qui tacet consentire videtur

Eric Crampton on Bryan Caplan’s EconLog writes (Hat tip MR):

A grad school colleague once hit me up for a donation for his participation in a Habitat for Humanity project in the Philippines. While he agreed that comparative advantage would dictate that he instead work more in the States and donate the money to hire folks in the Philippines more competent than him to do the construction work, he also noted that that alternative wouldn’t get him a trip to the Philippines. And, of course, I then declined to subsidise his vacation. In that case, it was pretty clear that the charity was bundling large benefits for solicitor/participants with its fundraising mechanism: the charity that bundles private benefits for participants with its activities will attract more participants.

We have similar vacation subsidies in SG except that taxpayers here do not get to decline (I may be wrong on this, but I do think overseas expeditions are partly subsidized by the state even if most of the costs are borne by the participants). I wonder if the resources foregone (ie the opportunity cost of the taxes, participants time, SIF’s administrative costs etc) might have done more for the economic development of these societies in private hands…

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Rob Horning notes that because certain goods (counterculture, counter^2 culture and infinite spiral of more-cool-than-you signals etc) are valued because of their obscurity/scarcity, the long tail may decrease rather than increase the range of consumer choice. Counterintuitive? Yes.

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After escaping the office on Friday I made my way down to the airport to pick up Nara-noona (from my APEC YP team) from Terminal 1. We walked around a bit at Bugis, where I took her on a short detour to the Central Library and got myself a yellowed copy of The Book of the New Sun: Sword and Citadel. Yes, I’m terrible at being a tour guide.

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Please update your links and feed aggregators to the new address at www.quitacet.net

Para Para disParity

After watching Pirates at yet another YR gathering, we passed by an arcade and so began the Para Para challenge between JK and myself, sponsored by WT. As first-time players we would challenge each other on the same song. Unfortunately I was completely defeated by his parapara skills, honed by years of salsa training. Way to represent Oxford, JK! It’s a lot harder than it looks, though Hinoi Asuka (ultimate cuteness) makes it look so easy.

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I spent Sunday afternoon at Cosfest V, where I attended as a random schoolboy (i.e. ren’ai game protagonist) in a high school uniform Zyl helped me to get a while back. In retrospect I probably should have brought a bag and changed at Downtown East, after all the stares I got on the train. I had only planned to stay an hour or two, but the rain kept me there the whole day. The upside was that I got to witness a subcultural market phenomenon firsthand.

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As the ending credits roll for the final episode, I struggle for words that adequately describe the joy that is Haruhism, and fail miserably. It defies genre conventions, yet is a paean to them. It is, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, a tipping point in animation. I would rank this in my top ten favorites along escaflowne, last exile and hachimitsu to clover.

Before I say any more about the series, some perspective on anime fandom is in order.

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Excellent address by Andrew Abbott from the U of C. Key takeaway:

Or on the other hand you can seek education. It will not be easy. We have only helpful exercises for you. We can’t give you the thing itself. And there will be extraordinary temptations — to spend whole months wallowing in a concentration that doesn’t work for you because you have some myth about your future, to blow off intellectual effort in all but one area because you are too lazy to challenge yourself, to wander off to Europe for a year of enlightenment that rapidly turns into touristic self-indulgence. There will be the temptations of timidity, too, temptations to forgo all experimentation, to miss the glorious randomness of college, to give up the prodigal possibilities that — let me tell you — you will never find again; temptations to go rigidly through the motions and then wonder why education has eluded you.

Though I wonder if he’s merely playing with definitions of education and skills, I do think this bit is right. Hat tip from SQ, my whartonite buddy who should be so pleased that he self-selected into the culture of success.