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• Get Your LIBOR Scandal Updates

  Latest news and reactions at Blenderlaw (U. Miami prof Caroline Bradley).

  [...]
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• I Hate to Think How Much Someone Got Paid to Do This

  Fresh into my mailbox: Happy Birthday from UM

  The link, incidentally, takes you to a really tacky video.

  And no, it’s not my birthday today, although they did get the right month.

  [...]
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• North Korea Finds New Way to Be Inscrutable

  This is way weirder than the fiction I’ve been reading lately:

  Kim Jong-un Appears With Disney Characters on North Korean TV:

  North Korean state-run television on Monday showed footage of costumed versions of Tigger, Minnie Mouse and other Disney characters prancing in front of the leader, Kim Jong-un, and an entourage [...]

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• Electoral Math for the 2012 Presidential Race

  Number of comments: 3
  

  Here’s about half of what you need to know to understand the manoeuvrings in the upcoming Presidential election (most of the other half is where the money is coming from, and unless the courts do something unexpected, that’s going to be kept secret from you):

  It takes 270 electoral votes to [...]

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• Cost of Bank Bailouts >> Cost of Science

  Number of comments: 4
  

  The UK has (allegedly) spent more on saving banks in a year than it has spent on science “since Jesus”.

  – BBC News, spotted via boingboing’s One year of econopocalypse would pay for a civilization’s worth of science

  So if we took the bailout money and gave it to [...]

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• Free Riders and Public Goods — Real and Fake

  Number of comments: 9
  

  One of the first things you learn when you study public welfare economics or public choice theory is that the private provision of public goods runs up against the problem of free riders — people who benefit but don’t pay. This is one of the core justifications for the governmental [...]

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• Not the Night Before Christmas

  For reasons unknown to me, the blog is sometimes showing Pentagon Whitewash Watch (posted Dec. 24, 2011) as the lead item.

  I’m working on it….

  [...]
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• The Ultimate Ethnic Joke

  Via Gene Spafford’s ‘yuks’ mailing list comes this category-killer of a joke:

  An Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman, a Welshman, a Latvian, a Turk, a German, an Indian, several Americans (including a Hawaiian and an Alaskan), an Argentinean, a Dane, an Australian, a Slovak, an Egyptian, a Japanese, a Moroccan, a [...]

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• Xmarks is Back

  Number of comments: 1
  

  Xmarks is back. I found this on their twitter feed:

  We experienced unscheduled downtime, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please try a “repair” for ongoing errors: [bit.ly]

  Which leads you to this ‘perfect storm’ explanation:

  Xmarks bookmark sync has experienced unscheduled downtime over the last 20 hours. This morning the decision was [...]

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• Xmarks is Down

  Number of comments: 1
  

  My Xmarks bookmark synching service stopped working. I got a whole bunch of different error messages, most of which made it sound like it was either my fault, or the fault of a gateway between me and Xmarks.

  But in fact, it seems to be a server problem [...]

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