Mises Search

February 15, 2010: Todd Jackson, product manager for Google Buzz, has announced that the company will disable the feature which gave users a ready-made circle of friends based on their most frequent email and chat contacts in Gmail. About 14 months ago, Google released what turned out to be the biggest flop in the company’s history. It was called

One of my favorite downtime activities is to browse the web gallery of art , which provides beautiful copies of “old master” art from the 11th to the 19th centuries. I’m not an art critic, but I do like what this art says about the times and the society in which it appeared. The paintings featured at this site are of saints, sinners, nobles, and

After three-plus years of floundering around, a consensus has finally arrived that we are back in recession. Growth is not happening. The meager statistical growth of the past few years — no one dared claim it amounted to full recovery — was probably illusory. There is real growth, and there are government statistics. The statistics have misled

“It is true that a form of slavery exists and thrives today, all over the world. We do live in cages.” The remake of The Planet of the Apes — the apes look real this time — purports to give the backstory of how it is that the world came to be governed by primates while the handful of humans are caged and abused. The story line is so conventional

Did you ever have the feeling that we’ve been through this before? Think of it. Those in charge have only recently sworn — yet again! — that if we keep interest rates at zero, keep battling the symptoms of recession and unemployment with spending and jobs programs, clobber the speculators with regulations, and otherwise keep trying to revive

Life is ticking along normally and then suddenly, out of nowhere and without warning, you find yourself plunged back in time, reduced to the level of a hunter-gatherer, unable to enjoy the conveniences of civilization that you otherwise take for granted. Anyway, that’s how it felt when the refrigerator suddenly stopped working. Here we have a

“One might say that Steve Jobs democratized beauty and thereby earned for himself and his company a kind of Teflon coating from the green-eyed monster.” The day that Steve Jobs resigned from Apple, hosannas for his life’s work and accomplishments erupted (and rightly) from every corner of the earth (or the blogosphere, in any case). He was

Michael S. Hart (March 8, 1947 — September 6, 2011) got it. He understood. He saw what others missed. And he was nearly alone at the time. After he was permitted access to an Internet account at the University of Illinois as long ago as 1971, he had a mind-blowing revelation. He realized that this tool had the potential to universalize all

“The slogan on the streets should really be ‘Up with the Man!’” The protesters of the “occupy” movement imagine themselves to be in the spirit of history’s great radicals — speaking truth to power and all that. As many have said, the movement seems blind to the real source of power in society, else they would be protesting government bureaucracies

“The credit report is the best friend of the responsible in the same way that it is the worst enemy of the irresponsible.” It was maybe third grade when the schoolyard was abuzz with a terrible thing. It was called the “permanent record.” If you did something bad enough, it would go on the permanent record. And then a one-day slip up would turn