Wednesday Links

1. Crazy 3D Printer news of the day. I haven’t really blogged on 3D printers since I don’t like being overly speculative, though I think it has an enormous potential to disrupt multiple industries. We’re so used to the economic forces that make technology-related things endlessly faster and better and cheaper that it’s easy to take it for granted that 3D printers will follow that trend to the point where soon we’ll be able to replicate things Star Trek style. Nothing like that is guaranteed, of course, but I keep reading about more incremental breakthroughs like that one. At some point I’ll have to do a speculative economic blog post…

2. Speaking of disrupted industries, Encyclopedia Britannica announced it will go fully digital and stop its 244-year-old print edition. Analysis by Matt Yglesias: “As Wikipedia drives inferior products out of business, GDP declines but welfare increases.” I generally agree with that line of thinking (it’s why I’m skeptical of stagnant-wages claims as things get cheaper or free and life gets better). Wikipedia is much more up-to-date and much more expansive than any print encyclopedia, and while anyone can edit it, anyone can fix it, which is arguably just as useful as trusting a group of un-editable hand-picked experts. (Here is a list of errors in the Encyclopedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.) But there’s still a part of me that loves a giant set of physical encyclopedias; maybe it’s an anachronistic irrationality, or maybe it’s a reaction to the negative side effects of online knowledge (what if your Internet gets cut off?). Now that the supply is fixed I might have to try to get my hands on the last set (On the other hand, World Book Encyclopedia is still printing as far as I can tell.)

3. New CBO score on the health care bill. Conservatives say Obamacare is now projected to cost twice as much as the previous projection. Mainstream media says Obamacare cost is now projected to drop slightly. It never ceases to amaze me how biased observers can draw completely different conclusions from the same set of objective numbers. From a brief perusal through the official Congressional Budget Office analysis, it looks like conservatives are looking at gross cost and MSM is looking at net cost, perhaps over different time windows. I’ll outsource further analysis to someone more competent…

4. World’s tallest man stops growing at 8′ 3″. 29-year-old Turkish man Sultan Kosen had an excessive amount of growth hormone that was beginning to damage his body as he continued to grow, but it sounds like doctors in Virginia were able to “fix” the hormone. I guess you can file that under “The United States has the best medical care in the world, if you can afford access to it.”

5. Could The Use Of Flying Death Robots Be Hurting America’s Reputation Worldwide? (video) The Onion is amazing.

6. Random funny Internet pic of the day. (Star Wars edition)