We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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A Cambridge physicist… … hears that his friend, an economist, is in Addenbrooks [in the US version of this joke, in Mount Auburn] with a badly broken leg, and goes to visit.
Physicist: What happened?
Economist: I had just stepped off the balcony, and wham! — I fell and broke my leg.
Physicist: You stepped… off… the balcony? What on earth for?
Economist: How was I to know there would be gravity failure?
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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“…a badly broken leg…”
Had gravity not failed, the leg would have been well broken.
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I don’t get it
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wouldn’t a gravity failure have saved the economist from falling?
Is there some play on words here?
A play on concepts. Economists (particularly liberal Cambridge ones) talk about market failure when the economic real world doesn’t work as they’d like it to, even though it is still behaving according to their own empirical laws. Physics accepts that theory must be universal and the work is to understand the conditions under which things happen.
Ahah! That is not something i had come across, thanks.
I still prefer the ‘3 statisticians out hunting’ joke.
(For the very few who haven’t heard it, three statisticians are out hunting with guns or bows or something. On seeing a rabbit or deer or whatever, the first statistician shoots. His shot goes wide, missing the target by 3 feet to the left. The second statistician fires, his shot goes three feet to the right of the target.
“Wooohooo!!!! GOT HIM!!!”, they all shout.)
Guy Herbert – Yes, but zmollusc is still right.
Er… no, that was the point of the joke. (Which maybe only I find funny.)
It’s a joke about “market failure”. Gravity did what it does. But the economist, as economists are wont to do interpreted consistency as “failure” because consistency did not produce a comforting result.
No, because if gravity had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen to the ground. A physicist of all people wouldn’t attribute his having been a victim of gravity to a failure of gravity!!
Verity, it wasn’t the physicist that attributed that, it was the economist:-)
In a nutshell, that for me describes quite neatly the contempt of empiricist “hard” scientists for the social parasites.
TWG
Two behavioural psychologists have just had sex. One says, “That was great for you; how was it for me?”