Fri, 24 Mar 2006
Max Clark points out that American, both the ones who run the government and
the ones that run the PTA,
are prone to short-term thinking.
If you have paid any attention to the news lately you should be aware that the
Republican controlled Senate is discussing changing Senate rules to eliminate
the filibuster.
...
What are they planning to do when the Democrats are back in power?
And here is where short sidedness takes over. The answer is nobody cares. Why?
Because by the time it happens it won?t be their problem.
He points out that a similar short-sightedness is plaguing those buying homes
with ARMs and interest-only loans at a time when long-term interest rates are
at historical lows.
Maybe they think the end of the world is near, so what the hell.
culture |
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Sun, 12 Mar 2006
I had to pay business tax to the city of Los Angeles last month since I receive
1099 income. The city took $600 from me, but it turns out that "creative
artists" who earn up to $300,000 are exempt from the business
tax thanks to the lobbying
of the Screen Writers Guild. I should move to New Hampshire.
business » taxes |
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The latest newsletter from Springwise,
which lists new businesses from around the world, mentions Zopa, which they describe as "eBay for
money". The concept is fairly simple.
Zopa is a place where creditworthy people who want to borrow money can get
together with people who are happy to lend it to them. And because there's no
middleman - the borrower just pays a 1% exchange fee to Zopa up front - both
get a great deal.
They pool loans together so each lender's loans are distributed among 50 or so
borrowers. Lenders can decide what type of debtors they want to lend to based
on the debtors' credit.
Zopa is only open to UK residents. I wonder how such a system would work in
the states with each state having different lending laws. It's an interesting
idea, and easier than standing outside the check cashing store looking for
customers.
business » ideas |
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Brad Delong (via Calculated
Risk) has posted part of Paul Krugman's introduction
to Keynes's
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. Having not ready General
Theory yet, I'll have to comment on Krugman's interpretation of it.
Stripped down, the conclusions of The General Theory might be expressed as
four bullet points:
-
Economies can and often do suffer from an overall lack of demand, which
leads to involuntary unemployment
-
The economy's automatic tendency to correct shortfalls in demand, if it
exists at all, operates slowly and painfully
-
Government policies to increase demand, by contrast, can reduce
unemployment quickly
-
Sometimes increasing the money supply won't be enough to persuade the
private sector to spend more, and government spending must step into the
breach
Sorry if my comments are naive; I am but a budding student of economics.
1. How can an economy suffer from an overall lack of demand? The overall
demand in an economy is made of up of individuals' demand. Who is Keynes
to say that my demand is too high or low? The most I could demand today is
limited by my productivity since birth plus any wealth gifted to me. If I
decide for forgo consumation today for tomorrow, no one has the right to demand
that I trade with them today.
2. If there isn't enough demand for what I can supply, I must find something else
to supply. For example, if I decide that the demand for my services as a
computer consultant are not sufficient to generate the income I desire, I might
go back to school to study economics. (Yes, I know I'm probably deluding
myself to think that my services as an economist will be more valuable to
society, but at least it's fun.)
3. How can government increase demand and reduce unemployment quickly? Let's see.
They can print out some money. Of course, they have to do this sneakily. If
they were to announce, "Tommorrow, we are going to increase the money supply by
1%," everyone would increase their prices right away (except for those lenders
and employees with dollar-denominated contracts; they're screwed). Instead,
people must be caught by surprise that they now have come into more money,
thinking that it must be due to their prowess and innate brilliance, so they go
out and spend their new dollars of spinning hubcaps and macaws.
4. Or, rather than just injecting money into the economy, the government itself
can go shopping. Of course, since the government doesn't actually produce
anything, it can only spend the wealth that it confiscates from its citizens.
Now, they might not take that money from you today, but they'll get you for it
later. And to make matters worse, when the government goes out to Walmart to
spend some money, they're competing with you, and thus forcing prices up.
economics |
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Thu, 09 Mar 2006
Turnitin.com is a service schools can use
to detect plagiarism. Students submit their papers to turnitin.com, in MS Word
format, I guess, and it analyses the text for plagiarism. Here's how the
company describes
it:
The industry's most advanced search technology that checks papers against our
in-house copies of both current and archived internet content and our
proprietary database of millions of previously submitted student papers.
My Economics
professor told us an amusing story this morning about turnitin.com. She is
on a committee that was evaluating using the service. Going through a demo of
the service while on the phone with a rep from the company, she asked what
happens if the student hides nonsensical characters within the text by
replacing whitespace with characters in a white font. She went ahead and tried
it with the sample plagiarized poem the company provided. Lo and behold, the
poem was reported as not being plagiarized. Despite one professor's continued
desire to use this $5,000 service, the committee opted not to.
school |
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