THOUGHTS ON Cats And Responsibility.

AT AMAZON, the Electronics outlet sale.

STEVE JOBS: World’s Greatest Philanthropist. “Our youth are growing up with the strange notion that the only way to make a big difference in this world, or to be of service, is to work for a nonprofit organization, or become the next Bill Gates and establish a private foundation, or to start some kind of ‘social enterprise,’ often without any understanding of what that means. . . . What a loss to humanity it would have been if Jobs had dedicated the last 25 years of his life to figuring out how to give his billions away, instead of doing what he does best.”

HEH: “I’m chalking this up as further evidence that we’re living in Bob Heinlein’s ‘Crazy Years’.”

And there’s a lot of other evidence to go with it.

UPDATE: Rob Crawford writes: “Look back at the 2008 election and tell me we didn’t elect a Nehemiah Scudder.” Well, he’s no Joe Douglas.

TAXPROF: Obama Lacks Capitol Hill Chops to Push Through Tax Reform.

UPDATE: He told us he had no chops.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE: Saint Warren’s halo gets a little more tarnish. “In between opining on how to fix the US tax system, Warren Buffett still runs Berkshire Hathaway. As James McRitchie points out, however, Saint Warren’s corporate governance practices leave something to be desired.”

BLOGGING ABOUT STRATEGY at StrategyProfs.

MY PIECE ON SECOND AMENDMENT PENUMBRAS is up to #1 on the SSRN list of top downloads for recent articles. Thanks to everyone who downloaded it!

AT AMAZON, music Warehouse Deals.

FOR HELICOPTERS, an emergency backup electric motor.

SANDWICH GENERATION: CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE. “Seniors are struggling to cope with rising medical and long-term-care expenses just as their investment portfolios and home values are shrinking, and their middle-age children sometimes need to pitch in. Those same children, who breathed a sigh of relief when the college tuition bills for their own offspring finally ended, may also be fielding requests for help from the kids — or even a boomerang brood on their doorstep.”

BAD NEWS FOR BIRTH CONTROL PILLS: Women on birth control date bedroom “duds,” study suggests.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Global Overselling Of Higher Education. “Central planning — of the whole economy, or of the housing market, or of education — always wreaks a great deal of damage.”

FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF unfortunate tattoos.

J.R. DUNN: Beating Decline: Miltech and the Survival of the U.S. An interesting essay over at Baen.

TAKING ALL THE FUN OUT OF THINGS: Physicists Offer Mundane Explanations for Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos.

CHANGE: More teenage boys than ever are using condoms when first having sex.

JOHN STOSSEL: Government Is The Biggest Job Killer.

I guess Obama doesn’t know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn’t make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline — profit and loss — contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you’ll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific — all those rail lines we learned about in history class — milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

Incredible.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION? US Copyright Czar Cozied Up To Content Industry.

UNEXPECTEDLY! California revenues down by $705 million. “Revenues flowed into state coffers at a lower rate than projected in September, short about $302 million, putting California a total of $705.5 million below expectations for the first three months of the fiscal year.”

AT AMAZON, lots of coupons.

HEH:

REASON TV: Anti-Semitic Protester At Occupy Wall Street. “Here’s one of the protesters Reason.tv spoke to at Occupy Wall Street in Los Angeles on October 12, 2011. She identifies herself as Patricia McAllister and as an employee of Los Angeles Unified School District. ‘I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government… they need to be run out of this country,’ she said.”

From the comments, cruelly but accurately: “Why am I not surprised she works for a school district?”

HOW GOVERNMENT SPENDING has impoverished us all!