From my friend Manuel Lora.
This is wild. I found this when my 6 year old started telling me about how the Angler fish is one of the weirdest creatures b/c of its mating ritual. He described it but it didn’t sound right, so I googled it-…-sure enough, he was right. I found this list: I think the angler should be #1 not #7. But the octopus, #1, is weird.
Heroic!
Firefox extension liberates US court docs from paywall
A new Firefox extension created by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton aims to tear down the federal judiciary’s PACER paywall. It uploads legal documents to a freely accessible mirror that is hosted by the Internet Archive.
Latest pretentious terms from today’s Slate Political Gabfest (feel free to email me suggestions or leave them in the comments to the main page):
- on Martha’s Vineyard [PG 8-12-09, Plotz–as if everyone knows it’s an island]
- peripatetically [PG 8-12-09, Plotz]
- The Great Fractional Reserve/Freebanking Debate
- On Coinbase, Bitcoin, Fractional-Reserve Banking, and Irregular Deposits
- Am I a Bitcoin Maximalist?
- UK Proposal for Banking Reform: Fractional-Reserve Banking versus Deposits and Loans
- Musings on Fractional-Reserve Banking in a Bitcoin Age; Physicalist Shock Absorber Metaphors
- Michael S. Milano, “Privacy and Fungibility: The Forgotten Virtues of Sound Money,” Mises Wire (07/05/2025)
From the Mises blog; archived comments below.
Someone asked me the proper way to view deposit contracts, in the context of a discussion about fractional-reserve banking (FRB). He noted that in my A Libertarian Theory of Contract I state that contractual obligations can either be “to do” or “to give”; and that “to do” contracts are generally not enforceable due to specific performance, but can only result in damages if non performance actually occurs. This implies that the only real enforceable obligations are “to give” something. My correspondent asked me if this means that a deposit contract is not really a contract–i.e., based on the idea that a deposit is a “to do” contract (i.e., safekeep this deposit), while a loan would be a “to give” contract (i.e., return the money at the end of the term). An edited version of my reply follows.
First, I don’t view a loan as an obligation to return “the” money. It’s just a transfer of title to a certain sum of future money (IF you own it at the time). See my Contracts paper, pp. 32 et seq.
Second: in my article I wrote: “Contractual obligations may be classified as obligations to do or to give. An obligation to give may be viewed as a transfer of title to property, as it is an obligation to give ownership of the thing to another. An obligation to do is an obligation to perform a specific action, such as an obligation to sing at a wedding or paint someone’s house. ” The purpose of noting the positive law’s obligation to do/to give classification was to show that even in the current law, it’s really all about title transfer–to set the stage for Rothbard/Evers’s title-transfer theory of contract. Actually, I don’t view contracts as really being obligations at all; they are just title transfers. If I sell you my apple for $1, then the title to my apple transfers to you, even if/while I still (temporarily) possess it. Now, I am holding your apple, and I now have an obligation to let you have it, when you demand it, but not because of a contract or obligation to do, but just because of property rights, which the contract has rearranged. Contracts change, or rearrange property titles. Once this happens, people can then have different obligations–obligations to respect the property rights of the owners. If you find yourself in possession of property belonging to another person because a contract’s title-transfer provision has been triggered, even though it was your money a minute before, you now have to respect the wishes of the (new) owner.
In this post, Tibor’s Tantrum, the blogger chastises my friend, the noted libertarian scholar Tibor Machan, for lacking a sense of proportion. This charge is unfair, but he does point to a somewhat amusing exchange in the comments to this thread.
A recent MacBreak Weekly podcast had a very cool recommendation: The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time, and I learned about a nice iPhone/mobile phone app, Shoot It!, in a recent GeekBrief episode.
Forbidden City is an application for all platforms, providing an amazing “3D Virtual World of the Forbidden City in Beijing.” China and IBM apparently spent $2M developing this free application.
Shoot It! allows you to create a postcard from your iPhone from any picture in your phone, and have it mailed to whoever you want, for a modest fee. I plan to use this from now on, on vacation, instead of buying a postcard, addressing, buying a stamp, and finding a post office. The only drawback that I see is they don’t include a way to upload a picture from your computer to your account — you have to use your phone. That’s stupid. If I have a nice pic I took with a camera on vacation, I have to first put it on the computer, then sync with the iphone to get it on there, or email it to myself and save the email attachment to my iPhone photo library, and then use Shoot It!. I can’t see why they won’t let you do it from the website interface as well; but this will probably be fixed and in any event is just a minor annoyance.
http://twit.tv/mbw153
[Update: see various biographical pieces on my publications page, including Alan D. Bergman, Adopting Liberty: The Stephan Kinsella Story (2025).]
Gary North delivered a wonderful lecture last month during Mises University 2009 (the same day I gave my own speech), “Calling and Career as an Austrian School Scholar” (a shorter version of this was in the LRC podcast 127. Gary North: Making a Difference, Making a Living, which is also excellent). North talks calling and occupation. Calling is “the most important thing you can do with your life in which you are most difficult to replace.” Occupation is “how you put food on the table.” Occasionally they are the same, but often not; but there is no reason not to arrange your life so as to have both. He talks about how to combine them or at least have both in your life, and centers his talk around some examples, notably Burt Blumert and William Volker.
Also see Paul Graham’s “What You’ll Wish You’d Known (“I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.”)
Update: see also this video by Scott Galloway. A friend said: “I love his takes on “balance” and “follow your passion” being bullshit, which, while I think most people my age know it, few seem to explicitly say it and teach it to young people.”
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Libertarian Papers was launched in late January, 2009. The Editorial Board and I are extremely pleased with our progress to date. At this point it is appropriate to briefly assess our first half-year.
First, we were lucky to acquire such an outstanding Editorial Board, with world-class scholars working in the libertarian tradition–a veritable who’s who of Austro-libertarianism. Second, with the generous support of the Mises Institute, we were able to design this handsome and useful website in a short time.
The journal is already included in a number of leading indexing/abstracting services, including Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory; Cabell’s Directory of Publishing Opportunities; International Political Science Abstracts; The Philosopher’s Index; Mises Institute Literature Index; Directory of Open Access Journals; HeinOnline; EBSCOhost; and Gale/Cengage. And we have already established the O.P. Alford III Prize in Libertarian Scholarship, a $1000 prize awarded annually to the best article published in Libertarian Papers in the preceding calendar year.
Just as we hoped, the online format of Libertarian Papers has given us the flexibility, speed, and accessibility readers–and authors–love. I am personally most proud of the quality and variety of the 35 articles we have published to date, which include submissions from young and independent scholars–as well as from established libertarian intellectuals such as Narveson, Higgs, van Dun, Salin, Kukathas, Block, and Machan. And, astoundingly, in our first half year we have published five previously unpublished (or, in the case of Leoni, obscure and unavailable) works by towering thinkers such as Mises, Rothbard, Bruno Leoni, and Adolf Reinach.
Further, although we are an online journal, we have produced our first print archive covering the first 17 articles; a second print archive is in the works. And incredibly, we have recruited an army of libertarian volunteers to turn many of our articles into audio versions for our free podcast, and to help copyedit articles. These (mostly young/student) libertarians are amazing, and give reason for optimism about the future in these dark times.
My personal gratitude, therefore, to our Editorial Board, outside referees, volunteer podcast narrators and copyeditors, the Mises Institute, authors, readers, and other supporters.
Stay tuned for things to come! As always, comments and suggestions–and submissions–are welcome.
Yours in liberty, Stephan Kinsella
[Cross-posted at LP and Mises blog]
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