A three-bathroom solution?

Posted on April 28, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

The State of North Carolina recently enacted a controversial law limiting the legal rights of “transgender individuals.” The law prevents such persons from using public restrooms that don’t correspond with the gender (male or female) on their birth certificates. (By the way, although the North Carolina law allows private businesses to create their own wash room policies, practically speaking this law is unenforceable. After all, who carries around their birth certificate?) In any case, Tyler Cowen, one of our favorite public intellectuals, has written up a thoughtful post about the N.C. law on his hyper-blog Marginal Revolution. Specifically, he poses the following legal question:

Should there be a legal definition of who is a transgender person and why? 

But is this a legal problem or an economic one? From a Coasian perspective, we think he is asking the wrong question. Instead of asking what it means to be transgender, shouldn’t we be asking a different question, i.e. who pays?  After all, if elected officials in North Carolina care so strongly about this issue, why don’t they just allocate sufficient funds from the state budget to retrofit all public buildings with three sets of bathrooms? (Yes, collecting taxes to pay for extra restrooms is coercive, but our three-bathroom solution is less coercive (and more practical) than telling people which bathroom to use.)

Image Credit: Wikipedia

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“Letter distribution” (secondary Scrabble markets in everything)

Posted on April 28, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

With apologies to Marginal Revolution! (photo credit: F.E. Guerra-Pujol)

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Visualization of counterfactual history (Pres. Trump edition)

Posted on April 27, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Write your own caption …

Posted in Current Affairs, History, Politics | 1 Comment

If cars could fly …

Posted on April 26, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Artist Credit: Cy Kuckenbaker

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Read a poem … Or write one up!

Posted on April 26, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

April is National Poetry Month! (Picture Credit: F.E. Guerra-Pujol)

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Console Collection

Posted on April 25, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Well, I'll be damned. That's one awesome console collection!

What? No Virtual Boy? (Image Credit: Narendur.)

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Facebook Postscript

Posted on April 24, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

This semester, we reenacted many pivotal scenes from the film “The Social Network” — and we read Ben Mezrich’s book “Accidental Billionaires” on which the film is based — in order to explore in-depth many legal and ethical issues in the business world. The movie, which was released in the fall of 2010, ends with the following epilogue:

Facebook has 500 million members in 207 countries. It’s currently valued at 25 billion dollars. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world.

That was before Facebook’s initial public offering (IPO) in 2012. Today (spring of 2016), Facebook has three times as many active users (over 1.49 billion) and is valued at over 200 billion dollars! 

(By the way, for our last class (4/25), students may volunteer to present their final projects in class. Each student or group of students, as the case may be, will be allocated a maximum of five minutes to make their presentations. The class as a whole will select the best final project, and the professor will feature the winning final project on his blog.)

Image Credit: Quartz

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Greater Mexico

Posted on April 24, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Today’s history lesson (via imgur) consists of an old map of the Californias (circa 1838). We tend to forget that the entire southwestern USA used to be Mexican territory before the Mexican-American War of 1848, an unjust and illegal war of aggression (territorial expansion) provoked by the United States.
California in 1838 - When it was part of Mexico

h/t: ppbears

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The geometry of national flags

Posted on April 23, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Image credit: Jeppe and Birger Morgenstjerne

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Requiescat in pace

Posted on April 22, 2016 by F. E. Guerra-Pujol

Update (4/24): Wow! After we reposted a fan video on YouTube of an old performance of “Let’s go crazy,” it took less than 24 hours for the video to be taken down. In any case, we confess that we weren’t really huge fans of the Artist Formerly Known as Prince (or of the late David Bowie, for that matter), but here is one of our favorite Prince songs (“I would die 4 U”) from when we were growing up. Shout out to Tracye Dukes for her heartfelt tribute to Prince and for her moving version of “I would die 4 U”:

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