Economics of nuclear power

I haven't time to read this right now but I think you'll be interested.

 

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

 

-Max 

 

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Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

 

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

 

 

Climate change costs

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124588837560750781.html

"The reality is that cost estimates for climate legislation are as unreliable as the models predicting climate change."

An interesting point, and one I hadn't thought of. Of course it cuts both ways, especially for someone as economically ignorant as me, so my takeaway may be rather different than what the author intended. I guess I'm acquiring more epistemological humility as I get older[1].

-Max

[1] Losing arguments with K. probably doesn't hurt that process either. And yes, it is possible to lose an argument with someone you haven't seen in years, if you can remember what they used to tell you.

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Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Revision? Dinosaur weights

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/dinosaur_weight_revisionism/

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a
man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and
desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although
he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F.
Smith (manual, p. 69)

Programming languages overview

May also be of interest, if you have time. I've found Peter Van Roy's thoughts on this subject to be cogent in the past.

 

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/VanRoyChapter.pdf

 

-Max

 

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Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

 

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

 

 

When is a picture worth a thousand words?

On diagrams and problem-solving:

http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/class/cs591kgk/LarkinSimon87.pdf

It's 36 pages long, so be warned. I haven't actually finished it yet,
but so far it's interesting.

-Max

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a
man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and
desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although
he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F.
Smith (manual, p. 69)

Health Care Costs

Interesting story: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124536722522229323.html

As most of corporate America sits on the health-care sidelines -- issuing vague statements, trying not to offend a new U.S. president -- Mr. Burd has charged into the political debate. "I'm here because health-care simply isn't a partisan issue," he says. There is what works, and what doesn't. "I'm genuinely concerned someone might try to solve this by nationalizing health care, at the moment we at Safeway have proven that it is the market that reins in costs."

Prove it, he can. As recently as 2004, Safeway was suffocating under health-care costs growing at 10% a year. Mr. Burd, who had long been intellectually and politically drawn to the health-care issue, decided it was time to hit the restart button. He blew up the company's existing health-care structure and replaced it with one that embodied market principles -- choice, responsibility, competition and price.

Today, Safeway has accomplished what Washington claims is the goal: The company's per-capita health-care expenses have remained flat, compared to the near 40% increase experienced by the rest of corporate America over the past four years. This has not been done by cutting care or shifting costs to employees. Nearly 80% of the 30,000 nonunion Safeway workers who take part in the program rate it good, very good, or excellent. [snip]

-Max

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Legal vs. natural rights

Thomas Jefferson talked about "natural" and "inalienable rights" which came from Nature, and as a kid I never really understood what he meant: a right, I reasoned, is always granted by someone and must by acknowledged by them in order to take effect. If I give you the right to buy oil from me at $80 a barrel--a right which is worth nothing unless oil starts trading at higher than $80 a barrel--that right came from me and will be enforced by me. Talking about self-existing rights makes no sense. Suppose I claimed I had a "right" to medical treatment for my cancer (if I had cancer). From whom does such a right come? If someone refuses to treat me, because I can't pay them, to whom do I go for recourse? Such a right is no right at all, it's just nonsense.

There's another sense in which we sometimes use the term "right," though, and it basically comes down to this: if intelligent and right-thinking people[1] would universally find no fault with you in a certain course of action, then you have the right to take that course of action. For instance, you have the right to marry someone you're actually attracted to[2]. Some people might fault you for holding out, but no celestial beings will[3]. If we wanted to draw a distinction between these two usages of the word right, I propose that we call the first kind "legal rights," granted to you by some other entity, and "natural rights," because I think that's what Thomas Jefferson pretty much meant by his use of the term. To say that man has a right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," is not to say that anyone is required to GIVE them to you--inalienable rights cannot be given or taken, else they'd not be inalienable. Rather, it is to assert that one can claim that for one's self, or seek to claim them, with a clear conscience, no matter what or who may claim otherwise.

-Max

[1] I.e. all celestial beings.

[2] And yes, this is one of the reasons I think about rights sometimes. There's a part of my psyche that still feels bad about dying a bachelor, eventually, but I really do have the right not to marry someone I don't want to marry. Plus, it's impossible to marry anyone against your will anyway, at least in the temple.

[3] Or if they do, then by definition you DON'T have that right. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I've been wrong, or even the thousandth. But I'm pretty sure you actually do have that right, because it's testified of all over the scriptures and throughout the gospel.

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Thoughts on investment and inflation

[I didn't Cc the blog on this originally last week but now I've changed my mind because I think it's important.]

 

From a co-worker of mine, some interesting thoughts. Emphasis added.

 

Maturity mismatch is the main purpose of the modern banking business existence! Normal people are presumed to be unwilling to lend money to someone for more than one year, yet the industry needs this sort of loans. The banks therefore borrow short and loan long, lying to depositors about being able to return their deposits on time. The FDIC is there to instill confidence in the lies. [snip]

 

Back when we did not have the bond  market what banks were doing was justifiable – in order to finance the industry somebody had to pry the savings away from populace, evaluate risks and borrow out the funds. Now there is simply no excuse for this anymore – people should invest their savings directly or via special vehicles (e.g. mutual funds) with explicit understanding of commitment terms and risk levels instead of the vague "magic FDIC will save me!". Maturity transformation is steroidal and we're well into "drug abuse" territory.

 

On a related note, people should not be using fiat currency as a store of value, because doing so is implicitly transforming the responsibility for investment management from the individual to the state. It's wrong for the same reason that maturity transformation is wrong – people surrender responsibility for managing their wealth without knowing they did so. (Hoarding hard currency is fine since you are explicitly committing to invest into gold or silver commodity).

 

Interesting way of thinking about it, no?

 

-Max

 

--

Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

 

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Irony

Just as we're phasing out incandescent light bulbs for energy-efficiency, someone invents a cheap way to boost incandescent efficiency by more than 65%:
 
The process could make a light as bright as a 100-watt bulb consume less electricity than a 60-watt bulb while remaining far cheaper and radiating a more pleasant light than a fluorescent bulb. Despite the incredible intensity involved, the femtosecond laser can be powered by a simple wall outlet, meaning that when the process is refined, implementing it to augment regular light bulbs should be relatively simple...
 
It seems that Professor Chunlei Guo of Rochester hit upon the idea of brightening-up lightbulb filaments following earlier experiments in which he and his team used laser zapping to turn metals completely black. This worked so well that Guo and his cohorts wondered if they could reverse the process.
 
"We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament," says the prof. "When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb's energy usage."
 
It seems that Guo and his team of lightbulb-blasting boffins can also produce other strange effects, getting incandescent bulbs to emit partially polarised or differently-coloured light - without the energy-wasting filters that would normally be necessary.
 
-Max

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Birdcam

You may enjoy this: http://wimp.com/hawkssee

--
Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)

Compassion

Well, isn't this interesting. Dante vs. Vlad.

 

But then things got surprising. When Rokia was presented with the statistics, the donations fell by nearly half. Worse still, when the authors asked one set of subjects to perform mathematical calculations and the other set of subjects to describe their feelings when they heard the word "baby," the subjects who'd done math gave only about half as much to Rokia as the ones who'd thought about babies. Apparently, just thinking analytically makes us stingier. The authors of the study concluded that "calculative thought lessens the appeal of an identifiable victim."

 

-Max

 

--

Rock Is Dead. Long Live Scissors!

 

"The presentation or 'gift' of the Holy Ghost simply confers upon a man the right to receive at any time, when he is worthy of it and desires it, the power and light of truth of the Holy Ghost, although he may often be left to his own spirit and judgment." --Joseph F. Smith (manual, p. 69)