As I pack my bags (4:55 am) to head back to D.C., CNN has just run a penguin interest news story on the gay penguins of the New York Aquarium. No doubt it is a purely a priori truth they have very high time preferences.
Wendell and Cass, Friends for Life
🙂
Well I’m sure you could also say that Silo and Roy, New York’s gay penguins, have high time preferences as well. A priori, like you said.
But, seriously, aren’t there peer-reviewed studies indicating prisoners have high time-preferences? And aren’t confined penguins prisoners? It’s not like they have the freedom to make long-term plans, confined as they are in the New York Aquarium…
:->
RL
Tom, surely you’ve missed the most important set of issues. What KIND of penguins are we talking about here? Adelaide? Emperor’s? Most crucially: would they let their offspring interbreed with other sub-species of penguin? I mean, if the penguins turned out to be bigoted against other sub-species of penguin, wouldn’t that prove, once and for all, that HHH was a model of moral probity? Why, of course it would.
Proof: We begin with Kinsella’s Axiom that 1=0 and then engage in iterated applications of Kinsella’s Irrelevance and Random Assertion Theorems…I leave the rest as an exercise for the reader.
Obviously to maintain a future libertarian zoo, homosexual penguins would have to be physically removed.
Well not only removed, but before they were taken to the zoo they’d have to calculate their full cost of captivity and then make sure that the emperors owned all zoo property.
Tom,
Should we consider these animals as possible ambassadors for penguin homosexuality? Hmmm.
John