Praxeology Theft

By -
I was listening to an ad on the radio for a company purporting to help prevent identity theft. The announcer listed some of the horrors that could occur, and then advised, "Order now before your identity is bought OR sold." (With heavy stress on the "or.")

As disturbing as I find the idea of having my identity stolen, I am even more rattled to learn that it can be bought without also being sold, and sold without also being bought.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:26 PM

    I imagine the free bankers could explain it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Anonymous12:27 PM

      Yeah, them and financial commentators.

      Delete
  2. Unknown12:43 PM

    Gene, if there's one thing I learned from my father, it's that words in English have more than one meaning.

    An alternate meaning for 'sold' is "made available for sale".

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:38 PM

      Uknown, if there is one thing I learned from my father, it's that context matters. In the phrase "bought or sold," 'sold' don't mean what you suggest.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more