Thomas Sowell asks if thinking has become obsolete.

I doubt if this is a new phenomenon. I suspect that it’s been a problem down the ages, as have many aspects of human nature.

[Update a couple minutes later]

More evidence for my proposition.

The carbon emission offset market in Europe is in crisis because of an unexpected 50% price drop in the last couple of weeks. True to Europe, the traders are demanding government intervention to prop up the price(!) of carbon offsets. While it is true that the governments can afford to buy more, why would they want to? The high price of hydrocarbons will curb carbon emissions.

Assuming that the coal/methane/nuclear balance continues to move toward nuclear for electricity, high gasoline prices mean less carbon. So either we will run out of oil or we will have high CO₂, not both.

Louis Ruykeyser has died.

This is really a shame, because in the context of modern lifestyles and medicine, he wasn’t that old. I was a devoted Wall Street Week fan for decades.

Despite his loss of the ultimate battle, I’ll always remember him as the eternal optimist, an attitude well justified by events.

According to this, pennies are now worth less than their cost of manufacture. My rule for getting rid of a coin is the point at which you can no longer purchase anything with a single one of it. In fact, at this point, with multi-hundred-thousand-dollar houses, and new cars costing over twenty thousand dollars, is there even anything that you can buy with a nickel any more?

Time to can the coin, and come up with some other way to honor Mr. Lincoln.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

Ron Bailey explodes it.

In The Ethicist column in the New York Times Magazine last month, Randy Cohen talked about organ transplant sales being unethical:

For a system of acquiring organs to be ethical, it must be equitable, which is not the case when one economic class is exploited (and put at significant medical risk) for the benefit of another. And exploitation it is when the seller is not making a truly voluntary decision but responding to financial desperation.

Is it unethical to hire a maid who is financially desperate? If I had trouble getting a job out of college, I would be financially desperate, but I would be very grateful for the opportunity to sell my labor.

Organs are different than jobs. But the difference is not financial desperation.

Well, actually, power from the people:

I’ve always thought it’d be cool if we had giant turbines powered simply by brawn, sort of like that mill-thingy that made Conan so strong in the first Conan movie. I’m not talking slave labor, but if we could work out the technological kinks we could hire people at minimum wage to push a giant wheel around and around generating electricity much the same way dams do. Teenagers who couldn’t find other work could do it. They’d get in shape, stay out of trouble, and earn a few bucks. Unemployed people would always have at least one fall back job available to them. It would help with health care costs as it would provide ample exercise. There would be no damage to the environment and pretty much the only foot print would be, well, footprints. People who worked nights or in bad weather would be paid a bit extra. PIRG hippy volunteers could do it too, in their spare time. Every human turbine spin is one less gallon of oil pumped from the ground.

Though, as he notes in the preamble graf, he’s not sure about the economics of it. I can assure him that it’s nuts.

But it reminds me of an idea I and some colleagues at Rockwell had back in the eighties about how to get the public more involved in space. Since one can view the space program as the modern-day equivalent of a cathedral, or building pyramids, why not get the masses into the act? Instead of using those big diesel engines on the Crawler at the Cape, why not harness human muscle power? We could have hundreds of people–volunteers–pulling on ropes, hauling the giant vehicle down the causeway. I think that it would be quite symbolic of…something.

Maybe.

Housing starts are down, more than expected.

Just anecdotally, we’ve had several houses on our street for sale for months, and they’re not moving. One house down the street was on the market for almost seven hundred thousand last fall. It’s now for sale by the owner. He had marked it down to six something. Yesterday I noticed that the sign said “price reduced” and the flyer no long had a price.

I also noted that Zillow has dropped its estimate of our house in east Boca Raton over the past few months, by about ten percent.