Economics

Search Wars

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Buried deep in this NYT article is this:

And Google has embarked on an ambitious secret effort known as Project Ocean, according to a person involved with the operation. With the cooperation of Stanford University, the company now plans to digitize the entire collection of the vast Stanford Library published before 1923, which is no longer limited by copyright restrictions. The project could add millions of digitized books that would be available exclusively via Google.

This is really good stuff but, since copyright protection has lapsed on these books, I wonder why they would be available exclusievely via Google.
Will Wilkenson is ‘jacked’ about this and also notes that:

This is, by the way, what Microsoft is really good for. It puts the fear of Jesus in the Googles of the world, and makes ’em hustle to make us happy. So what I’m really hoping for is that Microsoft comes close in the search war, and succeeds in creating a superfast integrated search in Windows that allows me to search my own measly 30gb hard drive at something close to the speed that Google manages to search the whole goddam internet, but falls short in the end because of all the glorious innovations the Google geniuses lay at our feet in order to keep us from straying.

Things should be pretty exciting in this space over the next several years.
Via Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution.

Let’s Balance the Budget

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Dwight Meredith takes a shot at balancing the budget for w and the punch line is:

Okay, we have cut all of the fat. Waste, fraud and abuse have been eliminated. Perhaps we nicked a little muscle along the way. The problem is that we have cut only $385 billion out of a deficit of $521 billion.
The other problem is that the only discretionary spending left in the budget is for Defense and Homeland Security.
I am not kidding. We have eliminated all federal government discretionary functions except Defense and Homeland Security and the budget remains more than $130 billion in the hole.

Of course, w has no interest in balancing the budget and could hit his target of reducing the deficit by 50% by making some of the cuts Dwight enumerates but there does not appear to be any such proposal in this years budget.
The federal budget situation is a mess and there is no meaningful excuse that the current administration and its republocrat accomplices in congress can offer up to cleanse themselves.

Doing Your Work?

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The Speculist suggests that:

Thinking Machines…Maybe closer than we think.
Maybe already here:

This is one time you do need to go read Phil’s post as well as the original article. Thaler’s work appears to be pretty amazing and very interesting.
And for you folks a little concerned about what kind of work you will be doing 20-30 years from now here are some thoughts about what you might not be doing:

All of the possible applications for Creativity Machines make some people uneasy. The machines could easily supplant people for many mundane jobs, and Thaler predicts that some traditionally human-only jobs, including laboratory scientist, could be up for grabs. Computer chemists could soon design new compounds and figure out how to make them.

While a ‘leisure’ culture is a long way off it appears to be time for serious work on what it means to be human in a world where work, if it exists at all, is very different from today.

The Fed and You

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Have you been wondering about yesterday’s drop in the value of your stock portfolio?
The national news gives you the shallow version: Fed changes words and values drop.
For the deep version with all the stories behind the story read Bilmon’s analysis. There is more going on here then you might imagine. Here is his summary:

This means the Fed is going to have to balance the demands of some politically powerful domestic interest groups against the demands of financially powerful foreign constituencies. And as central bankers in any number of developing countries can attest, this is never an easy, or pleasant, job.

We’ll all get to live through the results.