Friday, November 19, 2010

Thursday, November 18, 2010

The Elusive Underpinnings of U.S. Venturesomeness

"...Differences in the growth rates in the U.S. and other Western countries during the 19th and 20th centuries also raise questions about the degree to which the basic supply-side formula is a sufficient (rather than a necessary) condition for rapid growth. By historical standards, economic growth in the 19th century—when per capita incomes doubled—was unprecedented. But in the 20th century, incomes increased four times as rapidly as they did in the 19th century. Given the higher “base,” one might have expected growth in the 20th century to have been slower. Strikingly, the modern economy has also been less prone to lurch from exhilarating boom to devastating bust. In the 19th century, several depressions interrupted economic growth, whereas in the 20th century, apart from the Great Depression, downturns were relatively mild and short-lived—in spite of two great wars. Yet conditions in the 19th century conformed to the basic supply-side formula more closely than those of the 20th century. In the United States, government expenditures and taxes were extremely low—and, except during the Civil War, there was no income tax. There was no federal bureaucracy to impose minimum-wage laws, regulate health and safety standards, or resist monopolies and trusts. No Clean Water or Securities and Exchange acts had been passed. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security programs had not been conceived. And property rights—another mainstay of supply-side recommendations—were at least as secure, if not more so, in the 19th century than they are now.

Another puzzle: according to Solow’s groundbreaking research, technical progress rather than capital accumulation was the source of nearly 90% of U.S. growth in the first half of the 20th century. In the 19th century, capital accumulation made a larger contribution to growth than did technical change. Yet the new products invented in the 19th century were extraordinary. Inventions between 1850 and 1900 include the monorail, telephone, microphone, cash register, phonograph, incandescent lamp, electric train, steam turbine, gasoline engine, and street car, as well as dynamite, movies, motorcycles, linotype printing, automobiles, refrigerators, concrete and steel construction, pneumatic tires, aspirin, and X-rays. These may well overshadow inventions credited to the entire 20th century.

The smaller economic impact of 19th-century inventions suggests that they weren’t effectively commercialized; their widespread use was hampered by some combination of inappropriate features, high costs, poor marketing, or a paucity of venturesome consumption. Why in spite of a more congenial supply-side climate was this so? What changed in the 20th century that allowed the United States—and other countries with advanced economies—to extract more value from technological and scientific breakthroughs?
..."


The Venturesome Economy

Monday, November 15, 2010

The American Dream and delusions of the 'Real World'

8:34 PM

V: So this is basically the template of someone trying to become American middle or upper middle class from a (Chinese) lower class.

It's all very directed but without being introspective.

Like -
Go to school
Get a job
Get married
Save money
Buy a house
Have children

Each action is directed toward this singular goal but the actions are simultaneously very mechanical and automated.

It's a success story, but each part is just a fairy tale.

You study hard in school and get a PhD and get a job!

Might as well plant magic beans - it'll have just about the same effect.

...

There is a large limitation of perspective... a lot of self-delusion that can come from it, too.

When you finally get your break to the next level, you can very easily delude yourself into thinking it was all about the things you did.

That you finally figured out how the real world works.

Friday, October 29, 2010

On the watersheds of thought

I have often wondered whether people can change so suddenly and so drastically...

Or if these are the case of just never really seeing the person for who he or she is?

Monday, October 18, 2010

The Fall of French Cuisine

Some of the ‘declinists’ think that what would set France right is a good dose of Thatcherism and Chicago School economics, and Steinberger considers that this sort of remedy would do much to fix the national cooking crisis. Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Reagan was elected president in 1980, and Mitterrand’s long reign began in 1981: ‘Insofar as the restaurant business was concerned, the United States and Britain unquestionably took the better route,’ Steinberger says, and this despite the fact that Mitterrand was a very great gourmand while Thatcher was of the ‘food is fuel’ persuasion and Reagan’s favourite foods were macaroni and cheese and liquorice jelly beans.

Down to the Last Cream Puff

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Vahalla Rising



Among many things, good soundtrack.

Nordic landscapes can be so dark and brooding. It's a wonder how civilization emerged out of all the mist and bog.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Regressive

9:43 PM

V: ... I am very wary of these kind of arguments about how something is socially regressive.

It's manipulative: there is implication of civilisational conflict between western liberalism and eastern fundamentalism. Look how terrible and regressive this fundamentalism is (true) - we have a duty to combat this!

This is exactly an argument that you see through when applied against China. That there is a very false concern that masks crasser political desires.

Yeah, I mean, I won't argue that these systems are backwards and awful, but it's not like they formed in parallel to a superior western system.

It's more like the western system oppressed, abused, and brutalised people, who then later turned to embrace backwards social systems.

It's flimsy thinking to turn this into a moral equivalence.

But it's equally sloppy to suggest that there is a developmental equivalence - that there is some new white man's burden to enlighten these natives - when the powers most interested and able to pursue this conflict are those who brutalised these people in the first place.

An NGO that opens a battered women's shelter? Is this what we oppose?

Or just the continued otherising by those whose brutalisation created a context for these social regression?

I mean, a lot of this backwardness is clearly unsustainable...

Actually, I mean the other way. That liberalism seems to accompany the development of wealth. The stabilisation of political systems and economies.

It is this constant state of conflict - this destabilisation - that seems a better culture for this sustained backwardness.

Do you think a wealthy (not just rich), politically and economically stable middle eastern nation is going to resist liberalisation?

The production of wealth has strong educational implications.

What is the other explanation? That brown people are just inferior and backwards and need to be enlightened? Their political situation is so backwards, it really isn't even such a terrible thing if they are killed as part of a larger political conflict - not like their lives are worth much anyway.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Sign and Sight

Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists?

It is well known that in the struggle of the weak against the strong, it is easier to attack the former. Those who resist will always be accused by the cowardly of exciting the hatred of the powerful.


Anyone with a mind to contend timidly that liberty is indivisible, that the life of a human being has the same value everywhere, that amputating a thief's hand or stoning an adulteress is intolerable everywhere, is duly arraigned in the name of the necessary equality of cultures. As a result, we can turn a blind eye to how others live and suffer once they've been parked in the ghetto of their particularity. Enthusing about their inviolable differentness alleviates us from having to worry about their condition.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Trading

V: The CEO is showing off to a bunch of impressed traders his Blackberry bull whip app. Makes a sound when you shake it.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

The Fall of 0-W

And so, yet another alliance rose and then crumbles into ashes.

Such is the history of EVE.

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Dijkstra

One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate.


PDF

manuscripts archive

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Med school

...

V: well, the med students are all abcs
so they inherit all of the standard abc fakeness
their stated motivations seem at once both more idealistic and less idealistic

...

V: more idealistic in that they talk about these broad, grand notions of live saving
but less idealistic in that it's like this desire to be a television doctor
self-centred idealism

Friday, July 02, 2010

A walk in mortal paradise

Ipanema/Le Blon
From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

From Brazil

Barra
From Brazil


From Brazil

From Brazil

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Law school

11:50 PM
V: Reading an interesting discussion of law school. Some very choice quotes.
There's a pretty sad reason for this glut: there's the constantly-circulating idea that law school is the French Foreign Legion for the intelligent and aimless; they accept any scoundrel and turn them out a gentleman.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

a review of Mad Men

As I see it, the whole spectacle has the bad faith of, say, an 18th-century American slaveholding society happily ridiculing a 17th-century Puritan society – ‘Look, they used to burn their witches!’ – while secretly envying the ease of a time when you could still tie uppity women to the stake. If we’ve managed to become less credulous about advertising, to make it more normal and the bearer of more reasonable expectations, perhaps in 50 years’ time viewers will look back on the silly self-congratulatory subtexts of Mad Men, shake their heads, and be grateful that gender and sexual tolerance have likewise been normalised. Advertising circa 1960 is genuinely interesting. Would that Mad Men had been genuinely interested in it.

Saturday, May 22, 2010

And sometimes time just passes by

Went sailing for the first time. Pelicans! Their wingspans are huge.

Monday, May 10, 2010

The Reveal

Enjoyed reading the latest Dunk and Egg short story. The title first led me to hope that it would about the tournament at Harrenhal in the Year of the False Spring, but I later realized my chronology is off by a few decades.

I like reading GGRM's books. The events that happen are as amazing and shocking to the characters in the story as it is to the reader.

It just has this sense of verisimilitude that is hard to find else where. The small and mundane details, the characterizations, the myth and legends; vivid but never pompous...

Monday, May 03, 2010

Ideas

The Maine line

Veil of Ignorance

Friday, April 16, 2010

C. Lispector



"Grown up, she was extraordinary-looking, all eyeliner, cheekbones and pout: Gloria Grahame crossed with Sophia Loren. Men fell for her, but she seems to have been above such things."

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Arthur, Merlin and love magic

"The role of the romance heroine in healing the knight’s injuries overlaps with her granting him her love, so that at first healing and loving go hand in hand. Only later, as medical knowledge becomes the preserve of university- educated men and female empirics are excluded from practice through professional regulation, does the idea that women literally cure their lovers dissolve into a metaphorical understanding of the beloved as healing the wounds made by Cupid."

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Exasperational Age

The Aspirational Age?

"It is a pessimism, first, about there being any way in which society collectively, acting primarily through the state, can reshape its underlying socio-economic structure. Staggering inequalities of wealth are simply taken to be part of the natural order. Where it used to be said that ‘the poor are always with us,’ eternal existence is now granted to the rich as well."

In need of an analysis

basti: I really like ‘Entourage’...It kills all the magic of movies entirely.

On the surface, this show is like a male-version of ‘Twilight.’ It's all wish-fulfillment. They do whatever they want with no consequences. Except if you really pay attention to it, it has some very interesting themes.It's not clear whether they are intentional or not, though.

Look at the so-called artistic characters. And look at the examples of the movies they create. Like Billy Walsh and ‘Medellin’/‘Queen's Boulevard’. He's just this pretentious prima-donna. He is obsessed with his artistic initegrity, but the movies themselves are just pseudo-intellectual art. The characters talk about how much they want to make great movies, but it's just crass business.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

Inter-generational progress?
"In a society of this sort, with stability in both the underlying growth in productivity and the propensity to consume, each succeeding generation must be richer in material terms than its predecessor."

Thursday, March 25, 2010

And this is the way it is

Google Redirects! But Will The Chinese Government Block?!

# The Chinese, in their amazing capacity to endure, conscious of the very real progress the Chinese government has thus far delivered to them in so many other areas, decide this still isn’t big enough for them to rise up and rebel.
# They adapt, switch to other services, and continue with life, making the best of things.
# They may even begin to resent Google and “the West” for abandoning them, for not respecting their circumstances enough to work with them and instead end up being seen as working against them in the guise of working “for” them.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

The Virtuous Poor

basti: Some people at work were talking about collecting art.
It was very much like in ‘Wall Street’
I guess if I weren't so poor, then I might go back to coveting wealth.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Predicting the Future

CPUs and GPUs in the next ten years

"Today’s CPUs have already reached higher heat density than a nuclear reactor, and maintaining Moore’s Law will be a considerable challenge once five nanometer gates are achieved.

The Itanium architecture was conceived two decades ago as insurance against that inevitable day...

Unfortunately, the compiler technology to pull this off did not even exist when Intel and HP began the project"

Sunday, February 21, 2010

A gift from the past, part 1



For me, access to the internet around the early part of the decade made TV in general, and Cartoon Network in particular, one of those things that fell by the wayside. But just recently I found something that was not in my teenage subconsciousness: Justice League.

When confront with this artifact of a past era it is difficult to say what effect it would have had if I watched it back then, but I definitely appreciate watching the show now. Perhaps I am just becoming capable of appreciating these things.

The most surprising part is how much I enjoyed watching a series that is almost a decade old, and with decent - not great - animation. It wasn't a breakthrough in technique by any means, but the story telling is quite compelling.

When I think back on what meant so much to me as a child, as a teenager, and even as short a while back as one year ago, I can comfortably say I have come to ridicule many of them. This is somewhat of a reversal.

The series is well written with some surprising characters. In watching the Justice League I've gain a sense of appreciation for the American canonical superhero characters who always uphold the same ideals, and sometimes, fight the same supervillains. In the past I've mocked this aspect of DC comics as stagnant, preferring instead the more fast paced anime (perhaps I would not have appreciated this back then after all). But as time passed, many of these new animes felt hollow - because style is no substitue for substance. And plus, one can only withstand so much the confused philosophical meanderings and misogyny of their 'autuers'.

What came across as uplifting in Justice League is the exploration of themes such as love, redemption and renewal amidst the backdrop of characters that we thought we knew. And of some surreal existentialist themes...

(to be continued...)

Saturday, February 13, 2010

France, or what's left of it, in Africa

Nodding and Winking

'...we maintain the fiction of our "presence" and endorse the course of events we no longer determine.'

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

A poet

Interview with Imtiaz Dharker

"And you are as God made you, beautiful
And you are as God made you, unexpected"

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Post-colonialism in Dune

basti: It's interesting. I am half-watching the SciFi channel version of ‘Dune.’ There are certan elements they stress that the Lynch version does not.

Like, for example, they stress how kind the Atreides are to the natives. This is meant to be understood directly. Like, that they are generous, benevolent rulers. But I think there is a lot of room for a different interpretation. The movie's attempts to construct this interpretation are faulty - it's just not that well done.

So it's possible to look at this the other way. That these foreigners come in with all of these high-minded ideals about social equality and wontonly disrupt the native culture without any real care for its long-term health.

They show up, dismantle all of these old customs overnight, but there is no real, lasting attempts at building a better society. Just these token gestures.

This, I think, is interesting, because the original Dune does not take this approach at all. Only the 2000 version does, which seems very telling of the intended audience and the preconceptions of the writers. There is this additional burden for the writers to portray the colonial masters as benevolent, but it always takes this very apologetic stance. And the stance seems very hollow. Whereas Lynch seems to have had no need to address this at all.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Diary of an EVE Industrialist, Part 6

Just how unequal is EVE's hyper-capitalistic universe? Apparently, not so unequal than our own.

I remember a while a go, someone calculated the average income of a surface dweller in EVE based the on the price of a dinner meal in one of the official EVE chronicles. The figure came out to be 4 million ISK (Interstellar Kredits) per year.

Well, here are some back of the napkin calculations. To put the 'average' income into perspective, the income of a capsuler, an EVE pilot, is a good 20 million ISK, per hour. Let's take the U.S. as a basis of comparison. The average U.S. income is $33,000 per year. That means, for the U.S. to reach that level of wealth disparity, there needs to be people who are earning $165,000 per hour, or, $1,446,225,000 a year.

According to Forbes, there are 793 identified billionaires in the world with an average net worth of $3 billion each. The yearly income of a capsuler in EVE is half the networth of the average richest people on a 2009 basis.

Consider that the "lifespan" (average subscription month) in EVE is 8 month, the networth of the richest people in EVE are in the same range as the richest people on Earth. Since the average number of EVE capsuler residents is 50K (I use this because EVE recently reached this peak number, with room for future growth) against a background of untold billions on the surface of planets. I have to assume that ratio is not so different from 793 out of 7 billion people. Looking at it that way, the stratification of the richest people in EVE are similar to the wealth divide of this era.