Woohoo! I’m writing again. It feels good. (and cooking, mostly high end omelets). My thoughts from the last week:
“In this case it’s the application of reason to the study of the financial
behavior of irrational, social, creatures (humans). AKA economics. ”
“20 years ago we could blame the lack of information for our inability to fix the world’s problems. Now we’re the bottleneck.”
On CA:
“Our taxes are high but they’re not nearly high enough to pay for all of the earth fixing programs we like to “fund”.
“California is basically a giant version of an idealistic student at Berkeley with a Visa who has never taken a class on personal finance.”
“Don’t forget California. The Republicans are supposed to come in and cut taxes and spending but they find it’s a lot easier to just cut taxes.”
On wholistic medicine:
“It’s called the placebo effect and it does work but, like Peter Pan, only if you believe.”
On Keynesian misconceptions and fiscal shenanigans:
“Krugman (liberal) thinks Obama isn’t doing enough to stimulate the economy. Their prevailing wisdom is that you do need to worry about deficits but not until we’re through this recession. Otherwise we could get caught in a deflationary spiral (see Great Depression).
A deflationary spiral would collapse tax receipts and would grow the deficit. This is why unfunded spending and low GDP both have a negative impact on the dollar.”
“Giving away mortgages on crack houses doesn’t make them crack homes.”
On the moon:
“Some of us Luddites think we should pay down the deficit before space travel becomes a priority.”
“Baby boomers already saw a guy on the moon. At this point in their lives they’re going to vote for more drug benefits. The baby boomers get what they want.”
On Socialism:
“Socialism is basically the Apple model. Things cost more but you get a strong leader (Jobs) and nationalistic pride (the Apple brand/ lifestyle), and you don’t have to worry about evil monopolies because you assume the government monopoly is benevolent.
Some of us prefer an open model with fierce competition. Brands aren’t as important because if companies are dropping prices fast and innovating faster, nobody will remain king of the hill. This is Capitalism but it requires regulation.
Bill Gates was completely wrong when he likened Open Source to Communism. Socialism consists of government run monopolies. Bill Gates as a politician in other words.
Socialism is basically the admission that the lobbyists have won, no regulation will pass, and it’s time to pray for competent bureaucrats. We Americans have trouble admitting that, probably given our history of occasionally tarring and feathering corrupt politicians.
Though I think we should take from the rich and give to the poor (within reason, wealth divides are growing) it doesn’t mean the government has to expand out from the department of motor vehicles and start running our supermarkets. If you don’t see the problems inherent in letting the government run businesses then you’ll probably like Socialism.”
On law:
“If regulation is just legislation and you assume laws are enforced then leadership should only consist of representatives. A Representative Democracy is arguably the antithesis of strong leadership.”
On Toyota:
“I think you should engineer safe gas pedals rather than change the behavior of the throttle system.”
“Toyotal Recall” My highest ranked comment this week but it looks like some headline writers at Fox news thought it up a few days before me.
On dog lovers eaten by their own dogs:
“You would expect man hungry dogs to eat a man so that’s not ironic but the fact that he is the supposed leader of their wolf-pack is.”
On Graphine based processors:
“I doubt that other than supercomputers the effort will be in reaching that level of performance. For most of us they’ll try to slow them down to only what is required for the application to reduce power consumption. Cell phones lasting a week on a charge would be nice.”
“Dixon Ticonderoga Number Two processors.” My second highest rated thought for the week according to Reddit.
” I think the concept of “good enough” may start to apply in the near future.
I would rather have a cell phone or PC that uses 5 watts than something that requires 150 but can render full length Pixar movies.
GPUs will probably jump on this for performance but it’s hard to argue many people are dissatisfied with current top of the line graphics.”
“Watch your cpu use, even during compiling, a lot of the bottleneck these days is IO. Most people are surprised what their CPU can do after installing a good SSD.”