Tag: economics
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U.S. foreign aid & immigration
The United States uses foreign policy to save money. Wars are expensive. A single Hellfire missile costs more than my annual salary. That’s one shot. It doesn’t include the operational costs to get the missile in place to fire it. The superior firepower makes winning likely, but we don’t have a great track record of…
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Outage FUD
A gas pipeline running from Houston to New York had a break in Alabama over the weekend. My understanding is the owner has crews working to route around the problem. By the end of the week the flow should resume. Their second line for other fuels is apparently being used to help. The governor of…
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Chaos of lists
I went to buy a book. There were a chaos of options in the used list at the same price. Because these were used, there were descriptions of quality headlined with: Acceptable Good Very Good Like New All but new were represented at the cheapest price level. So naturally I looked through the very goods for the…
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Sunk Cost Fallacy
In economics, a sunk cost is any past cost that has already been paid and cannot be recovered. For example, a business may have invested a million dollars into new hardware. This money is now gone and cannot be recovered, so it shouldn’t figure into the business’s decision making process. … from How the Sunk Cost…
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Review: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis My rating: 5 of 5 stars This book is really the story of why and how IEX was created. Humans made bad decisions. So, to protect people from other people, we moved the operation of the stock market to being run by computers. The natural consequence…
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TED Talk: The riddle of experience vs. memory
We tend to think of memory the same as an audio-visual recording of the events in our life. Unfortunately, it is not. Memory captures snapshots which influence what we recall later. So a relatively good experience with a particularly bad ending can bias memory to recall the whole as bad. If the below video does not…
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TED Talk: David Brooks: The social animal
Some quotes I liked from this talk. “Emotions are not separate from reason. They are the foundation of reason as they show us what to value.” “The first gift or talent is Mindsight: the ability to enter into other people’s minds and learn what they have to offer…. Babies are born to interpenetrate into Mom’s mind and…