- Tom Selling from Accounting Onion on Loan Accounting Standards: This post is very interesting and extremely reminiscent of a piece by Matt Levine about Michael Dell buying out Dell which probably deserves to be it’s own link.
And it is unauditable to boot. If you believe that another financial crisis is just a question of time, there will be a generation of auditors that will once again have to answer for turning a blind eye to market indicators of deteriorating economic conditions.
- Scott Sumner on whether or not we should build more infrastructure (and who should or shouldn’t build it):
Though the bridge took only 11 months to build in 1912, it will take close to five years to repair today at a huge cost in dollars and mass delays.
- Alex Tabarrok commenting on the same Larry Summers article: he takes a more direct angle about how to address some of the problems.
First, it’s often the case that buildings of little historical worth are preserved by rules and regulations that are used as a pretext to slow competitors, maintain monopoly rents, and keep neighborhoods in a kind of aesthetic stasis that benefits a small number of people at the expense of many others.
Second, a confident nation builds so that future people may look back and marvel at their ancestor’s ingenuity and aesthetic vision. A nation in decline looks to the past in a vain attempt to “preserve” what was once great. Preservation is what you do to dead butterflies.
- Kaleigh Rogers at Vice on cursive as a going concern in education: some of the arguments the proponents of cursive put forth are hilarious, hopefully most kids aren’t wasting time learning handwriting when they could be learning anything else.
New Jersey … to make cursive writing mandatory in the state curriculum. “So that students are able to read our most valued historical documents in their original form … this bill requires that cursive be included in the public school curriculum.”
Oh, and for books, I finished the third Dune book, Children of Dune. Much more like the first, and much less of a grind than reading the second book.
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