The Billion Prices Project

(From The Email List That Must Remain Nameless)

The Billion Prices Project is an academic initiative that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research.

This page shows our most recent research leveraging high-frequency price data, including a series of experimental inflation indexes designed to enhance policy decisions. Currently, we are publishing the US online index, a price and product availability index in Japan, as well as a World Inflation Index that provides daily information on global inflation trends.

As you'll see if you follow the link, the "academic" in this is MIT. We can all lament the liberalization of academia, but there is still top shelf work being done there on a lot of fronts, so I'm giving this one some attention. I'm especially playing with the US graphs, which are most interesting indeed.

North Carolina scored a 16

(Via RobertaX and Snowflakes in Hell)

Apparently we still have too many stupid gun laws.

Boy, the Charlotte Observer is just full of bloggable goodness today

And I do mean goodness, at least for this post. My mom was one of Arnie's Army back in the day. I can still remember her making my Dad give up the TV (yes, *the* TV) so she could watch golf on Sundays.

Odd...

Tuesday was a school day across North Carolina, yet...

A sea of public school teachers in red T-shirts chanted, shouted and danced through a rally across the street from the legislature Tuesday afternoon in a raucous fight against budget cuts.

So did they take a vacation day for this rally?

Sometimes the systems works

And that is what keeps me hoping that things can be fixed in this country.

According to WSOC-TV, Judge Smith ruled that Grimes had lied in court last month when he said a woman he arrested on a DWI charge in October had failed several field sobriety tests.

Video from Grimes' patrol car showed that the woman had never performed those tests, according to the report.

Well this didn't take long

(Via Blackfive)

Spew Alert is in effect.

Another freaking terrorist bastard dead

But this time, it's the head scum his damn self.

A big "THANK YOU!" to the brave men who, ah, executed this mission. We owe you.

The Facebook Comment of the Day

I was looking at a post from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on a WSJ article that argues that getting a job as a prison guard in California was a surer way to riches than going to a good universtity and working hard.

I found this gem in the comments from one Charles Ryan:

"Now I know why the state of California is the Greece of America, just with damn yuppies and annoyance."

This dude so needs to get a blog.

I feel much safer now

(From the Email List That Must Remain Nameless)

I'll sleep better at night and walk the streets with confidence because those Guardians of Our Safety, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Etc. are going to protect us from fruit farmers and their "Explosive Pest Control Devices".

And as you might expect, yes, the United States Congress had something to do with this. In 2002. ATF is just now getting around to saving us from the threat, seeing as how they have completed arming the drug gangs in Mexico, which must have rated way higher on the to-do list.