Donald Boudreaux: “The discipline and guidance supplied by private markets – markets embedded within the law of property, contract, and tort – helps to ensure that the ‘fantasies’ of entrepreneurs bear a significant attachment to reality, for the market will quickly halt the pursuit of wildly improbable ventures. But matters with government differ categorically. Government officials spend other people’s money and order other people about. The right to say ‘no’ is severely attenuated when the offers commands come from the state. Government officials – having no personal claim on whatever residual monetary revenues their schemes might leave after paying all costs – are neither incited in their imposition of these schemes by the lure of personal monetary profit nor disciplined by the fear of personal monetary loss. And these officials’ decisions, being intended to override market signals, are of course not guided by market prices. Dreams and fantasies pursued through government inevitably make life more hellish (except for those individuals currently issuing the commands).”
Auberon Herbert in 1908: “Establish freedom and open competition in everything, and all forms of trade and enterprise, all relations of men to each other, tend to become healthy and vigorous, pure and clean.” [via CafeHayek]. Donald Boudreaux: “Herbert correctly understood that in practice protectionism is not only inevitably economically inefficient, it is also inevitably and grotesquely unjust. Protectionists miss this inefficiency and injustice because they see only the relatively small handful of concrete firms and flesh-and-blood individuals that benefit from protection. Only by ignoring protectionism’s inescapable economic damage and its unavoidable encouragement of special-interest-group rent-seeking can protectionists convince themselves and others that their restrictive schemes are good for the country as a whole.”
McKinsey: “Research on the omnichannel experience shows more than half of B2C customers engage with three to five channels each time they make a purchase or resolve a request. And the average customer looking to make a single reservation for accommodations (like a hotel room) online switched nearly six times between websites and mobile channels. If these customers encounter inconsistent information or can’t get what they need, they may lose interest in a brand’s products or services. And this can translate into business outcomes. Omnichannel customers shop 1.7 times more than shoppers who use a single channel. They also spend more.”
Wired on Rust: “There are fads in programming languages, and new ones come and go, often without lasting impact. Now 12 years old, Rust took time to mature from the side project of a Mozilla researcher into a robust ecosystem. Meanwhile, the predecessor language C, which is still widely used today, turned 50 this year. But because Rust produces more secure code and, crucially, doesn’t worsen performance to do it, the language has been steadily gaining adherents and now is at a turning point. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services have all been utilizing Rust since 2019, and the three companies formed the nonprofit Rust Foundation with Mozilla and Huawei in 2020 to sustain and grow the language. And after a couple of years of intensive work, the Linux kernel took its first steps last month to implement Rust support…Rust is what’s known as a “memory-safe” language because it’s designed to make it impossible for a program to pull unintended data from a computer’s memory accidentally.”
T.H. White: “The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” [via Atanu Dey]
