quick hits

Sitting on the corner

The downside of public policy is...that it is public. At least in this case. Simple solutions win the debates. Complex solutions win the wars. But complex solutions can be explained "simply" as things like "muddling", "dithering", or as they call critical thinking down in Texas "gobbledygook" and thus dismissed from public attentions. The immediate example I came up with here is drug policy (which is naturally referenced after the immigration debate. Thanks school/work zero tolerance policies for being so asinine as to apply to a basic logic failure). Money line:
"A good bit of mental hygiene might simply be to ask oneself, whenever one’s policy preference can be described as a corner solution, whether that preference is held for its simplicity rather than its actual utility."

If you haven't seen this yet.
Speaking of those drug laws.



All you ever wanted to know about the Eurozone banking system.
For now at least. While Europe is not quite in the position of having lots of people with a comfort with a central banking system (for all of Europe, individual countries in Europe have long had more direct influence over their banking systems through central banking), it does seem to have adopted a backwards sense of local fiscal control and central monetary control. For the type of system they have at present, it would almost be preferable to do it the other way around, with a more central method of loaning out money to countries for fiscal purposes and local monetary policies, so things like Greece (and probably Spain at some point, if not the rest of the PIGS states) could be avoided by depreciation of the currency market.

For dessert: sex and sexual signaling 101

The kind of amusing part is the definition of "sex" as it applies first to oneself and then to a potential significant other. It sounds something like "that was in another area code, that doesn't count". Except when its YOU (the other person) that did it. Then it's a tragedy of the highest order. The other interesting part was the cross cultural bias toward men being afforded some sexual advantages over women. Though that's hardly news.

What was perhaps "newsworthy" (except it was in the older study report from last year), and psychologically interesting for the signaling effects it involves, was that women were less likely to identify something as "sex".