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  • Afterlife – YouTube 

    Can you have a meaningful life without an afterlife? I asked several friends to join me in exploring the merits of human existence and the concepts of posthumous reward and punishment. It is my hope that this video will answer religious claims that a secular life is meaningless and void and remind us all to cherish our precious and temporary tenure on planet earth.My deepest thanks to AronRa, DarkMatter2525, DPRJones, Evid3nce, HealthyAddict, Laci Green, Thunderf00t and ZOMGitsCriss for their contributions to this project. I also encourage you to subscribe to their channels and support their work, and I’ve provided links here (in alphabetical order). All my best. -Seth Andrews

  • 3.0 Atheism: A New Way of Seeing God – YouTube

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  • The Hart of the Matter – NYTimes.com

    And now for something completely different: I haven’t seen anyone point this out, but the very interesting Times story on why Microsoft is building its own tablet was a perfect illustration of Oliver Hart’s theory of the firm.

    Just briefly: the theory of the firm asks why we sometimes rely on contracts — I sign an agreement with your company to make my widget — and sometimes go for direct control: I employ people to make widgets. Hart (and others) argue that such things depend crucially on our inability to write complete contracts, specifying all details — and that the incompleteness of contracts can pose problems for investment decisions. For example, if you contract with other people to build equipment, they may be unwilling to invest in quality in the belief that you will use your sole-buyer status to extract the benefits.

    And that, apparently, is exactly what has been going on with Microsoft; its reliance on other people to build computers using its software worked very well for a long time, but lately Apple’s control-freak approach has been winning out.

    Lots more to say, and I’m still on vacation, but this article was great fodder for the kind of economic analysis that I would be doing more of if we weren’t in such dire straits.

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