Arnold Kling:

Chris Dillow writes,
 
 If extensive knowledge is possible, then bosses might be able to manage big companies well. If not, then centrally planned companies will be inefficient. Sure, perhaps competition will eventually weed out egregious incompetence, but market forces might not grind so finely as to eliminate all inefficiency
 
 Pointer from Mark Thoma.
 
 I cannot emphasize enough how much I agree with this. Because I spent 15 years in business, I got an opportunity to see large organizations close up. I saw that in a large business, the top management cannot keep track of more than about three major initiatives at a time. I saw that compensation systems have to be frequently overhauled, because employees learn to game any system that stays in place for more than a couple of years. I saw the “suits vs. geeks” divide, as specialists in information technology or financial modeling had difficulty communicating with executives who had only general knowledge.
 
 The notion of large, efficient organization is an oxymoron. If you think that large corporations have overwhelming advantages, then you have explained why IBM still dominates the computer industry, while Microsoft and Apple never really got amounted to much of anything. I like to say that if you are afraid of large corporations then you have never worked for one.

Ramez Naam:

 I’ve been writing about exponential decline in the price of energy storage since I was researching The Infinite Resource. Recently, though, I delivered a talk to the executives of a large energy company, the preparation of which forced me to crystallize my thinking on recent developments in the energy storage market.
 
 Energy storage is hitting an inflection point sooner than I expected, going from being a novelty, to being suddenly economically extremely sensible. That, in turn, is kicking off a virtuous cycle of new markets opening, new scale, further declining costs, and addition

Museo de la Vid y el Vino

Clark expediciones provided an enjoyable journey around northern Argentina, including a visit to Cafayate.

Dan Geer:

“…..mimics how a stratum of elite people carry neither money nor identification”

Gorgeous handiwork from God.

Ava Kaufman:

When most people think about the future of wearable technology, they picture Apple Watches and FitBit bracelets that are more affordable and wornas commonly as underwear. However, Becky Stern pictures a jacket whose zipper shuts off the annoying TVs in her favorite bar, a GPS dog harness that track’s her dog’s run, or a skirt with embedded LED sensors that sparkles as she moves. Then she sews and programs them, and shares for free what she’s made and how-to make it in detailed step-by-step tutorials online.
 
 Though Stern has been sewing, tinkering, photographing, filming and editing things since at least the age of eight, she didn’t combine all of her skills until attending Parsons Design and Tech program. At Parsons she made one of her first electronic craft projects: a set of plush steaks embedded with LEDs. (They symbolized the “radiation process most American beef goes through during processing.”) In graduate school, Stern started producing video tutorials for MAKE—a passion project that eventually turned into a full-time gig.

Charles Ornstein:

The federal government released detailed data today on nearly 1.4 billion prescriptions dispensed to seniors and disabled people in the Medicare program in 2013, bringing more openness to the medication choices of doctors nationwide.
 
 The data release comes two years after ProPublica reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had done little to detect or deter hazardous prescribing in its drug program, known as Medicare Part D. ProPublica analyzed several years’ worth of prescription data, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and created a tool called Prescriber Checkup that lets users compare individual physicians to others in the same specialty and state.
 
 But Medicare itself hadn’t made this information easily accessible—until now.
 
 “This transparency will give patients, researchers, and providers access to information that will help shape the future of our nation’s health for the better,” said acting CMS Administrator Andy Slavitt in a statement accompanying the data’s release.
 
 The information released by CMS is part of the agency’s data transparency initiative. In recent years, CMS has released data on hospital charges, geographic variations in the way health care is delivered, and Medicare’s payments to doctors. The payment data, first released last year, came after the Wall Street Journal and its parent company challenged a long-standing legal injunction that had kept the information private.

University of Wisconsin Arboretum

Some of us lived through the “80’s”!