I think I'll read whatever Posner has to say... later.

I read somewhere that Posner schedules his day in some absurdly small increment, like 6 minutes or something. He's a machine.

If one is good at procrastination, one does not have to be good at anything else.

Of course, this may explain why I gradauated from a law school ranked #50-ish.

12:26 - I'm sure Posner pads to some degree, like, ".5 - bang wife."

my mother always told me I was a proscratinator. "You just wait," I'd say.

Ummm.........is it too obvious to say? Ill go for it:

This site.

Also: gotta love Scrabulous.

Doesn't he have anything better to do than trash my lifestyle? What a waste ...

Procrastinate later.

hey Richy you're so fine, you're so fine you blow my mind, hey Richy! hey Richy!

I've had too many assignments change mid-stream to not procrastinate.

Okay, so Posner has a blog and he's decrying the evils of procrastination? Isn't that a bit like McDonald's proclaiming that people need to cut down their cholesterol?

I think my favorite thing about the Slate article is that every other commenter on procrastination is labeled according to their job title, e.g. barista, cheesemonger, psychic. But not Posner, no. His just says "Richard Posner." Richard Posner's job is to BE Richard Posner. Outstanding.

Posner's advice and tone remind me of Jeremy Bentham, who decried idleness as the root of all of society's ills.

I think my favorite thing about the Slate article is that every other commenter on procrastination is labeled according to their job title, e.g. barista, cheesemonger, psychic. But not Posner, no. His just says "Richard Posner." Richard Posner's job is to BE Richard Posner. Outstanding.

procrastination is efficient.

google it Posner, you self-righteous douche.

Please stop writing these valentines to these supposed wonderful legal minds who, first, are over-rated in theor legal prowess and, second, are bad human beings. When I saw you writing about how wonderful Posner was here, I thought immediately to a New Yorker article I read some time ago in which he essentially says that old people, including his parents, have little value to society. I googled it and was able to find it. This shows you what kind person we're dealing with:

Both Posner's parents lived into their nineties. "My mother, in the course of her decline, broke her hip," Posner says. "In the olden days, people broke their hips and died, which was great; now they fix them." After his mother broke her hip, his father found it difficult to take care of her, so his parents moved to assisted-living facilities in Chicago. When his father grew very frail and sick, Posner asked the gerontologist what the point of keeping him alive with all these procedures was; the doctor informed him that termination of care had to be voluntary. "Because my father was more or less compos mentis and wanted treatment, you couldn’t deny it, Posner says. Growing up the way he did, struggling the way he did, the notion of giving up, not fighting to the end, was anathema to him. I hope my generation can be a little more rational about this. I'd like to choose my own time of exit.

"I don't know if this is true of everybody;" Posner says, "but I loved my parents when I was growing up and they were really the sort of parents you should be grateful to-my mother gave me great cultural enrichment, and my father helped me buy our first house, so they were ideal parents. But my thoughts about them are dominated by their old age. I don't make allowances: when I think about them, there's no affection. Charlene thinks I'm a little bit unnatural about my family. But so many people have these decrepit, horrible old parents, and then they're so upset when they die at ninety; and regard it as a medical failure that the doctors didn't do this and didn't do that. My father was even annoyed when my mother died-he thought the doctors hadn't tended her carefully enough-though by the time she died she couldn't speak, she couldn't use her hands, she wasn't human. And it's not as if you had a cute animal with the same mental ability-when you see human beings like that, you don't think, Well, she's on the level of a chipmunk." Asked what he felt when both his parents had died, he looked puzzled, as though the question didn't make sense to him. "I don't have any feeling about it," he said.

That last quote from Posner about his lack of any feeling about his parents' deaths is chilling. But as for the rest of what he says, it seems unfair to characterize it as a statement that the old are not socially useful. Really he seems to be saying that he disagrees with the medical practice and social norm (which his father internalized) of keeping elderly people who are very frail and ill alive regardless of cost, given that, in his opinion, their own subjective quality of life is most likely not very great. It's a cost-benefit analysis, but the benefit being weighed against the cost is not the benefit of the elderly person to society, but the benefit to that same person of being alive. I have to say I agree with him--if my physical and mental condition degenerated past a certain point I don't think I would consider the benefit of living to be worth the cost of being alive. That doesn't mean I think that elderly people who request continued treatment and support should be denied it.

I don't disagree with Posner's point and I admire his honesty.

I'm looking forward to penetrating my cat tonight.

"are bad human beings."

If one recognizes the trade-offs, Posner is actually being a better human being than you. From an efficiency standpoint, why care for the decrepit elderly when that money could better enhance social welfare by education of the poor, investment in technology, etc.? From a redistributive justice standpoint, given that medical insurance is notoriously plagued with adverse selection, why force the working class, many who are poor, to support the elderly? Many of the poor can't even afford insurance due to the aforementioned adverse selection. I see no rational reason for society to prefer the lives of the decrepit elderly over the poor youth.

Yes and let's just let economists rule the world because, you know, everybody acts rationally with complete information in all situations and economists never make mistakes, right?

"Yes and let's just let economists rule the world because, you know, everybody acts rationally with complete information in all situations and economists never make mistakes, right?"

If you're going to disparage economists, perhaps you should try reading a few of their works. No economist assumes people "act rationally with complete information in all situations." And everyone makes mistakes, obviously. Seems kind of odd to use that as a counterargument.

- 9:34