s driving decisions; paying per trip would. It wouldn’t have to change revenue, but it could encourage more efficient use of roads, lower congestion, and those who used it more would pay more. With today’s high-speed toll lanes, it doesn’t even require a lot of toll booth lanes and extra delays to pay. Just drive through at 70, and the transponder on your windshield beeps to let you know you’ve just paid.  Plus, rates can be adjusted for areas of high congestion, or during peak times to spread the load.

CERN lab goes ‘colder than space’

That’s an impressive task: Keeping a 27km ring under vacuum and chilled to 1.9 degrees Kelvin. Looks like it is working though. Now they just need to guide7TeV protons around it.

Zimbabwe introduces $100 billion banknotes 

According to CNN that’s worth about $1 USD. According to the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe it is more like $4. But, that was yesterday. Expect it to be significantly less tomorrow. You can buy the slightly older $50 billion notes on ebay for like $60! I kind of want one, but not for more than $20. I may wait for the $1 trillion version (although, they might not have any paper left to print those).

Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.

A few more pictures after the jump…

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It came up in a recent conversation that Sweden was an example of socialism working. At the time, I really didn’t know a thing about Swedish politics or economics, so I left it alone. I’ve done a bit of research, and I don’t think Sweden is a socialist state at all. At least not as I interpret the word.

Webster’s defines Socialism as:

“Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.”

And this seems to be not at all what sweden is. Industry in Sweden is primarily privately owned. Even energy production is largely privatized (with very little fossil fuel usage, BTW). It ranks #1 on The Economist’s Index of Democracy. The new face of Swedish socialism on Forbes.com contrasts the “socialist facade” with a booming economy with low inflation and a lot of entrepreneurial growth. The Sweden Wikipedia article and related articles also give a good overview.

I think few will disagree that Socialism as defined above has not worked out well historically. Alan Greenspan captures why this is very effectively in his book, “The Age of Turbulence“. It is because a centrally planned economy relies on the central planners to set prices, allocate production resources, etc. They simply can’t do this effectively. Markets can. When lots of people are acting individually, using price signals to determine the best way to deploy the capitol under their control, they can arrive at a more optimum distribution of resources. Additionally,private property rights must be guarantee, or there really isn’t any reason for anybody to invest themselves or their resources (which they don’t really have in the first place) in anything.

There is little doubt that markets are an excellent tool for optimizing resource allocation and determining prices, and private ownership is required to maximize motivation to succeed. However, what people so often call socialism in sweden, includes both of these things. Okay, some services, such as health care and education, are “socialized”. It is certainly a welfare state by anyone’s definition, with guaranteed health and education services for everything, extensive unemployment support, and a tax burden higher than any other industrialized country (as percent GDP). But these taxes are used to provide services that Swedes apparantly think are worth paying for. They’ve decided that it is worthwhile to pay for health care for everyone. And socializing a service doesn’t mean the government is going to screw it up. Since 1992, Sweden has implemented a school voucher system, where the state will pay full tuition costs to the for-profit private school of the parent’s choice. Schools must compete for students providing the motivation for excellence, yet equal access is still guaranteed for all citizens.

I’m not suggesting that Sweden is a perfect model of government that the U.S. or any other country should strive for. I just want to make two points:

1) I wish people would stop throwing around the word Socialism or Socialist every time someone suggests the government provide health services for the WHOLE public. They are just trying to associate an old stigma, that really doesn’t apply at all. We are not talking about abolishing private property, compromising democracy, or throwing away free markets.

2) Tax-payer funded health care and education (among other things) can work, and has in several countries, Sweden included. As far as I can see, it is the only way to guarantee equal access. The real question people should be asking themselves is if they are willing to pay a bit extra in taxes in order to provide it. The same goes double for education. We ALL benefit from a well educated public.

 I accidentally ended up on MSN today:

Good names? Experts weigh in on Brangelina’s picks for twins.

This was one of today’s “Top Picks” news items. It went along with “Michigan city investigates manhole cover caper”, and “Family sitcoms in sad state”. Woohoo!