What’s New with Wu

My long planned series, American Lawbreaking, is running this week in Slate.

I don’t spend much time on health care policy.  But this following from the National Review blog — suggesting we assume away the problem — is really astonishing:

There simply are no longer genuinely “poor” people in sufficient numbers. As Miss Shaidle points out, if you’re poor today, it’s almost always for behavioral reasons - behavior which the state chooses not to discourage but to reward. Nonetheless, progressive types persist in deluding themselves that there are vast masses of the “needy” out there that only the government can rescue.

Its true: if we assume there are no such thing as poor people, many of the nation’s problems are much easier to solve.  Even better, if we assume that we won’t get sick, we don’t even need a health care system at all.

This kind of writing is a sad parody of neo-classical economic reasoning.  Academics do make assumptions sometimes to simplify a problem.  But no one who is responsible or an adult thinker thinks that that makes the assumptions true.

I honestly thought this was a story in the Onion when I saw the headline out of the corner of my eye.

But the Onion actually has good record for predicting the future - reread this from 2000: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’

My patience with Apple has begun to wear thin, when I realised they have crippled bluetooth on my iPhone.

I was in the midst of trying to use bluetooth for sync, and to send and receive some files when I realized this!

I am amazed that my Razr has better Bluetooth compatibility with my Mac than the iPhone..

an unlocked iPhone.

More later this week in Slate.