Antifragility applies to emotional health as well. When you guard children against every possible risk – do not let them outside to play or walk home alone – they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills. Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow. Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak. Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors. Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring. Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think certain ideas are dangerous, or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run. Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible, it setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression.
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And if someone died—for real Twitter addicts, that’s Asshole Christmas. If you could make a facile point that reinforced your team’s political stance on the day someone collapsed in front of his wife and kids—you were a true hero, the Twitter version of a captured pilot resisting torture in a POW camp. Except your prison was your mother’s basement, or your half of a Brooklyn apartment covered with Cheetos. August 31st, 2018 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
 We’ve a new little report, piece of scientific research, telling us that cheese and red meat are good for us. This in entire opposition to everything governments have been telling us about diet for decades now. This telling us that government is a seriously bad way of doing anything. Sure, of course, humans are wrong, most humans are wrong a lot of the time. The problem with government being that when that wrongness gets propagated by our rulers it becomes the established fact. Meaning that we’re all affected by it, there is none of that natural variability of error which protects some and harms others. We all become subject to the error that is August 30th, 2018 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
So, imagine this. We desire to move 500 lbs of food from the field to the town where the people want to eat it. It’s about 10 miles from field to town. We have two available technologies. Ten people carrying 50 lbs each in rucksacks, or one bloke with a handcart carrying 500 lbs. The handcart is a technology of course. Which should we use, the technology economising on human labour or not? One answer is that ten people want and desire jobs so we should use the rucksacks. But that is to be an idiot. The other is use the handcart and leave nine people doing sod all. Which is the correct solution. August 28th, 2018 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am persuaded that no system of government — democratic, oligarchic, aristocratic, monarchical, tyrannical, oriental despotic or worse, liberal-progressive — can deliver anything resembling justice in this world, unless it is under the direction of angels. – David Warren, via Maggie’s Farm August 26th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
As originally reported by Janet Burns of Forbes, the New York City Council has denied city residents access to additional ride-sharing services. In a 39-6 vote, the bill caps the current supply of New York City Uber and Lyft drivers for the next 12 months and implements a minimum wage of 17 dollars per hour. In what City Council Speaker Corey Johnson referred to as reforming an industry “without any appropriate check or [government] regulation,” Councilman Eric Ulrich argued, “This is like putting a cap on Netflix subscriptions because Blockbusters are closing.” August 25th, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
I don’t think the average South African looks at Zimbabwe and says “I wish we lived like that”. But I bet Ramaphosa looks at Mugabe and thinks “I wish I lived like that”. Ramaphosa’s wishes matter more than the average citizen’s. August 22nd, 2018 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
South Africa has until recently been a decent model for other countries to orient their policies toward. But if the continent’s biggest economic engine moves more and more in the direction of Zimbabwe, then economic growth, investor confidence, and, most important, average people going about their daily lives will suffer not only in South Africa but in the nearby countries with which it trades and does business. August 21st, 2018 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is not obviously progressive to insist that equal numbers of men and women work eighty-hour weeks in a corporate law firm or leave their families for months at a time to dodge steel pipes on a frigid oil platform. And it is grotesque to demand (as advocates of gender parity did in the pages of Science) that more young women “be conditioned to choose engineering,” as if they were rats in a Skinner box. – Steven Pinker I found it here. He found it here. He read it here. Go manlinking! More recently, see also Pinker‘s remarkable Galapagos photos. August 20th, 2018 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hands up everyone who thinks that Liz Warren wants that shareholder interest to be even more powerful in American firms? Quite, then she’s not proposing the Nordic model of corporate governance, is she? But then, you know, since when did Matt Yglesias allow reality, or even knowledge of it, to ruin a good Democratic Party talking point? – Tim Worstall. Face it, Matt Yglesias has been a fountain of ignorant fluorescent idiocy since the early days of blogging. August 19th, 2018 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is a pity that the lifeblood of industry in this country is small businesses, and by small I don’t mean the UK definition of “SME”, I mean a handful of people, mostly one person, doing their trade. The Conservative Party is transfixed on big business, that they can regulate, and the Labour Party wants more public services under government control, there is literally no-one standing up for the one-man bands of the country that keep us afloat. Under many of the big enterprises are a collection of qualified individuals, major service companies frequently use freelancers. For them, there is no requirement to commit under the company banner, and subsequently the consequences of not having holiday, sickness, guaranteed work, etc, so it is not a great choice but one many people are willing to take nevertheless. Every time there is some form of new regulation or taxation it is the one-man operations that suffer the most. The big business can suck up expenses or tax increases without a problem and the public sector is exempt, just ignores them, or gets someone else to pay for it. The Tories and the Left hate the single operators – and it shows. August 18th, 2018 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
And do note that interesting little difference between London and New York. In NYC you must have a medallion to gain a taxi permit. The money from the restriction on the number of cabs flowed to those who owned the medallions, to those who controlled access. London Black Cabs were not so restricted – so it was the drivers who gained the higher incomes from the customers being screwed. But if we restrict the number of drivers with a middleman like Uber controlling the access then it’s going to be Uber – as with the medallions – who gains, not the drivers. Seriously, this is nuts, Sadiq Khan really is proposing that Uber should have monopoly profits thrust upon it. And why the Hell is a Mayor of London proposing that? Evil or ignorant, your choice. August 16th, 2018 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
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