One thing that truly does suck is being in Paris on a rainy weekend with your wife and being utterly unable to enjoy the city, let alone take that side trip to the south of France, because a chapter of your next book (and an article for a conference) is taking much longer to write than it ought to. This post therefore gets a leisure tag, because of the lack thereof. But now you know why I haven't finished the Dubai posts (one more is waiting about Iran) or said more about nuclear power, the reason for my trip.
One thing that doesn't suck is Doug Muir's explanation of Comorian independence. It may be unsatisfying, but so is reality. It does leave me wishing that Julius Nyerere, a heroic man of heroic accomplishments, hadn't been so ... well ... unyielding in his anticolonialism. The world, I think, would be a marginally more happy place with 800,000 additional French citizens in the Indian Ocean, rather than 800,000 poor victims of lousy institutions wedded to French neocolonialism.
Something that doesn't suck but is, I think, incorrect, is Charlie Stross's analysis of the economics of restrictions on labor mobility. The discussion gets started at comment #27. Go, argue!
Of course, I have a dangerous streak of Francophilia, and am therefore not to be trusted.
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