Freakonomics: The Movie is now out on DVD and Blu-ray. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors including Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side), Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp), Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight), and Seth Gordon (The King of Kong).
via Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics.
Bahrain Soldiers opened fire Friday on thousands of protesters defying a government ban and streaming toward the landmark square that had been the symbolic center of the uprising to break the political grip of the Gulf nation’s leaders.
Officials at the main Salmaniya hospital said at least 50 people were injured, some with gunshot wounds. Some doctors and medics on emergency medical teams were in tears as they tended to the wounded. X-rays showed bullets still lodged inside victims.
via Bahrain forces fire on protesters; 50 injured – Yahoo! News.
A cheaper substitute might mean buying nothing. Personal coaches, for example, usually sell against this alternative. It’s not a matter of finding a cheaper coach, it’s more about having no coach at all. Same with live music. People don’t go to cheaper concerts, they just don’t value the concert enough to go at all.
via Seth’s Blog: On pricing power.
Thousands of protesters poured into a main square in Bahrain’s capital today in an Egypt-style rebellion that sharply escalated pressure on authorities as the Arab push for change gripped the Gulf for the first time.
via Arab crisis: Bahrain’s turn as protesters demand political reform and freedoms | Mail Online.
An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.
He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’.
As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.
The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry.
Speaking at Mining Indaba conference in Cape Town, James Turk forecast that gold could reach $8,000 per ounce by 2013-2015. He added that that may be too conservative.
Turk, the founder of digital gold currency GoldMoney, said individuals should own bullion not as an investment, but as a wealth preserver.
$8,000 Gold by 2013-2015 May be Too Cheap « MineFund.
Because of my quest for knowledge, I am always looking for ways to educate myself, whether it’s through traditional methods like going to college and reading books or more random ways like perusing the back of a cereal box at breakfast.
iTunes U is a completely free medium through the Apple iTunes application where colleges and universities can offer courses at no charge, to anyone who wants to take them. There is also a new section of iTunes U that focuses on K-12 education, where state or county education departments provide content for both students and educators. Currently, over 800 colleges and universities from across the globe provide content to iTunes U for post-secondary learning, and 15 states in the US offer K-12 learning tools.
via » What is iTunes U? Free College Courses From Top Universities.
A friend wanted to buy Dr. Dre headphones. They list for about $300.
Any audiophile can tell you that they sound like $39 headphones. Instead, consider these. We can prove they sound better!
But of course, that’s not the question. It’s not what sounds better, it’s what’s worth it.
The Dre headphones come with admiring glances at no extra charge. They come with self-esteem built in. You can argue that this is a worthless feature in a device designed to reproduce sound accurately, but you’d be wrong. After all, the whole reason you’re listening to music in the first place is to feel good. To be happy. If the Dre’s make you happy, and your happiness is worth $300, then they’re worth it, no?
For others (put me in that category) I get more happiness knowing that I didn’t fall for a clever marketing ploy, and I buy the ones that I believe sound better. Of course, that’s a clever marketing ploy too–persuading me that better sound is worth this much. But don’t tell anyone. That would make me feel manipulated.
via Seth’s Blog: Are $300 headphones worth it?.
Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999.
Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math. And at the same time it is something that is incredibly intensively believed; there’s this sort of psycho-social component to people taking on these enormous debts when they go to college simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.
It is, to my mind, in some ways worse than the housing bubble. There are a few things that make it worse. One is that when people make a mistake in taking on an education loan, they’re legally much more difficult to get out of than housing loans. With housing, typically they’re non-recourse — you can just walk out of the house. With education, they’re recourse, and they typically survive bankruptcy. If you borrowed money and went to a college where the education didn’t create any value, that is potentially a really big mistake.
via Back to the Future with Peter Thiel – National Review Online.
knowledge is power 