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Anonymous
There is no chance that Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. That said, I found the movie Anonymous to be reasonably watchable, although I thought many of Vanessa Redgrave’s scenes as the older Queen Elizabeth were ridiculous. But since the movie claims (perhaps as a joke) to…
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Corporate Unions
In an ordinary employer-employee relationship with a large company, the employer has most of the power. When any individual employee seeks a higher wage, he or she has no leverage; for a large company to lose a single employee makes little difference. In the U.S., unions have been a way for employees to get more…
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Nuclear Irrationality
I was recently thinking about my college studies of nuclear warfare. At the time it seemed like a relevant topic, and I took two courses on it. Like everything, the more you look into it the more complex it gets. The depth of the thinking in nuclear warfare planning was both impressive and appalling. One…
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Sudoku
I’ve been playing Sudoku on Google+. i’ve more or less mastered the easy and medium levels, but it takes me about 30 minutes to do a hard level, and I haven’t tried expert yet. Sudoku is a fairly dumb game in some ways; as a colleague of mine pointed out, it’s trivial to write a…
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Pay Voting
New plan: let’s let people pay to vote. Everybody gets one vote free, just like today. You can also pay, say, $1000 for another vote, then $2000 for the next one, $3000 for the one after that, etc. Also, you can sell your vote, so a cheaper way to get more votes is to pay…