I was surprised to find a story on the interesting, but usually left-leaning Boing Boing, about a property battle written in favor of the homeowner.

The 87-year-old mother of the founding editor of Wired magazine was planning to build an addition to her Berkeley home: a first floor bedroom for herself, and an upstairs bedroom for a caretaker. The woman was absolutely frightened to use the stairs to get to her current bedroom, because an accident could stop her from leading her mobile lifestyle.

However, a couple of her neighbors protested her decision to add on to her home, acting as if her expansion was akin to a Wal-Mart invading their idyllic, progressive neighborhood. They even went so far as to petition the local council to designate her home as a landmark when they ran out of legal options.

Though her home was eventually deemed a landmark, the council unanimously voted to let her build the addition anyway. Score one for property rights!

Read the first post about the story here. The second one is here.

Tim Noah, eyeing the 19th hole:

If 18 Bush electors betray both their party and the popular vote and cast their votes for John Kerry on Dec. 13when, as we Electoral College bores like to point out, the real presidential election takes place in state capitals around the countrythen John Kerry will become president.

Tim Noah, moments earlier, still going over every blown stroke at the 18th hole:

If John Kerry had gotten 118,776 more votes in Ohio, he would have claimed Ohio’s 20 electors, giving him 272 electors to Bush’s 266. For want of 118,776 votes, John Kerry lost the presidency. I’m not going to pretend I don’t still brood about this.

I wish I could be the first to say . . .

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

. . . And perhaps technically I am, but a hat tip must go to Hit & Run.

For unfortunate reality-based reasons, I have had to spend quite a bit of time recently thinking about the practice of teaching, which has ended up with me reading things like this interview with University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson.

He’s a big booster of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve never read Emerson, what little Thoreau I’ve seen has struck me as a bunch of hippie claptrap, and lines like

Thoreau is a tough, brutal critic of one central tenet — one central tendency in American life, and that is consumerism, all right? Simplify, simplify, simplify. There`s no writer who knows more about the perils of consumerism.

don’t exactly inspire me to pursue it further. (Thoreau’s noble embrace of asceticism led, if I recall correctly, to his dying of TB.) Regardless, Edmundson seems like an interesting fellow, and there’s some good stuff here on the seemingly deathless issue of politics in academia:

Also, I think a lot of the kind of angry conservative movement that rubs me the wrong me, the Rush Limbaugh kind of stuff, came about because people going to college felt, All my professors are liberal, I could never give them my reservations about the liberal line, so that those things festered and got darker and nastier. And then, you know, welcome to talk radio. There they are, expanded to 90 times their size. If they`d been listened to in a tolerant way and disagreed with in an affectionate way, we might have a little bit better civil discourse in the country… one of the things that English departments, in particular, need to do is become receptive to hiring more people who have conservative political views. You can`t have a real dialogue if all you have are liberals, leftists and leftists to the left of leftists.

I particularly like the phrase “disagreed with in an affectionate way”.

Read all the way to the end and, in lieu of a cookie, you get an amusing Hayek-related moment.

Everyone’s busy with finals and whatnot, so you may have missed this little gem. Some people, this Ailee Slater being one, apparently consider the problem to be that the undergraduate degree has not yet been sufficiently devalued:

Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the University system makes absolutely no sense. Students pay teachers to educate us, yet they are then allowed to tell us how much we’re learning. The whole situation seems akin to a boss paying her employee to clean toilets and the employee turning around and telling the employer how much she is or isn’t happy with the cleaning job. If I’m paying someone to do my housekeeping, I’ll be the one to tell the receiver of my hard-earned money exactly how well they did. Shouldn’t it be the same with education?

Ms. Slater has paid good money to be told that she understands things, and she expects to be told that she understands them, chop-chop. The question of whether or not this is actually the case seems to be unworthy of consideration. It all makes one wonder: why doesn’t she just go ahead and ask her housekeeper to issue her with a BA? It could scarcely be less meaningful, and the domestic help wouldn’t dare get uppity.

There’s more, much more. This plaintive theme recurs:

I pay the teacher to teach me, and then I get slapped with the label of failure if the teacher deems that I haven’t learned the correct information?

That is absolutely correct. Well done! I see this “college” thing hasn’t been a complete waste of time after all.

(See also: this editorial. Summary: You can’t expect us to work this week! We just had a four-day weekend! We have to ease back into this stuff!)

I cannot believe somebody beat us to this.

As the OSPIRG campaign against the high price of textbooks continues to demonstrate their complete and utter inability to understand markets, a number of Econobloggers have taken a look and come to varying conclusions.

Henry at Crooked Timber suggests that textbooks have relatively inelastic demand. His intitial comment about “low demand” causing high prices on some books is, umm…backwards…he’s intuition is correct: that it costs so much to produce limited runs the books are expensive, but that factors in as “high marginal costs” not “low demand.” In a world where all firms have some pricing power, especially in publishing where one publisher might have exclusive rights to a book, higher marginal costs will mean significanly high prices as the monopolists extract rents from the market. Anyway, moving right along…

Alex Tabarrok suggests that third-party decision making is the cause. He also draws a nice parallel with healthcare, and I’m much persuaded by his take on that.

Mark Steckbeck suggests that the increase in resale has led publishers to capture the resale value in their initial price. He even does a present-value calculation, exciting!

I’m inclined to think that it’s probably all of these things in concert. Any one would be enough to increase prices some, all of them at once is enough to really amplify the effect. If kids are actually achieving a net welfare gain through resale, then the OSPIRG kiddies are trying to make people worse off, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one. Oh, and you’ll be excited to note that there’s an OSPIRG blog.

UPDATE: Commenters at Coffee Grounds point out that in a high fixed-cost industry, the supply curve is discontinuous and therefore low demand can lead to higher prices because of the discontinuity in supply. Fixed costs play a role in the entry/exit decision of the firm, and because the marginal cost of the first unit is so very high, the price of it will be as well. I considered adding a couple of graphs to the update, but stopped myself. If you must have graphs, email me and I shall construct them.

I may not be the prolific photographer and documentarian that Blog is, but I do own a mediocre digital camera, live in Texas, work in a cubicle, and have very little to do. Pictures, words lend meaning, entertainment to website. Clickable images lead to larger, more clear photographs.

This is a piece of paper I recently received in the mail stating that yes, in fact, I did complete my “studies” at the University of Oregon. Avoid finishing the requirements for this thing at all possible costs.

This is my workspace.
There are many desks like it,
But this one is mine.

The South has risen again! In hotel form! Funny Bit of Knowledge that would be labled “irony” by some: The Robert E. Lee hotel is now low-income housing for old people and impoverished blacks.

This is, as far as I can tell, the only park in all of downtown San Antonio. Of course it is outside my cubicle window to taunt me. That statue is Col. Frost. He founded the bank over 100 years ago. Nevermind, you don’t care

The practically named $6 Lot* where I park my car. Can you find it? If you can locate my car in the photograph you win the car-finding contest!

I am important.

Important enough to be toward the bottom of the sign, anyway.

Tim’s Cubicle: still cleaner than the OC office.

From a law firm around the corner. Gamez: 13g41 5upp0r7 4 1337 h4qx0rz.

That is all, nothing more to see here, move along children, move along.

*That’s $6 monthly.

I just got a lid on the recent attack of comment spam hocking DirecTV (which TOTALLY SUCKS, comments to the contrary notwithstanding).

Anyway, as I was plowing through the flood (how’s that for metaphor mixology?), I noticed that one of our authors drew considerably more spam than the others. The numbers I have are:

Tim: 10
Olly: 5
Sho: 4
Dan: 2
Flood: 1
Pete: 1
Tyler: 1
Everyone else: 0

It seems that something about Tim’s posts is considerably more market-friendly than the rest of our work. I suggest we start selling advertising on them.

Tonight is the Collegiate Network’s 25th anniversary here in DC. While the Commentator has always been something like the black sheep of the family, the National Review’s John J. Miller thinks we belong:

Thats sort of what the CN has done for the conservative movement. For the past quarter century, it has supported a loose association of student publications whose names you probably do know: the Dartmouth Review, the Harvard Salient, the Stanford Review, the Oregon Commentator, the Virginia Advocate the list is long. Just about every elite college campus in America is now home to a conservative newspaper or magazine.

Bret and I are unpacking our best suits (for me, my only suit) out of the back of our closets and plan to rub elbows with conservative journalism’s elite. If anyone there doubts the need for a dissenting voice at this school, I’ll be sure to mention the vagitators…

It’s happened. It’s finally happened. After years of waiting – years in which I was not sure I would be around to see this – it is upon us. If you are one of our curious liberal visitors wondering how one could become so alienated as to be uncomfortable with the seemingly innocuous term “liberal”, if you are reading this outside Eugene and think that we’re just making this shit up, even if you never bother to follow the links in these damn posts – then you must read this.

I present to you the Ultimate UO Story. Bar none.

I can’t even Spew it. I’d have to Spew the whole thing. It’s pure gold.

Background? OK. Last year the term “Vagitator” was coined to describe the protestors surrounding the Women’s Center production of the Vagina Monologues. The story’s comedy potential got it some attention nationally (the Volokhs, in particular), and this must have pleased the participants, because this year they sound like they’re shooting for cable news.

“The fact that they had auditions means that some people are automatically excluded.”

Yes. Yes, it does. Just read it. If this story is for real, and not something Gabe Bradley has made up for giggles, it may be the greatest thing I have ever seen in my life. Meanwhile, student groups are being asked for their input on the cast list. Needless to say, I have suggested Tyler for a role.