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Yes, it is showing already in Leon, Nicaragua, as Bryan Caplan had predicted.  You should see it.  Cameron has absorbed a lot from Princess Mononoke.  The aliens don't seem to trade much or accumulate capital.  Like the Olympics ceremony in Beijing, it raises the bar for a lot of subsequent efforts.  The crowd seemed unmoved by the theme of "las indigenas."  It has interesting themes on disability and also the diversity of intelligences.  The three hours go by very quickly.  It's not perfect.  People who can reach other planets still fire bullets from machine guns.  Dubbing makes all the dialogue sound corny and thus it limits the impact of the real clunkers, which do come every now and then.  I'll see it again, in 3-D next time.

Related

  • That's the excellent bagel and smoked fish shop at 3rd Ave., just north of 50th St. I order my bagel from a gentleman with a thick New York accent and he eyes me suspiciously.  Finally he grunts out, in a tone slightly less than that of accusation: Server: "Where are you from?"

  • Political jobs would be torture for most people.  You have no freedom.  You are underpaid and over-bugged.  You lose a lot of your privacy.  You have to stop writing emails or saying what you think.  You don't get to read many good books or go for many quiet walks.  It's hard to be a non-conformist.  And so on. Yet it's really hard to get top political jobs.  So who gets them?  People who truly, deeply love the power.

  • James Kwak's calculation of the value of tax exclusion is incomplete.  He leaves out the exclusion from the payroll tax, worth 15.3 percent to the person in his example and to most people, and 2.9 percent (at the margin) for the rest who earn more than the OASDI taxable maximum.  The correct math is that the gross wage is 1 + .0765 = 1.0765 to allow for the employer's payroll tax cost.  The take home pay that could be used, after both payroll and income tax for someone in the 15 percent bracket is 1 -

  • What are the exact conditions for counting "transhumanism" as having been attained?  Would you rather have a worse trip with better memories, or a more fun trip with fewer memories?  Why do some Senators act so obnoxiously to their subordinates?  Why don't more people from Hollywood go into politics?  From here on in, what is the best case scenario for your life?  Does it increase the productivity of a man if he marries a very religious woman?  If so, through what mechanism?  If China starts first with explicit genetic engineering, doe

  • Study this model and try to improve on it.  Here is further historical information.

  • This Saturday and Sunday, GMU email will be down completely, it seems.  You won't be able to reach me or Alex through the usual email channel for that time.  For me, use my gmail address those two days, if you wish.  I don't want to put the address on-line but it's a lot like my gmu email address.  Don't mail to it after this weekend, though, because I use it for storage and I don't check it regularly.  Sorry for the inconvenience, reader email is for me a positive externality and I very much appreciate all of the great mat

  • Alex and I will be there for the Southern Economics Association meetings, along with many other economists.  I don't know the city well, as I've been there only once.  There might be a bit of free time.  What should we do?  Where should we eat?

  • Richard, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:

  • Adam asks: If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be?

  • I have never heard a market-oriented economist argue that a rise in the minimum wage boosts the demand for labor.  You might try this argument: "The government is certifying that these workers are worth this much.  The government is defining the market price.  Entrepreneurs will believe that price and hire workers in the expectation of finding an equivalent or even superior marginal product.  The government said that was the right price." 

 
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