• As for the second question, this is where I realize that liberals often really just do not grok what libertarians are about. For them, this is a battle between people who like health care companies, and want to defend them, and people who like the government. But I don’t care about the pharmaceutical companies qua pharmaceutical companies. The pharmaceutical companies are interested in what is good for pharmaceutical companies. I am interested in what is good for society.

    I am not under the delusion that those are necessarily the same thing. “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” was a Great Society slogan, not a libertarian, or even a conservative one. Right now, pharmaceutical companies spend a great deal of effort on innovation because they have to in order to survive. But if survival means ditching the R&D labs and churning out low-cost copies of things they’ve already invented, then I’m pretty sure that’s what they’ll do. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not to the benevolence of pharma that I look, but to its self interest. In the current system, that self interest means inventing new drugs.

    In other words, I’m not in favor of business. I’m in favor of competition.

    —Is What’s Good for Pharma Good for America? - Megan McArdle

  • The Segway hasn’t delivered on its initial promise, to put it mildly. There are several reasons why, but one is that people don’t want to be seen riding them. Someone riding a Segway looks like a dork.

    —The Trouble with the Segway

  • Occasionally, some of the pools in Dare and Currituck counties experience a very mild ground current. Generally this is not caused by a pool defect or the household electrical system, but appears as a result of the earth’s own natural electrical current.

    —Frequently Asked Questions for Twiddy’s Homes

  • The fastest commercial shipping that ever sailed was the clipper ship; yet the world stopped building them after just twenty-five years. Steam had come. Steam was faster, safer, more dependable, cheaper in time and men.

    The freeways served America for almost fifty years. Then modern transportation systems cleaned the air and made traffic jams archaic and left the nation with an embarrassing problem. What to do with ten thousand miles of unsightly abandoned freeways?

    King’s Free Park had been part of the San Diego Freeway, the section between Sunset and the Santa Monica interchange. Decades ago the concrete had been covered with topsoil. The borders had been landscaped from the start. Now the Park was as thoroughly covered with green as the much older Griffiths Free Park.

    Within King’s Free Park was an orderly approximation of anarchy. People were searched at the entrances. There were no weapons inside. The copseyes, floating overhead and out of reach were the next best thing to no law at all.

    There was only one law to enforce. All acts of attempted violence carried the same penalty for attacker and victim. Let anyone raise his hand against his neighbor, and one of the golden basketballs would stun them both. They would wake separately, with copseyes watching. It was usually enough.

    Naturally people threw rocks at copseyes. It was a Free Park, wasn’t it?

    —

    Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven

    All the excitement about the High Line keeps bringing me back to this story.