Shorters

with a look at today's "dust-up" at the London LA Times on deck.

Out of touch:

So it looks like I'm going to be living without a cell phone for a month. I can't find the damn thing, and since I'm going to buy an iPhone on July 11th, it doesn't make sense to replace it.
...
More thoughts on the cell-less existence as I have them.

She might as well start documenting the daily growth of her fingernails and hair, and the weight of each bowel movement.
Megan, we don't care.

Kosher wine--it's not just a good idea. It's The Law.:

One of the formative experiences of growing up in New York City is the abortive attempt to get drunk off filched Manischewitz. This is not actually possible, because the sugar coma gets you long before the alcohol does.

Here's what puzzles me about this one; Megan knew enough Jews to get the wine, but not enough to have a damned clue about it? She grew up on the Upper West Side, of course she knows the tribe, but wtf? She never went over for dinner and had the ceremonial shot of that stuff? I tried some truly foul things in the young and dumb learning phase (grape soda and jack was probably the worst thing I've ever drunk), but I never thought of asking my neighbors to sneak some of that from their parents' supply, and to my knowledge they never did, because we'd all already tasted it. Also, there's a shitload of other alcohol in the world, which is designed to be drunk in larger quantities allowing for intoxication.
And then there's this

Of course, the low number of Jewish alchoholics remains an obstacle to obscene wine profits. But as kosher wine hits the big time, I'd expect to see at least a few expensive kosher restaurants come into their own.

... low number of Jewish alcoholics? Do you actually know any Jews, Megan? Yeah, yeah, her family is Irish. Just because Jews are maybe, in stereotypeland, less likely to get sloppy drunk that doesn't they're somehow pikers in the alcoholism game.

That smarts . . .: Someone has criticized Megan McArdle. You know what this means

This somewhat misunderstood what I was saying.

What follows is an easily misunderstood piece of drivel arguing that some things are hard to regulate, and therefore we probably shouldn't try.
And then she says

I guarantee that merely by writing this post, I will get at least one angry blogger or commenter ranting that I am a libertarian moron who doesn't understand the difference between PROFIT and POLITICS. Au contraire. Both are incentives that work well in some contexts, not in others. Political incentives are not a good way to organize, say, one's agricultural output. They are a very fine way to organize one's wars--or at least, better than the alternative.

You cannot simply assume a priori that regulatory incentives will be more socially optimal than the profit motive. Profit, in this case, a pretty strong motive for doing what we want them to do: avoiding catastrophic failures. That's why I think that a powerful regulatory body is only an unquestionable win if you have some reason to think that it will be smarter than the banks.

I don't know how to even begin to snark at that, I just wanted to make your heads hurt, too.

It's not theft, it's an homage:

"Is it just me," asks my friend, "or is Dow Jones advertising for someone whose job will be to steal blog posts?" Quick answer: yes. Only please to call it "research".

Is it just me, or is it hard to decide whether it's funnier that Megan jokes about research or about copying and pasting the work of others with minimal contribution? Not counting the question from her friend, Megan added 12 words total content to this post.

Now I eat, and then we do the dustup, day 3.