I ordered my new computer the other day, I’ve been told it will be here on the 12th. I’m getting a 27″ iMac, the one with the 2.7Ghz quad core processor and a 2TB hard drive. I’m also upping my RAM up to 12GB. This machine is overkill in a lot of ways, but what the hell. I haven’t had a new computer in 5 years, it’s about time!
My 13″ macbook from 2006 has served me well, it’s still going. When my mother bought her 24″ iMac, I thought it was a bit much, until I started using it… I had been doing a big negative scanning job on my notebook and I thought everything was going fine, then I tried her machine… Wow. Yes, it was more powerful, but the display made a huge difference. Being able to see the image, the tool palettes, and even some chat windows all at once made a huge difference in my workflow. It was actually fun to do, it was a chore before.
This is going to be my TV too. I’m halfway thinking about getting rid of my cable and just going with iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon for my TV show fixes. In any case, I’ll be watching everything on my computer. It will be possible to have a 1080 stream and still have room for a chat window. A subscription to MLBTV isn’t all that much….
This will be the end of my computer buying binge, at least for a little while. I’m hoping all of my current things will last several years. What’s next on my bigger purchases list? I’ve got my eye on some new speakers (as always). If I do that, it won’t be till next year at the earliest. I’m going to try to save a little money the rest of this year, and of course buy some more small frivolous things…
I’ve talked about “Sammy the Mouse” by Zak Sally before in this blog. It’s a really odd tale (so far) with really evocative art. Fantagraphics has published the first three volumes in a beautiful format. Zak wants to make a book that collects the first three volumes, and he wants to do it himself. No really, himself. He’s going to print it in his garage, the warehousing, and the packing and shipping himself. Sounds like the only thing he won’t be doing is the binding. Actually, he will be making 10 hardcover versions. He’s hoping to raise the money for the project on kickstarter. It’s well worth checking out.
If you like comics, this is a great project to support. It’s cheap and well worth it!
“Osama bin Laden was already made an old fool by the Arab Spring. It was a million young bodies, their unsated creature needs, a generation of Arabs who were only 9 or 11 when 9/11 happened, that pushed the Middle East into modernity, in the end. It was taxi drivers and street vendors and people with no jobs. And they revealed bin Laden for what he always was, a trust fund brat peddling delusions of past grandeur as a cure for the present’s pains.”
I dreamed that I was in a photography class the other night.
My cousin Beth was in there with me and I explained to her in extreme detail how to use achieve accurate focus on an enlarger. I went through everything, the grain focuser, lens alignment, focus shifts as you top down from wide open, optimum apertures, vibration control, etc. This is pretty arcane knowledge at this point, and I was correct in every excruciating detail. What I failed to notice was that I was trying to focus onto previously exposed and developed film. That doesn’t even make any sense. I had one of my slides on the board and was getting frustrated that I couldn’t focus the image on the slide by shining light on it. The reflection was getting to me, the last thing I remember doing was looking for a polarizing filter to get rid of the reflection coming off the film. I had conflated copy photography and printing.
I woke up wondering how I could dredge up so much technical stuff accurately, stuff that wouldn’t even occur to me without actually trying to make a print and be so far off on the main event in the darkroom. It would be like knowing all about carburetor overhauling and then wonder why a mixture of water and molasses wasn’t doing real well in the car. Strange stuff…
I’m glad to see the general tone of reaction about his being killed being toned down a bit in the days after the event. Frankly, I was a bit shocked at the glee that had been expressed. Most of the commentators I follow have now come out and said pretty much the same thing. I can’t say I’m unhappy that he’s dead, but I can’t get too happy about any killing. I was actually afraid to post that feeling the day after we heard the news. I half expected someone to ask me if I couldn’t enjoy Bin Laden’s death, whose death could I enjoy? is there a word to describe the fear of irony?
The second in the Hayek/Keynes rap battles, Fight of the Century is a worthy successor to the original. This time, they get more philosophical. Here are some of the better lyrics I think.
KEYNES we could have done better, had we only spent more Too bad that only happens when there’s a World War You can carp all you want about stats and regression Do you deny World War II cut short the Depression?
HAYEK Wow. One data point and you’re jumping for joy the Last time I checked, wars only destroy There was no multiplier, consumption just shrank As we used scarce resources for every new tank
Pretty perverse to call that prosperity Rationed meat, Rationed butter… a life of austerity When that war spending ended your friends cried disaster yet the economy thrived and grew ever faster
This is one of my pet peeves, people talking about how WW II stopped the depression. Folks lived pretty poorly, there was massive rationing and all of the work went into things that were going to be blown up. It wasn’t exactly productive labor in the long run.
KEYNES You too only see what you want to see The spending on war clearly goosed GDP Unemployment was over, almost down to zero That’s why I’m the master, that’s why I’m the hero
HAYEK Creating employment’s a straigtforward craft When the nation’s at war, and there’s a draft If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet We’d be at full employment with nothing to eat
REFRAIN
HAYEK jobs are the means, not the ends in themselves people work to live better, to put food on the shelves real growth means production of what people demand That’s entrepreneurship not your central plan
Once again, people tend to lose the plot when it comes to jobs. It’s easy enough to create jobs if you’re not worried about what the people are doing in them. Never mind the waste of resources (including their time) involved and how they could have been better used elsewhere.
KEYNES My solution is simple and easy to handle.. its spending that matters, why’s that such a scandal? The money sloshes through the pipes and the sluices revitalizing the economy’s juices
it’s just like an engine that’s stalled and gone dark To bring it to life, we need a quick spark Spending’s the life blood that gets the flow going Where it goes doesn’t matter, just get spending flowing
HAYEK You see slack in some sectors as a “general glut” But some sectors are healthy, and some in a rut So spending’s not free – that’s the heart of the matter too much is wasted as cronies get fatter.
The economy’s not a car, there’s no engine to stall no expert can fix it, there’s no “it” at all. The economy’s us, we don’t need a mechanic Put away the wrenches, the economy’s organic
Exactly! The economy isn’t a thing, it’s a process, it’s us. Try to control it, and you try to control us.
KEYNES so what would you do to help those unemployed? this is the question you seem to avoid when we’re in a mess, would you just have us wait? Doing nothing until markets equil-i-brate?
HAYEK I don’t want to do nothing, there’s plenty to do The question I ponder is who plans for who? Do I plan for myself or leave it to you? I want plans by the many and not by the few.
As succinct a summary of free market ideals as there is. A point that isn’t made enough is the fact that central planning is a few people making decisions for many. No one has the knowledge to do that well.
We shouldn’t repeat what created our troubles I want real growth not just a series of bubbles Let’s stop bailing out losers and let prices work If we don’t try to steer them they won’t go berserk
KEYNES Come on, Are you kidding? Don’t Wall Street’s gyrations Challenge your world view of self-regulation? Even you must admit that the lesson we’ve learned Is more oversight’s needed or else we’ll get burned
HAYEK Oversight? The government’s long been in bed With the Wall Street execs and the firms that they’ve led Prosperity’s all about profit and loss When you bail out the losers there’s no end to the cost
the lesson I’ve learned? It’s how little we know, the world is complex, not some circular flow the economy’s not a class you can master in college to think otherwise is the pretense of knowledge
Zing! People that think they know what’s best are the ones that want to make decisions for everyone. The thing is that those are the same people in the pockets of industry.
KEYNES You get on your high horse and you’re off to the races I look at the world on a case by case basis When people are suffering I roll up my sleeves And do what I can to cure our disease
The future’s uncertain, our outlooks are frail Thats why free markets are so prone to fail In a volatile world we need more discretion So state intervention can counter depression
HAYEK People aren’t chessmen you can move on a board at your whim–their dreams and desires ignored With political incentives, discretion’s a joke The dials you’re twisting… are just mirrors and smoke
the market’s a process where we can discover the most valuable ways to serve one another we need stable rules and real market prices so prosperity emerges and cuts short the crisis
A perfect summation of a type of economics that is gaining traction. It makes sense to me, and it surprises me how many people are willing to allow a handful of people make decisions for them. Russ Roberts and John Papoula have done an amazing job making economics more accessible to everyone and laying out the major issues involved. I wish there was more education like this…
Got into a discussion with some friends about the playoffs in baseball. One thought that there should be more wildcard rounds, I’m totally against that. Baseball is unique among sports when it comes to the length of their season. The MLB season is 162 games plus the playoffs and the world series. 162 games! The idea behind having such a long season is to separate the good from the not as good teams. It’s clear who the best teams are at the end, it seems patently unfair to allow a team that did not do as well over that time frame to usurp the team that did well in a 5 game series. Anything can happen in a series that short. You can take the best team in the league and play them against the worst in a 5 game series and we don’t know who will come out on top.
It’s best to look at the season as a 162 game playoff series. What I would like to see is two divisions in each league. The winners of those divisions play a best of 7, or even 9, to determine who goes to the world series. 4 teams, 1 round of playoffs, we would definitely see who is the best.
“But then only the rich teams would make the series!” that’s a common feeling, but it just isn’t true. There are plenty of rich teams that haven’t done well, like the mets, the Cubs, and even the Dodgers, and teams in smaller markets and/or with smaller budgets that do fine like the Rays and the Angels. The fact that the Yankees or Red Sox haven’t won every world series and the fact that teams like the Royals and A’s have won it tell us that it isn’t just budget that determines success. It helps to be sure, but a well run team is far important than the amount of money they have.
To me, 162 games should mean something. Playing 162 games just to possibly be bounced out by a 4th place team in a best of 5 series just doesn’t seem right. If they are going to change the playoffs, there should be fewer rounds, not more.
I hope this will put the issue to bed. What really gets me about the entire affair is that the people pursuing this were so disingenuous. What is even more amazing is how ineffectual everyone was in calling them on it.
It was pretty clear that the birther thing was really all about being sore losers with some nasty racist and class undertones. When people would try to point this out, the birthers would simply shrug and essentially say, “Hey, rules are rules! Don’t blame us if he’s not eligible.” When prompted with this, eyes were rolled and disparaging things were said, but no progress was made.
I am sure the vast majority of people that were in the birther group were perfectly happy sitting idly by while far more important rules were being flaunted. Things like denying habeus corpus, the authorization of killing Americans abroad, and then there is the bombing in libya. It’s funny how the rules involving those things are just ignored.
Actually I know why those things were ignored even though it would have been the perfect comeback to birther nonsense. It’s because neither side thinks much of the rules. People defending the president couldn’t bring these things up, and the birthers don’t actually mind that aspect of his presidency.
Rules are indeed rules, it would be nice if anyone would notice ones that matter.
OK, after many fits and starts, I finally overhauled my website. This exercise has reinforced my understanding that I am not very good at website design… It’s not quite finished, I need to add some more content, but that will come as I feel like it. It’s still a really simple site, that’s by design. My main goals were to update the look a bit and get rid of the clutter that no one ever looked at, including me. I still need to put up my econ papers, those actually got a fair number of views and they are what drove more outside visitors to my site as opposed to family and friends. Please let me know if there are any obvious bugs or problems!
Silver is now trading at $45 an ounce. I started buying it when it was $17 an ounce, that was just a year ago. What is causing the enormous rise in prices? For an answer, all you have to do is look at the spectacle of the budget drama. The government was almost shut down, insults were hurled, programs were threatened, and in the end a compromise bill was passed and everyone patted themselves on the back for how responsible they were. As it turns out, most of the so called cuts were really just accounting shenanigans. The vast majority of the cuts were simply funds that were previously earmarked but couldn’t be spent for various reasons. In the end, the compromise cut a whopping 1/10 of 1% off of the current budget. And that took effort!
Since then, the president has gone on to explain how we need to keep spending money and S&P has judged that there is a good chance that federal debt will lose its AAA rating before too long. So, it really shouldn’t be too hard to figure out why people are buying metals. The government as a whole can’t, and more importantly won’t, meaningfully trim things back even to what they were in 2000 (a most barbarous time I’m sure). There are no more safe haven currencies to store cash values in, so people are turning to what people have used for money for all of recoded history, metals. Get it while you can I say, there is little hope of things getting better any time soon.