I dislike Mayor Bloomberg telling me I can’t smoke a cigar in Central Park, nudge stuff, and nanny states. And yet I find myself liking the fact that they are going to outlaw 640z sodas in NYC. I am impaled on the horns of a dilemma.
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Here is a counterintuitive truth I have discovered about the physical world.
Comments closedThe U.S. dollar is an IOU issued by the Treasury and backed by the full faith and credit etc. Which means what?
Comments closedWhen so many smart people disagree, how do they expect anyone to be convinced?
Comments closedEvery day I seem to come across new articles or incidents concerning universities that indicate the increasing strength of t.he tidal forces pulling at them and their denizens
Comments closedThe other day I used the Chase app on my iPhone to deposit a check from my health insurance for $17.32.
Comments closedWhen the era of rationality finally dawned, it became clear to everyone that love doesn?t last.
Comments closedMust one do things as well as one possibly can? If you don’t want to, is that a bug or a feature? And, beyond a certain age, does it matter?
Comments closedI don’t understand money too well, the idea of it, what exactly it is.
Comments closedThe other day while teaching I suddenly briefly felt really ill with a pain in my lower back and then broke out in a copious cold sweat over every part of me; even the hair on my head was as wet as though I’d had a five mile run.
Comments closedAs more and more people I know edge into retirement lifestyles, I found myself thinking on vacation about how I’d like to live. I know people who travel nonstop, but that’s not for me.
Comments closedI have been rereading (and enjoying, for the third time in my life) the book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori.
Comments closedI think I’ve maybe been a closet phenomenologist for the last 30 years, only I didn’t know it.
Comments closedI’m not immune to the charms of conspiracy theories; some things in the world are so messed up that I can see how only a conspiracy could explain them.
Comments closedMy carefully concealed always positive outlook on life is taking a beating these days, and the only pleasures are (i) attacking inconsistencies in other people’s positions and (ii) defending my own right to the same.
Comments closedI have been reading The Connectome: How The Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, by Sebastian Seung, a Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Physics at MIT, and formerly a theoretical physicist.
Comments closedI watched two recent finals — The Australian Tennis Open (Djokovic vs. Nadal) and the Super Bowl (Giants vs. Patriots) and their endings were very different in spirit.
Comments closedSchopenhauer, in The World as Will and Representation, has a chapter on The Metaphysics of Sexual Love, and remarks how strange it is that love ceaselessly occupies people’s thoughts, interests and readings, and yet has gone relatively unexamined from a philosophical point of view.
Comments closedSomething about naive liberal humanitarianism often bugs and irritates me more than correspondingly naive reactionary beliefs, and I (probably wrongly) end up judging more severely than I should otherwise good people who espouse it naively.
Comments closedWe’ve been in a bull market for Treasury Bonds since the late 1970s, and, as a student pointed out to me recently, and I think I can confirm, we’ve been in a bull market for academic grades too.
Comments closedThe Fed’s blithe confidence in their models and forecasts influenced society’s behavior. Therefore, not only were their models wrong, but their unacknowledged wrongness arguably made things worse.
Comments closedThere are two very different uses of the word probability.
Comments closedIn quantum mechanics — i.e. in the real world as we understand it today — matter can have two kinds of formerly apparently contradictory qualities. The same applies to people.
Comments closedLately it has become fashionable to disparage intuition in favor of careful statistical analysis. Me, I’m still a fan of intuition.
Comments closedIn Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and Macau, the thing that has impressed itself on me through airports and downtowns is the bombardment of luxury advertising.
Comments closedPart of the reason economists and traders are likely to be fooled is because, underlying everything they do is the statistics of what is ultimately human behavior.
Comments closedSelf-schooled in finance and unschooled in economics, I was very glad to be sent a link to Hayek’s Nobel Prize acceptance lecture.
Comments closed“Lola” is executed with great panache, and loosely relevant to economic affairs today. It’s set in a small town in the boom of 1950s West Germany, and is about contagion, the moral kind.
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