keyholez

"the scandalous particularity of the world"

[keyholez-blog]

At the global level, however, inequality is the elephant in the room. It’s where almost all our attention should be focused. Any article on “inequality” (no qualifier) should begin with a description of how much better things are than back in the horrible 1950s and 1960s when inequality caused misery that is simply beyond human comprehension. But that’s not how most articles on equality begin. They start by referring to the 1950s and 1960s as a “golden age,” which is an insult to the tens of millions of Chinese who were starving to death while American economists were completely focused on reducing unemployment from 5% to 4%.

Scott Sumner

[keyholez-blog]

The Death of Salesman a famous play that written by Arthur Miller, and get through this play we can know it's talk about the real tragedy of socialism.

one of the wife's students

[keyholez-blog]

Before [the demons] marched away on their new route, Around the dyke there on the left they wheeled, Poking their tongues out in a long salute-- A tribute to their captain in the field. He turned, bent down, and as he watched them pass He hailed them with the trumpet of his arse.

Inferno, Canto 21.

[keyholez-blog]

the Home Alone scene in the New Testament

Until recently I was unaware of this -- Luke 2:41 et seq.:

Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him.

After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, "Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."

"Why were you searching for me?" he asked. "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?"

But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

[keyholez-blog]

How to Overcome Your Flaws, Face Your Fears, Get Things Done, and Achieve Your Dreams, G

Hm, I thought that, if I wrote down the title and started composing, I might figure it all out as I went along, but no such luck.

[keyholez-blog]

In 1989 Francis Fukuyama made a bold prediction. The world would become increasing democratic and market-oriented. Other political models would gradually wither away. He called this “The End of History.” Here are a couple facts about his prediction: 1. It would be difficult to find any other prediction in the humanities or social sciences that has proved more accurate. There are many more democratic countries than in 1989, and policy has become much more market-oriented in most countries. 2. When intellectuals discuss his prediction today, 99% assume it failed to come true. Indeed most utter the phrase “the end of history” with undisguised contempt.

Scott Sumner

[keyholez-blog]

Thus in future cities crammed with computer hardware, roughly half of the volume is likely to be taken up by pipes that move cooling fluids in and out. And the tech for such pipes will probably be more stable than tech for energy or computers. So if you want a stable career managing something that will stay very valuable for a long time, consider plumbing.

Robin Hanson, "A Future of Pipes"

[keyholez-blog]

But Dante isn't thinking of regularity in the first instance any more than he is thinking of rhyme, which is too easy in Italian to be thought a technical challenge: in fact for an Italian poet it's *not* rhyming that's hard.

Clive James

[keyholez-blog]

I know Will Smith's personality seems a bit artificial, but are we really at the point where we treat his name like a short-story title?

[keyholez-blog]

real-estate treachery

My family unit is looking for a new apartment. Out of three "professional" viewings we've experienced, all three have involved the agent slyly telling us that the place we inquired about was taken or occupied or otherwise unavailable -- but would we be interested in looking at another, slightly more expensive place? We grit our teeth, feeling slightly exploited, but agree anyway -- not that we've actually taken any of the up-sold apartments. 

I have the sense that this is a well known real-estate "trick of the trade" -- but why? Are we sure this actually benefits the agents in any way, or are they just doing it out of some now outdated instinct -- the posthumous twitch of a dead commercial appendage? Surely the idea is that we'll be so won over by the nicer apartment that the one we had intended to see will become unacceptable by comparison -- but are people really so dumb and gullible that they forget about the price difference? And isn't it insulting to be told that the home you initially wanted to see is actually a disgusting hellhole, but one that's only $25 more per month is quite lovely? How could the market be so inefficient? Is the agent planning to rip us off on the nice apartment, or was she planning to rip us off on the cheap apartment? Either way, she's an asshole. 

In general, aren't these petty machinations out of place in a world where real-estate agents (and used-car salesmen etc.) are ex ante thought to be loathsome and untrustworthy? I'm already suspicious, already prepared to cut things short at the first whiff of bullshit -- and surely I'm not the only one! So the bait-and-switch treatment is at least as likely to make me call it quits as to grin and bear it. Not a good risk-reward for the scamster!

Real estate is terrible.

[keyholez-blog]

movies, books

"Good" books these days don't tend to include plot puzzles; your reward for reading is the "finely observed" writing itself. By contrast, it seems to me (and I can't say this with a high level of confidence since I don't actually consume much culture), "good" movies often do have plot puzzles, and the whole thing becomes an exercise in visual memory -- did you notice how Scene C alludes to that mysterious thing you saw in Scene A, allowing you to infer Explanation X?! As a person with a pretty weak visual memory, I am irritated by (what I take to be) this years/decades-old trend. What's the deal, culture people?

(I think the problem I have with plot puzzles in general is similar to the problem I have with my sense of direction when I'm with other people. On my own, I'm moderately competent, but when following someone else I just never remember to pay attention. Likewise, I notice a lot of anomalies in stories, but I tend to assume they're things I'm misunderstanding, so I make a mental note to revisit them later but never do.)

[keyholez-blog]

Donnie Darko

"perfectly" combines the main interests of all self-respecting teenage boys:

the notion that all time is simultaneous and the future has "already" occurred

burning down the school

[gogynfeirdd]

a) Nah, and this sort-of gets to a comment I left out to collect more notes: (in a world where prices are primarily determined by machines) capitalism, or at least the capitalist, is fucking moot. Traders ought to be jamming this software with their sabots. (Maybe you have front-line experience of such resentment?)

[keyholez-blog]

I've detected minimal front-line resentment, I think in part for ideological reasons (it would seem very unsporting for a human stock-jobber to quibble with the market's verdict that he or she was obsolete), in part because huge swaths of finance (especially bond markets) are still barely electronic ("Communism is power of the soviets plus electrification..."), and in part because human operators are still used to run and monitor the algorithms, many of which are just very finely honed implementations of human rules of thumb (e.g. if you have a big buy order, don't try to execute it all at once because you might drive up the price) used as helpmeets in the course of making some big dumb bet that, for better or worse, emerged from very old-fashioned wetware. In a way this is a more discouraging outcome than your vision of a mechanical black-box central planner, because in reality there's still very, very little money (in the scheme of the tens of trillion that are at stake) invested "systematically." As far I can tell, the robots split into 1)  a faction that basically commits automated plagiarism ("Ah ha! Some rube is trying to 'invest' based on an 'idea' -- allow me to grab a third of a penny from him (relative to an unobserved counterfactual universe in which I didn't exist) by becoming his doppleganger") and 2) a faction that just boringly, diligently, consistently follows time-tested investing rules without overlaying any particular "narrative." Perhaps surprisingly, the administrators of the world's great fortunes don't seem tremendously interested in either 1 or 2 -- they're just not that fun! So Skynet specializes in "microstructure," while human luminaries scrutinize the credibility of Taco Bell's counterattack on Chipotle.

It's similar to an entity like McDonald's -- so much technology and organizational know-how and skillful social engineering marshaled toward a tragically sub-trans-human end. The more optimization power there is out there, the more embarrassed we (do? should?) feel about what we want to use it for.

P.S.: the "liboors" are funny and all, but it's another case of nothing really mattering. All the sushi-based quid pro quo was in service of maybe but probably not actually nudging a set of interest rates a couple of hundredths of a percentage point in one direction or another. ("Probably not actually" because there was already a system in place for filtering out outliers, which the boors may not even have understood.) (Approximately) no one noticed or cared about this in real time because it was so damn picayune.

[gogynfeirdd]

As much as 70% of price moves in commodity markets are generated by trading programs reacting to one another,

[keyholez-blog]

a) Is there a principled distinction between human cognitive algorithms reacting to one another and "trading programs" (designed by humans, often based on abstractions of human traders' behavior) doing so?

b) If my 30 seconds of Google-ing don't deceive me, this is a pretty misleading summary of the underlying study. The article's phrasing made me think that it was basing this claim on some kind of data about who was trading with whom, but I don't think that actually exists. Sure enough, some (smart) Swiss people just took high-frequency price data and fit it to "the Hawkes self-excited conditional Poisson model" and then used that to estimate that 60-70% of commodity price changes are "endogenous." This doesn't actually have anything to do with "programs" as such. The "moves" could be endogenous even before electronic trading existed. Just look at what Washington Irving said about John Law!

[gogynfeirdd]

tariffs and capital controls are swiftly punished by neoliberal authorities while subsidies are tolerated with murmured concern - - then when states go bankrupt from paying fealty to rather than profiting from international commerce this is represented as ‘the will of the market’ (or its venerable...

[keyholez-blog]

Don't believe everything the votaries of sclerosis tell you. The European states that are "bankrupt" have not been driven to that point because "revenue-raising measures...are subject to a downward competitive spiral," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP shows Italy and Spain among the most voracious revenue-raisers out there, and even Greece outranks the US; it's not for lack of revenue that these states have faced (what a baby-soft commentariat deems worthy of the name) "crisis." (And by the same token, or maybe the opposite side of the token, it's interesting to remember that all those pleasant, unperturbed Nordic countries are so high on the list, yet you don't hear about people starving to death on the streets of Stockholm because they're crushed under the burden of oppressive taxation. Any polity-measuring variable in which Zimbabwe gets ranked first and Denmark second is probably not getting to the heart of the matter.)

The funny thing about the empirical reality of the "welfare state" (a very tendentious name!) is that it (somewhat) belies its potted summary as "redistribution." That conjures up the image of shifting money around from one sub-group to another, which really implies not a damn thing about running a budget deficit (and indeed Denmark and Canada have run pretty tight fiscal ships over the years). But zero-sum games are no fun, so it's endlessly tempting to rope in some complacent rentiers and roll the dice.

[keyholez-blog]

CHAPTER 13. THE ECCENTRIC PLEASURES OF THE BED, WHETHER PARTAKEN OF BY JESUS?

Bentham. 

[keyholez-blog]

[I wasn't being serious]

me: my three economic priorities are ending too big to fail, creating jobs, and growing the economy

me: what are yours?

mortgagez: ending the economy, growing jobs, and creating too big to fail