As I’m going to bed having a chat with my partner about what a horrible scumbag Ronald Reagan was, I thought about a brief summary of US presidents for people who don’t know much about modern American history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, and through the New Deal we saw the …
Yearly Archives: 2022
Why housing is expensive
From these two graphs we can determine the state of the US housing market. The number of houses being built per year is slower than it was in the 2000s. The price of housing has increased. Lower supply, increase or keep demand the same. This is why prices will rise. According to the National Association …
Diversification
Several different levels of diversification… The lowest level of diversification possible is where everyone is forced to be part of the same system managed by a small group of people. Participants have no direct say how decisions are made. If it goes down, there is economic collapse. The second lowest level of diversification is where …
Privatizing Medicare is not like self managed index funds
Republicans talk about privatizing Medicare. What this means is that instead of the government running Medicare a private insurance company runs health care for seniors. They don’t want to do this of course because seniors are expensive to insure. So it will never happen. But the main thing Medicare does is it is able to …
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Best economic lessons I ever learned
I was thinking today about the idea of sticking all of the most important financial advice onto a 3×5 note card. A few ideas came to mind. Pay off high interest debt as soon as possible (high interest > 8%) but not low interest debt if the alternative is investing in higher interest assets Take …
Ukraine in context
The official visuals of Ukrainians blocking Africans from getting on trains. #AfricansinUkraine pic.twitter.com/hJYpM3LY0A — Damilare (Deechi) (@DamilareArah) February 26, 2022 I saw this tweet today and naturally it got me thinking about how racism in our society is constantly perpetuated in all spheres of our modern world. People are very good at othering others. We …
Peace is a policy choice
Today saw the launching of the largest war in Europe since 1945. We must keep track of why there was so much peace in Europe over the last 77 years. It wasn’t because the leaders of Europe were all angels, some of them (particularly Stalin) were truly terrible people. It was because there was a …
Experience is complicated
There is a tendency in technology nowadays to require x years of experience in some technology in order to get a job when you start out. I am fortunately past that stage myself, and have observed why the current conventional wisdom is foolish, and we need to move to a different hiring paradigm. Let’s say …
Common Python pitfalls
Here are mistakes I have observed which lead to broken code. Python is not Java, C, or C++ and needs to be treated as its own language. Treating it with the same syntax is a sure fire way to make broken code. Java and Python are both object-oriented languages. French and Italian are both Romance …
What does International Relations teach us about Ukraine?
The world stands on a precipice right now. The question is whether Democracy will stand or whether it will fall. Russia is massing troops on the border with Ukraine, threatening a war (it’s the only reason a state ever does this military maneuver, let’s be honest) and now its NATO’s turn to act. There are …
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