Author: old_wp_importer

Here is a nicely tongue-in-cheek economics paper, claiming that people drive better bargains listening to Brian Johnson than to Bon Scott. What’s impressive is that they manage to keep up their oh-so-serious tone all the way through…

Our results suggest that having participants listen to songs by AC/DC in which Brian Johnson served as vocalist results in participants realizing more efficient (*) outcomes.

…

Our analysis has direct implications for policy and organizational design: when policymakers or employers are engaging in negotiations (or setting up environments in which other parties will negotiate) and are interested in playing the music of AC/DC, they should choose from the band’s Brian Johnson era discography.

(*) Efficient=mean and self-interested, it seems

In Sharm el-Sheikh, Ban Ki-moon and a gaggle of presidents finally [launched](http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/EGUA-72URTH?OpenDocument) the International Compact for Iraq today, supposedy gathering billions of dollars in aid for Iraq. [1]

They’re probably eviscerating their webmaster right about…..now.

[1] They claim $30bn, but most of that is debt relief (i.e. it is only worth a fraction of the face value)

Number of Iraqis living on less than $1 per day:

14.4 million

(54% of the population)

Amount spent on Iraq war/occupation:

$14,000 per Iraqi

[sources: Cost is $378 billion spent by the US over 26.7 million Iraqis, income is from a UN report published last week. The UK has also spent something like £4.4 billion, but the government doesn’t admit exactly how much]

I’ve finally got round to updating my contact details post. It now has skype (danohuiginn), German mobile number and address, and even a PGP key for the paranoid and the geeky among you. Plus far too many IM accounts of various forms, of course.

Although it’s friends-locked, I’m mostly happy for the information there to be given out to anybody who isn’t obviously a spammer or a mass-murderer.

Alan Moore has written a great essay on the history of pornography. This snippet on Victorian dramas is particularly charming:

Pornographic playlets could be purchased, ranging from two-person dramas through to full ensemble pieces if the neighbours were agreeable. These publications came with sheet-music, so that if one of the participants were musically inclined then he or she could sit at the piano and provide a vigorous accompaniment to whatever activity was taking place upon the hearth-rug or the horsehair sofa. Yes, I know it sounds ridiculous but I was told that by Malcolm McLaren and if you can’t trust Malcolm McLaren then whom can you trust?

I normally assume that nobody reads my

blog

. Turns out I was wrong. Or at least, some Pakistani publisher has pinched

one of the posts

to include in a book.

Would have been nicer of them to ask first, but I’m still flattered

If only I were in the UK, I wouldn’t miss documentaries like Adam Curtis’The Trap: what happened to our dreams of freedom?:

The central argument in The Trap is that modern society is based on a bleak view of humankind hatched during the Cold war, when US military tacticians studied game theory in an attempt to predict what the Russians would do.

The result was years of terrifying détente. But this beat a nuclear holocaust, so game theory seemed to work. It brought stability. And it was then applied to mankind as a whole: the belief grew that we’re fundamentally selfish creatures concerned only with our own interests – and that, paradoxically, this very selfishness should be encouraged, since the end result is widespread economic stability.

More academic treatment of the same idea is in Philip Mirowski’s book [Machine dreams: economics becomes a cyborg science](http://www.librarything.com/work/143008) (on the great pile of worthy tomes I may read one day). Also perhaps some of [Deirdre McCloskey’s writing](http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/books/virtue.php) covers similar topics.

meh. Why do the people who make stock cubes make them

entirely of salt

?

ION, life still good.