Saturday, March 8, 2008

A few more quick shorters

then we're caught up.

Protect them from themselves?:

Fire prevention is a genuine public good; most health care, with the exception of things meant to stop the spread of infectious disease, simply isn't.
What can I possibly add?

The roots of genius:
Quote of the day:
"Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly."
This was the sound advice of one friend to a discouraged inventor named Hiram Maxim, who went on to invent the machine gun.
(Technically, it was the first reliable machine gun. You have google, too, if you care.) More to the point, developing the ability to kill many, many more with one gun is genius? I disagree, but then I value human life.

Patrick Swayze terminally ill:
Like every other thirteen-year-old girl at the time, I fell desperately, hopelessly, eternally in love with Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. Now it appears that, at age 55, he's got pancreatic cancer. His doctors sound optimistic, but as far as I know the five year survival rate on pancreatic cancer is statistically indistinguishable from zero. What a tragedy. I will spare you the maudlin recollections of my own mortality that this spawns, but I imagine I'm joined in them by millions of American women.
Well, Megan, at least you can cheer those blues away with the thought that Heath Ledger is still dead.

And we're done.
Take the weekend off, Megan, leave us to some light cat porn here, plz.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Okay, I really don't have the stomach to actually read her blog anymore, but is that "health care is bad" quote taken out of context?

Another thing - Megan, dearest, please stop universalizing all of your personal experiences. Plenty of 13-year-old girls didn't give a shit about Patrick Swayze at the time. Not to make light of his illness, but Christ. And "statistically indistinguishable from zero" is a shit sentence.

spencer said...

Yeah, but it's how economists write and talk to each other. Megan may not have learned much actual economics while getting her MBA at Chicago, but she did manage to learn to do a convincing impression of an economist - by which I mean, convincing to people who don't know much about economics.