Thu Nov 02 00:27:34 UTC 2017
Forgot to fill this in after doing it at work!
Time block
| Time (PDT) | Intention | Revision 1 | Revision 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0000 | TV | ||
| 0030 | SLEEP | ||
| 0100 | SLEEP | ||
| 0130 | SLEEP | ||
| 0200 | SLEEP | ||
| 0230 | SLEEP | ||
| 0300 | SLEEP | ||
| 0330 | SLEEP | ||
| 0400 | SLEEP | ||
| 0430 | SLEEP | ||
| 0500 | SLEEP | ||
| 0530 | SLEEP | ||
| 0600 | SLEEP | ||
| 0630 | SLEEP | ||
| 0700 | SLEEP | ||
| 0730 | SLEEP | ||
| 0800 | SLEEP | ||
| 0830 | SLEEP | ||
| 0900 | SLEEP | ||
| 0930 | SLEEP | ||
| 1000 | SLEEP | ||
| 1030 | SLEEP | ||
| 1100 | SLEEP | ||
| 1130 | SLEEP | ||
| 1200 | Computer | ||
| 1230 | Walk to work | ||
| 1300 | Aimless meandering | ||
| 1330 | PLANNING | ||
| 1400 | Dataset Pill Style | ||
| 1430 | Config Verification | ||
| 1500 | Config Verification | ||
| 1530 | SST ProdEng Meeting | ||
| 1600 | Updaing goals | Code PR | |
| 1630 | Walk to library | Ping pong | |
| 1700 | Reading | Walk to library | |
| 1730 | Reading | ||
| 1800 | Reading | ||
| 1830 | Reading | ||
| 1900 | Reading | ||
| 1930 | Reading | ||
| 2000 | Walk home | and strectching | |
| 2030 | Cooking | ||
| 2100 | Cooking | ||
| 2130 | Gaming: Overwatch | Cooking | |
| 2200 | Gaming: Overwatch | Cooking | |
| 2230 | Gaming: Overwatch | ||
| 2300 | Gaming: Overwatch | ||
| 2330 | End of day review | Gaming: Overwatch |
Thu Nov 02 00:28:47 UTC 2017
Basic Economics reading.
All right, I'm super behind on Basic Economics. So, I'm going to note page numbers and short descriptive comments and try to read 235 pages before the library closes tomorrow.
First, let's clean out my notebook:
Page 296: An argument against peak oil.
Page 298: This is a good section to note the author's climate-change denialism.
Page 310: An argument against the gold standard.
Page 323: Insurance: good arguments, but ignored bad practices.
Page 326: Insurance speed-of-service flatly false.
Page 330: Property rights.
Page 332: Those evil environmental agencies (also: a good place to link to Lindsay Ellis' video essay about the Hunchbakc of Notre Dame).
Page 334: author implies ageism isn't real.
Page 337: "immediately"
Page 339: Detroit example
Page 340: Annectdotal evidence is good when the author uses it
Page 346: Fallacy of composition
Page 348: Great depression abundance logic
Page 354: Real income.
Page 357: Purchasing power.
Page 361: What's being counted?
Page 362: Statistics and survival.
Page 367: Inflation is bad
Page 368: Just talked about the misleading nature of statistics!
Page 371: The author accidentally makes an argument for bitcoin. I mostly agree.
Page 373: Deflation.
Page 375: Federal reserve depression
Page 378: Author argues against gold standard without explicitly saying so.
Page 381: Fractional reserve banking (this would be a good place to link Extra History series on subject).
Page 386: Author argues that federal reserve is bad.
Page 388: Author implies that private banks are the best.
Page 391: Author states that government pressure to make bad loans were main cause of banks collapsing in 2008. Nothing was stopping the banks from rating the loans as bad, but this goes against the author's general argument that cartels tend to fall apart on their own in the free market.
Page 395: Author makes good point about the effectiveness of governments that keep a good rule of law, even in spite of various bad laws that are overall bad. This is something I think about from time to time. Unevenly applied laws lead to all sorts of problems, whereas if all laws were properly enforced evenly, then bad laws would cause proper unrest in citizenry, hopefully leading to their reform.
Caught up on notes.
Thu Nov 02 00:49:35 UTC 2017
Basic Economics
Reading again!
Page 398: Author implies Britain colonialism was good.
Page 399: "While impartiality is a desirable quality in laws, even laws which are discriminatory can still promote economic development, if the nature of the discrimination is spelled out in advance[...]" The author implies a defense of giving different ethicities different rights. For anything the author is against, he will never give any nuanced opinion on its effectiveness. His interpretation of all historic government regulation has consistenly been negative, even of the positive historic examples (he insists that short-term positives are out-weighed by long-term negatives). But racist laws? At least the laws were spelled out in advance.
I think I should mention that the author was (and still is?) against the desegregation of schools.
Page 400: Mentions riots ruining neighborhood economic viability, but does not mention that economically viable neighborhoods have historically been ruined by racist mob jealousy. This happened to weathly black communities, and happened on a governmental level in Nazi Germany.
Page 400: Property Rights. I will assume a lack of pointing out where existing property rights can be bad. An easy go-to example is slavery. Let's hope I'm wrong.
Page 401: An accidental argument that all workers should gain some property ownership in their work.
Page 401: "The only animals threatened with extinction are animals not owned by anybody." Tragedy of the commons argument follows suit. It is a real phenomenon, but there is also the problem of ancient ecosystems that will be destroyed by reckless human interference. Either by the commons or the private. There are some ancient resources that will take decades before destruction destorys their business value. If the person who owns them does not care for long-term sustainability, they need not care about ethically haversting from those resources. The borneo forest is such an example. Its survivability may already be impossible, but harvesting continues.
There are examples of privatization that do no better, or do even worse, than commons. To ignore these examples is to avoid nuance that is necessary in future innovations in economic capability over both the short and long term.
Page 402: Enough poor peope together have more wealth than a rich person. The author tries to make this about property rights, but it's also a matter of social technology needing to further improve. We already have things like kickstarter helping the many fund projects that the few rich would rather not, further innovations may help the many outbid the rich in various other avenues.
The law is also in a state that makes this hard. There are minimum wealth laws for certain investment opportunites, for example. So, there is some truth in the author's point here.
Page 403: "the economic incentives are for landlords[...] to try to keep their apartments as fully rented and as continuously occupied as possible, so long as the tenants pay their rent and create no problems". Considering that the author just had a section about the problems that inflation causes, rent inflation is in fact a serious thing to consider (and perhaps rent controls and tenant rights are not good solutions to this problem, but letting things sort themselves out also definitely has serious consequences to weigh against).
Page 405: Section on social order and honesty is pretty good. Also good to consider the incentives that lead to honesty versus dishonesty. People who are stuck in a system may sabotage it, but those who can opt-out may simply abandon the system.
Page 406: "What economics professor William Easterly of New York University has aptly called 'the radius of trust'[...]" Cool name and a good phrase to understand. Gives me ideas that I can't quite articulate now. Make a good name for a game, too.
Page 407: The author is now talking about incentives and disincentives to be honest.
Page 408: Giving rent-control examples, citing arson incentives. Notably, non-rent-controlled slum in Britain recently went up in flames, and killed/injured many tenants. Gots to find my sources for that, though.
Page 410: Proper free markets punish cheaters. Anomlies are noted, but brushed aside as anomolies. I think anomalies need be studied to improve our capabilities moving forward. This book is convincing me of the value of free-market economies (well, after I fact-check and verify various things in the future), but to me it's clearly an argument on what improves the environment for proper free enterprise and what worsens it. It's more complicated than letting the market sort it out, I think. The environment needs to be tended to and we need to learn to direct it where and when necessary. Finding the flaws that occur naturally and working towards mending those flaws both during and before they happen is a necessary step forward.
Page 411: The author actually says the government is a good solution to something! External costs! Like polluting of the environment. I'm feeling there's a "but" coming, but I'll take what I can get. Also external benefits, like mud flaps!
Page 412: External, indivisible benefits. Aka: prisoner's dilemna. Military spending is the go-to example. Not sure how I feel about that. Military spending in the US is out of control. And yet, when talking about reducing government spending, military spending only increases. I have to find my sources, but I believe that any spending cuts that happen basically ultimately lead to increases in military spending.
It also comes across as a double-standard. Surely, similar arguments exist for general healthcare, and yet the author is defacto against socialized healthcare. But socialized military is necessary.
Page 413: Collective action as part of spontaneous organization. I like this concept. I find it relatable to the "radius of trust".
The example, however, is interesting. "[...]owners of cattle organizaed themselves into cattlemen's associations that created rules for themselves and in one way or another kept newcomers out, in effect turning the plains into collectively owned land with collectively determined rules, sometimes enforced by collectively hired gunmen."
The author just had a section talking about California/Virginia laws created by the weathly that restricted property rights such that a poorer collective couldn't buy land and turn it into a clustered housing unit (page 403).
I'm getting way to caught up in this stuff and my reading rate is a paltry 15 pages in an hour and a half, so I'm going to have to stop going into detail about this. I do not have the time.
Page 413: Author makes a point of trade associations and their benefit, but I can't help but compare their purpose to unions, but author went out of his way to talk about unions being bad.
Page 414: "Both the incentives of the market and the incentives of politics must be weighed when choosing between them on any particular issue." .... I agree. I wish this nuance was present more evenly throughout the book.
Page 415: "As an example of what virtually everyon now agrees was a counterproductive policy, the Nixon adminsistration in 1971 created the first peacetime nationwide wage controls and price controls in the history of the United States." Sounds like an interesting thing to read about. Find my sources!
Page 416: Interesting how the author goes out of his way to explain Nixon's price controls but just gave Carter's research a short sentence during the discussion on peak oil earlier in the book. I guess his lack of belief in climate change made discussing the nuances less valuable in that section.
Page 416: "There is no 'present value' factor to force political decision-makers to take into account the long-0run consequences of their current decisions." This isn't exactly a true statement, as far as I can tell. During the the healthcare reform attempt by the Republicans, the CBO score of any published plan that they had gave an estimated look into the future, and the CBO was a huge talking point and means of criticism of each Republican plan. This is a problem that is slowly being addressed politically. I hope.
Page 416: "With fundamental educational reform being both difficult and requiring years to show end results in a better education population entering adulthood, it is politically uch more expedient for elected officials to demonstrate imeediate 'concern' for education by voting to spend increasing amounts of the taxpayers' money on it, even if that leads only to more expensive incompetence in more showy buildings."
This is a fair but unbalanced example. An equally valuable example would be the politicians saying we're overspending on education and gutting education, worsening the competence of our educational system. Another equally valuabe example would be our ever-rising military costs, which have a similar problem in showing efficiency or effectiveness in spending as compared to output.
Page 417: The author gives another example, but with clean water or air. An example I agree with. But again the example could be military spending, and yet it isn't. Also, speaking of water impurities as going too far is kind of a badly aged example considering the recent Flint water crisis, and how Flint-levels of lead contamination are actually terrifyingly common and how government is doing nothing about it.
I need to verify my sources sources, but I found this out in the video below:
Page 418: I mostly agree with the talk on too much being done to fix impurities, I must say. Or rather, all that effort being made to further purify things that are already pure enough is plausibly taking away effort that could be made to all those Flint-level crises happening that are being ignored.
I think it may be politically wise to learn how to shift the conversation away from unnecessary improvements to necessary ones. How to actually do that, however, I do not know.
Page 419: The author makes a note about the dangers of airbags. I agree with this note, but wanted to expaned. A lot of car safety has been done with the adult male form in mind. This presents unmeasured risks with non-adult and/or non-male forms. I read something about this, and should find my source here. I found it quite interesting.
Page 419: "In the United States, government regulations are estimated to cost about $7,800 per employee in large businesses and about $10,600 per employee in small businesses. Among other things, this suggests that the existence of numerous government regulations tend to give competitive advantages to big business, since there are apparently economies of scale in complying with these regulations." Is this a net cost? I would assume there are instances of regulations saving money over some amount of time. Going to need to check the author's sources and find my own.
Page 421: A good point about the problems of laws and powers living past their purpose. It is, indeed, a problem that needs solving.
Page 421: "When thinking of government functions, we often assume that particular activities are best undertaken by government, rather than by non-governmental institutions, simply because that is the way those activities have been carried out in the past." This is true in reverse, as well, to be fair. It may, due to various social/technological innovations, work better for government to take control of some activities now, but we keep it privatized simply because it has always been so.
Personally, I think it's valuable to have government create a base-service, and also to allow for competition to that service. I can elborate further on that whenever I get around to using this writing as reference for future, polished writing.
Page 423: The beginning of Chapter 19, Government Finance. Woo.
Page 424: "If [the national debt] really meant what it said, the national debt would include all the debts in the nation, including those of consumers and businesses." Is there such a debt-measurement? That would be a good one.
Tangentially, this reminds me of when I fantasized (defined here as: thought about without the intention to do, and assumed for granted outcomes that would required serious work and luck) about becoming a politician, I considered a stock slogan to be: "I believe a debt-free America starts with debt-free Amercians".
Page 426: The book is explaining the concept of higher prices vs. fewer buyers. The book avoids charts at all costs, which is fair limitation, but a common means of showing this phenomenon is the "hat chart" (if I remember its name correctly). Showing revenue or profit vs cost-of-item and showing that there's a point in the middle where the most is gained.
This hat-chart is often not invoked, now that I think about it. Though perhaps that is because it implies a possibility that taxes could be too low, something that various people who argue for lower taxes to increase tax revenue don't really like to admit to.
Page 426: Actual examples of people leaving states when income taxes were raised! Now I'd like to see the same thing, but for federal examples.
Page 427: Close, I guess. Lowering capital gains tax on the federal level led to increased tax revenues.
Of note, lowering taxes doesn't always work. Kentucky is now feeling the negative effects of lowering taxes too much and not having enough money to pay for the things that the government is expected to pay for (and whom private industries aren't racing to replace the government in). I'll have to find my sources for that.
So, really, I agree with the author on the incentives being important, I just think there should be research done to see where the best tax-level is.
Thu Nov 02 02:56:17 UTC 2017
Library closing. Decided to renew book deadline. But now I have two library books!