Avenging Angels Mono Banter

Let us begin by assuming...

2009-10-21T16:37:00.012+11:00

Referencing this blog again. Is this becoming a habit for me?

Ok. So the idea you have of what goes on in economic circles isn't exactly true. But it's deceptively close.

The real consensus seems to be on the link between technology, education and income inequality. And even then, the data only goes back about 100 years, so anything much earlier than that no one is really sure about.

Please note that education doesn't necessarily translate into skills and economists aren't entirely sure what education does.

1. Ideas about Education
There's the idea that education increases productivity by teaching you skills, which is sort of more traditional. Then there's the idea that all education does is signal an inherent ability, largely attributed to Michael Spence. (The testable difference should involve looking at highly productive workers in jobs where education is no predictor of productivity.)

As an aside, Tyler Cowen has also proposed a new model of education that suggests that some forms of higher education are really placebo education and work through the placebo effect. Therefore more education might not make you more productive, just more convincing education.

2. Income/Wealth
It's important to keep in mind that we're measuring income inequality here and not utility or happiness. It's interesting to note that a lot of the technologies you mentioned as being ubiquitous were consumer products and public goods. These things often provide significantly more utility/happiness than they cost. (Think cell phones in the developing world.)(Neo)-classical economics points out that the price of a good tends towards its marginal cost, so we'd expect that consumers end up with a quite a lot of gains from happiness that aren't reflected in economic data.

So when we look at income data, what we really need to look at is suppliers/producers. The question is therefore how income affects workers/producers of goods, not consumers.

3. Education leads to skill
So there are a couple of theories on this. The most popular one out there right now was produced by Goldin and Katz entitled "The race between education and technology", which was a paper and is now a book as well. I must confess I have yet to read either.

The idea is that increases in technology increase demand for skilled workers (ceteris paribus) thereby increasing income inequality.

Please note that productivity is a difficult thing to measure. It's traditionally measured as the value of output per hour worked. How you measure that is a strange thing. You can measure it either through pay, through some value of the output, through market value of the output etc.

Assuming that workers actually increased their productivity in the sense that they produced more output, you can imagine that technology like a computer has increased the productivity of an office worker more than say a janitor.

Furthermore, you can imagine that time-saving technology (think email etc.) would increase the earnings of a lawyer more than it would his or her secretary because the time of the highly educated tends to be worth more.

4. Globalisation leading to Hit or Miss products
This sort of theory runs around the idea that globalisation breaks down barriers between markets. In the modern era, because of the nature of technology there has been a concentration in the resulting gains from trade.

The idea behind this theory is something like this. Consider that before globalisation, the job of searching for information was spread around across a lot of people. Think of all the librarians, encyclopaedia writers etc who toiled away working on the problem of cataloguing and retrieving information. Technology, in the form of say Google, has largely replaced many of these people, and does their job significantly more efficiently. Unfortunately, in this new model, all the gains from this increase in productivity accrue only to the shareholders of Google, who we assume are a much smaller group of people than all the librarians/cataloguers of the world. Therefore the technological change in this case, although increasing productivity, increases income inequality because the gains from productivity go to smaller groups of people.

Now you can see that point 3 and point 4 are both related to the idea that "skilled" workers are more capable of exploiting technological advances.

5. Empirical data
The interesting point about the empirical research is that if you increase (public) education and technology at the same time, inequality actually decreases (See Goldin and Katz from above) because those who would otherwise have been workers with low education and low earnings now jump far ahead to the high-earning highly-educated group of the technologically advanced economy. This group tends to form the traditional middle-class. (When I say high-earning I mean relative to before. The really high earning would be the propertied upper class I guess.) It seems intuitive though that technology would expand the income inequality decreasing effects of education.

I'm not entirely sure about the math on this point since it depends on how you measure inequality as well. Might be interesting to look at.

How this mechanism operates is somewhat elusive. If you know of any research on the topic, it might be interesting to read. I'm tempted to put a conclusion in somewhere but I feel that's a little premature. Thoughts?

Carbonated Energy Drink

2009-10-21T09:54:00.005+11:00

Apologies seem to be in order. Clearly I've lost my sense of humour.

This is also a classic case of 2 people looking at the same thing and seeing completely different things. So let's run through how I managed to read something other than what was written.

1. CO2 Cloud Joke
I actually thought your CO2 post was a joke referencing this. I did think it was a joke, but perhaps I took it a bit more seriously than I should have. Ok, I'm definitely more morbid than most.

2. Carbon Sequestration and Petrochemical Plants
Hmm. I guess I mis-read the implications of your paragraph:

What's that, you ask? Haha, well it's funny, but carbon sequestration tends to coexist with petrochemical plants. The Gorgon Gas Project is designed to produce 1.1 billion billion cubic metres of natural gas a year. That's a billion times larger than the carbon dioxide annual input.

Carbon sequestration as you seem to point out, is a comparatively mild attempt at reducing carbon emissions compared to merely leaving fuel in the ground. And I'm even more skeptical of the total amount of CO2 emissions avoided because of things like this:

... meaning that even when they are considered depleted, many natural gas reservoirs contain significant natural gas that can be potentially recovered by enhanced gas recovery processes associated with injecting CO2 for carbon sequestration. This additional gas recovery can be used to offset the cost of CO2 injection.

When people say carbon sequestration, I think of increased fossil fuel extraction first. The economic implications of greater extraction also explains why people seem so keen on carbon sequestration. These might not be standard or even fair conclusions to draw from your comments, I'll agree, but they were honestly the first things I understood from those sentences.

I should also be the first to admit that I don't personally know if the increased Gas extraction through carbon sequestration results in a net gain or or loss in total CO2 emissions. If you have anything that shows carbon sequestration is on net reducing emissions, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

3. Wind Power
My point was that Australia's attempts at reducing carbon output are largely illusory. Considering that it controls a significant amount of energy resources, I'm wondering if restricting output might be a more effective means of controlling emissions. I find that most of the attempts to lower Australia's natural carbon emissions end up merely adjusting supply chains so that emissions happen overseas.

South Australia for example has made serious attempts at making investments in Wind Power. But perhaps I'm a little too cynical when I say that I believe that these investments in alternative energy are being paid for by taxation on the export of fossil fuels. That being said there's a serious possibility that all the money going to CSIRO and the like will be able to make significant advancements in alternative energy that will ultimately offset the carbon being emitted to fuel its research. Then again, that's largely uncertain.

But this leaves me a little confused. Was your post just an interesting exercise in contemplating the quantities of CO2 being sequestered and emitted? Was it an investigation of what is meant to be good for the environment? I seem to have lost the plot here.

Energy Drunk

2009-10-18T10:25:00.004+11:00

I'm writing in response to this article.

Eh, excuse me. Australia does not pollute. It sells fossil fuels to China. If the Chinese decide to burn it and emit carbon, is that Australia's fault? I mean who knows what they do with it anyway? Maybe they just use it in cooking. Have you ever eaten Duck Rice? Describe it in 1 word. Oily. Explains everything.

So maybe, just maybe, they burn some of it and I mean everyone knows their energy plants aren't necessarily as clean or well maintained or as efficient as they could be, but you know really, I mean Australia doesn't sell that much fuel to China. According to the Australian Government in the financial year 07-08 it was only:

$205m of Coal
$204m of Liquid Propane and Butane
$646m of Crude Petroleum

It's not that much carbon, compared to say the fact that Australia sells a lot more coal to Japan, the EU, India, Korea, Brazil and Tawian. And that's just coal. The total crude oil exported by Australia is about 16 times what it sells to China.

Besides, Australia is committed to environmental protection and reductions in carbon emissions through ~~the import of products manufactured in China using raw materials sold by Australia~~ use of alternative energy sources. Like when Oil went up to 140US a barrel and we started considering the alternative energy source of shale oil.

I mean the IEA counts carbon emissions by country and clearly the problem is with China. Or if you go by per capita, it's with the US. Either way it's not with Australia.

So please note, Australia doesn't pollute. You don't blame a dealer when someone ends up in a hospital OD-ing.

Drug War Friendly Fire

2009-08-08T21:38:00.002+10:00

Goddamit. I'm sick again. I've gotten the flu. Normally this means antibiotics + flu meds and I'm good to go. This time however, things are shit.

I went to the doctor, got a prescription for antibiotics. So far so good. I go down to the pharmacy. The only non-drowsy nasal decongestant they have is Sudafed PE Non-Drowsy. Ok. I look to see if there is any cheaper/generic option. None is available. I buy both drugs.

I fail to notice that on the Sudafed box is a small blue band that says PSEUDOEPHEDRINE FREE. Little did I know that because Meth cooks have been using Sudafed, the makers of Sudafed, Johnson and Johnson have decided to now market Sudafed with Phenylephrine as the active ingredient.

Now I'm normally not one to look a gift horse in the mouth and criticise the drugs I've been given, but the only reason I'm writing this now is because Phenylephrine is total shit. It's usless. Doesn't do a damn thing. It's non-drowsy because it's non-anything. If you look at the wikipedia link to Phenylephrine above, you'll notice that at the bottom, there is some dispute as to whether or not Pehnlephrine works any better than a placebo. Guess what guys? It fucking sucks.

Now the article on Pseudoephedrine mentions that you can still purchase the stuff in Australia although it has to be stored behind the counter of the pharmacist. Fuck. How was I to know this? So kids, keep this in mind for future reference: Ask for Pseudoephedrine - Accept No Substitutes!

Abort.

2009-08-06T20:19:00.003+10:00

This is a most disturbing article from Esquire on Warren Hern, the last late-term abortion doctor. Made me want to retch, weep and curl up into a ball. Nothing gets you like the surreal nature of the lifestyle that he has to keep just to do what he thinks is right.

Chinese Passive Aggression

2009-08-06T09:32:00.003+10:00

Ha. Ok. So It's been a while. I've meant to post lots of things but somehow never got around to it. I return now with some Chinese lols.

As some of you who've read this blog may know I find it hilarious when Chinese citizens do this passive aggressive shit to their government. It completely ruins the whole conspiratorial tone of how the West tends to portray "The Chinese", as if attempting to conflate the Citizens of China, the further regions of the country, the highly regional provinces, the unchecked businesses that operate in China, the PLA and the men in suits in Beijing. Ha.

So apparently, Chinese statisticians are apparently not too keen on the fact that the published economic data might not really have a basis in reality. Money quote:

The Global Times, controlled by the People’s Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, reported that the public reacted with “banter and sarcasm” to NBS figures showing average urban wages in China rose 13 per cent in the first half to $2,142.....

... The criticism has prompted the NBS to launch a campaign last week, entitled “Statistical Feelings: We have walked together – Celebrating the 60th anniversary of the founding of New China,” to boost confidence among statisticians.
The campaign has already produced works such as: “I’m proud to be a brick in the statistical building of the republic.” In another poem, a contributor writes: “I can rearrange the stars in the sky because I have statistics.”

Minor Update

2009-07-09T09:25:00.003+10:00

How do you not want to read this nyt article on the future of Porn film plots? Choice quote:

“The feature is not as big a part of the industry today,” Mr. Orenstein said. But he says he still plans two to three bigger-budget releases each year, including the recently shot “2040,” which is about the pornography business of the future. Mr. Orenstein described the movie as “an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story between an aging porn star and a cyborg.”

I'm not even sure what the fuck "an almost Romeo-and-Juliet story" means. Does anyone?

Also, to balance out the recent Matt Taibbi rants against Wall St, we have some good Michael Lewis in VF doing an article on the insides of AIGFP. I love the fact the he seems to be one of the few Wall St reporters who seems to identify with and yet distance himself from the traders.

Flu Away

2009-07-04T19:21:00.001+10:00

Some of you may know that Sam Chan postponed his trip to Australia recently because his mom feared swine flu. Ironically, I now have the flu. (Not the swine kind, but still.)

Economics Class

2009-06-30T09:57:00.003+10:00

I might be centre-right on economic issues, but here's a class act by Greg Mankiw in response to some unkind words by Paul Krugman. Then again, maybe I'm siding with George Will and Greg Mankiw because I'm actual fans of their writing. Who knows?

Also, here is Malcolm Gladwell telling people like me (i.e. Chris Anderson) to stfu and be realistic on the nature of free technology. I had some consolation reading this on the internet revolution and the blogosphere.

Beauty

2009-06-26T09:16:00.003+10:00

So, I was reading some stuff this morning and sutmbled upon this interesting article on beauty.

Made me think of a site like T Shirt Hell. (especially the Calvin and Hobbes shirt there) Perhaps post-modern art does have an obsession with desecration, but I'm not sure that beauty as a virtue can be recaptured. We seem to have been conditioned into distrusting the beautiful. The beautiful prom queen is now supposed to be hiding her inner bitch. The austere priest is now supposed to be fiddling boys in his spare time. The beautiful landscape is now supposed to remind us of what we stand to lose if pollution doesn't get controlled soon. The middle-class guilt and anxiety that is all the rage right now reminds us that everything beautiful is apparently under threat by our unsustainable, anti-worker, ignorant, carbon-emitting lives. Is it no wonder that the only art we can connect to is the transgressive?

Someone might point out that this of course has resulted in the dramatic rise of satire and parody as newly dominant forms of expression. (If you don't believe me, try searching youtube for something popular + parody and see how many amateur parodies there are.) In a way parody not only desecrates other art forms but on a subtler level rails against art itself. So many parodies, rather than actually caricaturing art forms actually seem to attack the suspension of disbelief on which they rely. In a way we have started to aggressively mock not just our values but our realities as being woefully inadequate.

Perhaps we see beauty as kitsch only because it now seems that perception of it is more a product of ignorance than knowledge. Perhaps the modern incapacity to forget or to push aside has led us to forget what beauty is like. Whether or not this state of affairs makes us worse of is something else entirely. Perhaps it is merely the best economising we can do given our current awareness. Or maybe it just means we're bitter and jaded.

Minority Report

2009-06-24T08:45:00.005+10:00

Here's a great article from New York Magazine on how there's a distinct generational gap that's formed within the American gay community.

Oddly enough, that almost resembles how my brother and I feel about the Indian protesters in Melbourne. Except it isn't a divide based on age, it's a divide based on degrees of cultural assimilation. Huh.

Also, I bought Cool Is Just a Number by I Fight Dragons. I mean how do you not buy an album that has a cover that looks like this:

Arbitrage Opportunity!

2009-06-21T10:48:00.007+10:00

Hmm. Tables in blogger seem to be rather shittily implemented. So here goes.

Remember how I complained a few posts ago about being unable to download Elizabeth and the Catapult - Taller Children? Well, problem solved.

I went on ebay, bought a $25 iTunes (U.S.) Gift card and got the code emailed to me so there's no shipping charge. I'm now comfortably listening to Taller Children on my Mac. Sweet. How much money did I save? See this table I made here. (Prices are based on Taller Children. Not sure how typical the pricing is though.)

Lovely. It's amusing to note that there are a couple of sellers on ebay selling $25 iTunes (U.S.) gift cards for $28.48 USD. It's essentially currency speculation by another name. I wonder how long it'll take before iTunes either adjusts its prices or the currency markets adjust (correct) to their original position.

Now that I have a couple more dollars to be spend, I'll probably get
Cool Is Just A Number by I Fight Dragons. If you're wondering what their sound is like they describe themselves as "Chicago's finest (and quite possibly only) NES-Rock band."

And maybe some Ricky Gervais nonsense. Hmm.

P.S. As a nerdy side note, if Obama's stimulus money and quantitative easing isn't managed properly on the economic upswing we could see a massive devaluation of the dollar. And if iTunes stays rigid in its pricing (as it's known to do) that might make the business of iTunes gift card reselling more and more lucrative.

Blur at the Outlines

2009-06-20T09:48:00.001+10:00

I've just realised that I spend some amount of my time hanging out with people who would've been GEPs if they'd been brought up in Singapore. Is this social auto-seeking feature something I can turn off? Who knows?

Also, this is awesome. I mean do you like retro games? Of course you do. Do you like musicals? Who the fuck doesn't like musicals?

Enjoy the pop-ness of it all.

Throw Away Your Newspaper

2009-06-17T21:02:00.004+10:00

There's been quite a hoo-ha recently about how newspapers seem to be haemorrhaging money left right and centre. This post by Philalawyer on the time value of internet content is quite interesting.

It got me thinking about the newspaper business and the shit it's in. Newspapers seem to be producing disposable news in that yesterday's newspaper is worth basically nothing. I'm not sure why that has to be. I mean if you do a really in-depth article or a great story, it doesn't lose value just because it's a day old. Maybe several months or a year later it might be old, but that doesn't really detract from its quality.

The reason blogs seem to be taking over the newspaper industry is that if you think about it blogs are the ultimate medium for disposable news. They're digital making them perfectly disposable. I mean thinking about it really, the idea that you print out these huge sheets of paper only to throw them away/recycle them the next day seems somewhat ridiculous.

So what is a newspaper without disposable news? A magazine? So, as a genuine question is there anything that the blogosphere+magazines can't accomplish that is currently being done by newspapers? And if the answer is no, then is the death of the newspaper really that bad a thing?

Elizabeth and the Catapult

2009-06-12T22:34:00.002+10:00

Oh man this sounds so good I'm seriously tempted to buy the damn album on iTunes.

Then again $17 is an awful lot of money for mp3s. Also considering that on the US store it's 7USD, which is 8.61AUD this pisses me off. Rah!

Assuming on the Sly

2009-06-09T10:42:00.002+10:00

It's interesting to look at the current obsessions of the media and note their sometimes faulty assumptions. Look at this list from Wired. The whole thing smacks of someone reminiscing fondly about a romanticised past then using old assumptions to extrapolate into a future where they do not hold. Also, I feel the need to rant.

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

Really? National? Literature tends to be organised around the groups people identify with, and recently nationalism has been particularly popular. But that wasn't always the case and that won't always be the case. Prior to the last 100 years heaps of literature was written around social, cultural or racial groups. Writing about the Ummah or the White Man's Burden hardly counts as national. The future of literature is more likely to be written with common ideas as a context. So instead of maybe Indian or Chinese or American literature, there'll be technophilic literature, bibliophilic literature etc.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

Who are you kidding? Digital screens are still heavier and much more expensive than paper. Paper has the capacity for free form annotation and can be more economical than e-ink. Consider in terms of cost+weight paper's portability vs that of a battery. Consider the Espresso Book Machine as the future of print media. Print per se isn't dying, it's just the large scale selective mass production of print.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

Long tail my ass. MR has an excellent bit on how The Long Tail is less prevelant than you think. It completely ignores the fact that part of the reason we consume literature is to interact with others. How many snobs do you know of that read books just so they can seem cool and artsy?

12. Algorithms and social media replacing work of editors and publishing houses; network socially-generated texts replacing individually-authored texts.

This is absolute shit. Talk about design by committee. Social media might be good at helping you allocate your attention, but I find it difficult to believe that social-generated literature is going to be better than individually authored literature. It's much easier to create a socially-generated set of facts, but much more difficult to create a socially-generated style of presentation.

18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.

More trash. See limerick db. WTF is poetry anyway? Does this count?

In an unrelated news article from the NYT on education and poverty alleviation there is a less presumptious but no more dangerous assumption.

The article very slyly assumes that you can teach hard work. Not only that but some sort of non-parental government program can teach hard work. I mean sure cultural factors might explain away the race performance gap but I have yet to find a government program that can teach you a culture. KIPP looks promising, but the data just isn't in yet. I wonder how many taxpayer dollars around the world are wasted because of this assumption.

Maybe I should start a daily exercise of undermining assumptions in popular media sources. Hmm...

American Disease

2009-06-08T03:33:00.002+10:00

What I first though was a recent phenomenon has proved to be much older than I thought. From The Great Gatsby:

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of
the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a
national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute
limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of
anti-climax...

...I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking
a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable
football game.

How strangely tragic.

In The Loop

2009-06-06T17:26:00.003+10:00

Hmm. Just watched In The Loop, and I feel that I should strongly recommend it.

The show is truly awesome. Comedy at its finest. The synopsis is probably this: A minister in the UK accidentally slips on radio and says that war is "unforeseeable". Shit hits the fan as both the US and UK attempt to maintain their machinations to start a war in the Middle East.

Trailer is Here:

Also, the show is excellent because they actually hired a writer to just go through the script and add better and better insults and vulgarities to it. Also note that Malcom Tucker is supposed to be based on Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spin doctor.

See the evidence:

Things to See

2009-06-04T22:00:00.003+10:00

Exams are coming up for me so I'm going to be pretty pre-occupied for a while. In the mean time, the Palm Pre and new iPhone are set to be launched and announced within the week respectively.

Here's something interesting about alcohol, society and religion. It's surprisingly poignant for what at first glance sounds like a lot of wankery. The question therefore is, if I can commune without a divine presence, feel the oneness without the spirit, meditate without the Om, then why God?

Also, I have discovered the awesome that is Dan Ariely. Here's his latest TED talk on how people are predictably irrational. Awesome:

Then I discovered his older piece on as they put it "our buggy moral code". Awesome to look at how to hack people's morality:

Busted Alright

2009-05-27T08:15:00.003+10:00

It seems the NYT can't keep its journos in check. My Personal Credit Crisis was the most emailed article on NYT for a while. Great article, fantastic story. Turns out it isn't exactly the whole truth. Megan McArdle, who kicks ass for the Atlantic Monthly, then came out with this very relevant expose on something Ed Andrews failed ot mention. Ed Andrews and the NYT then respond with this and this respectively. McArdle replies with this, insisting that Andrews is being somewhat disingenous.

Commentary by a third party that I so far agree with. Megan McArdle isn't just "a blogger", she's Megan McArdle. Jeez.

It's Inside Me

2009-05-25T08:37:00.002+10:00

It seems that even if I don't blog, I have a habit of writing trash anyway. I doing the Course Evaluations for my university today and realised that I'd suddenly written this. The question was:

This lectuere's teaching could be improved by:
girls in bikinis. Short of being attended to by bikini clad girls, I don't see how this lecturer could have improved. I mean I actually understand what a Multi-Plant Monopolist is. As a financier might say, this is a five sigma event. Probabilistically likely to occur less than once in the lifetime of the universe.

He's so good he could probably teach a naked mole rat economics if he wanted to. Not only that but the Naked Mole Rat would probably meet a Tasmanian Devil taught by Gautam and the two would end up becoming a lecturers at Chicago (not Harvard. Please.) then use supercomputers and formulate a fully functioning Macroeconomic model of the Australian economy using the aggregation of Microeconomic actors. That's right, Grand Unified Theory of economics. 20 years later, BAM!, Nobel Prize. But wait, Naked Mole Rat is dead, and they don't award Nobel's posthumously. Tasmanian Devil goes up to receive the prize, but seems a little upset commenting that the award is clearly meant for joint work. He also remembers to thank Arghya and Gautam, who managed to teach non-self aware beings economics. That's how good this guy is. So don't ask me how his teaching could be improved. It can't.

Return

2009-05-24T10:12:00.003+10:00

Ha. So I've been gone for a while. Apparently my readers have largely left too. All is well.

Paul Krugman comes to an interesting conclusion. News stories about HK always seem to remind me of some sort of Capitalism utopia/dystopia ala Marx. This post has also made me wonder if the rent controls in NYC actually helped its development by adjusting the housing market into producing many small units. Does living in a densely populated area create positive externalities/reduce negative externalities? I mean as far as distribution and infrastructure costs are concerned, it's fairly obvious, but do these actually outweigh the externalitites associated with high-rise, high-density housing (e.g. requisite transportation of perishables from elsewhere)?

Economics is annoyingly seeping into my life. The other day in my Crim Law class, we were discussing how having sex in public carries a lesser sentence than having sex for the purposes of prostitution in public. The first answer that came to me was that the involvement of money allows for the compulsion of 1 party (the prostitute) to do something she/he doesn't particularly want to do.

The next thing that came to me was that street workers have an economic incentive to use the street since private space (i.e. a hotel room) is a marginal cost for them, something brothel workers don't have. Also, as a percentage of their regular fee, private space can be quite high. Consider also the elasticity of demand for street workers considering that their clientele are unlikely to be CEOs and senators.

The rest of the class engaged in a discussion on offensiveness.

That being said, it was an awesome discussion.

"I'd be more offended if I saw someone having sex with a prostitute." How would you know? "I mean if she was dressed like one." Please, I mean today, you can't exactly tell anymore.

I love that we live in some sort of post-Feminist world.

Don't Whine

2009-05-20T08:50:00.002+10:00

Imagine you get into medicine. And you could have done anything you wanted with your life, but you thought about it and since you’d made it this far anyway you’d probably just take it up.

And it’s 60 years from now, and you’re a really old doctor. And you’re dying, today. You’ve had an awesome life. Not the best, but pretty damn good. You remember all the coke you snorted, the crazy parties, the nitrous you used to steal for your friends. You have a wife, a lovely intelligent lady whom you adore holding your hand. You have no kids, because the two of you figured out that kids would do nothing for you. You’ve made a lot of safe decisions because you didn't know any other way to keep your insane lifestyle going. It was hedonistic and free and over the top, but it all cost money. And you’re lying there thinking about your life, and you wish a little that you could do that again

And then the devil appears.

And he’s lugging a MIRACLE MACHINE also marked ‘Deus Ex Machina Co.’ And he eyes you up and down and says, ‘I trapped him in this box, have another go?’

And you say ‘that would be nice, please’

And he says, ‘okay’

And suddenly it’s today, and it’s right now, and you’re sitting in front of a computer reading something off the internet

Get up.

Go and do something interesting.

Don’t turn around.

[Retry]

Imagine you get into law school. And you could have done anything you wanted with your life, but you thought about it and since you’d made it this far anyway you’d probably just take it up.

And it’s 60 years from now, and you’re a really old lawyer. And you’re dying, today. You’ve had an awesome life. Not the best, but pretty damn good. You remember all the drugs you did, that special cocktail of Prozac and Paxil your friends used to ask you to cut for them. You don't have a wife or kids, but you've been swinging your whole life. You have an open relationship, with a 80 year old lady. You’ve made a lot of safe decisions because that's how to run up the billable hours. And you’re lying there thinking about your life, and you wish a little that you could try again

And then the devil appears.

And he’s lugging a MIRACLE MACHINE also marked ‘Deus Ex Machina Co.’ And he eyes you up and down and says, ‘I trapped him in this box, have another go?’

And you say ‘that would be nice, please’

And he says, ‘Of course, professional courtesy.’

And suddenly it’s today, and it’s right now, and you’re sitting in front of a computer reading something off the internet

Get up.

Go and do something interesting.

Don’t turn around.

I could do this all day. Stop whining Sam. Being middle class is awesome.

(Climate) Change I Can Believe In

2009-04-25T22:37:00.003+10:00

Ok. Here's an interesting article on climate change activism in general. I guess if I could summarise the article, it is this:

1. Climate Change activists often campaign for policies in an attempt to create a utopian environmental future.
2. Climate Change activists are focused on certain issues like absolute carbon emissions (rather than carbon emissions efficiency i.e. Energy/C02) which may hide the real problems faced in the search for a better energy solution.
3. In the short-run there are serious trade-offs involved in enacting the said campaigned for policies. Most of these are not measured in terms of cost-benefit analysis. (Banning coal in the U.S. will probably do very little to the total amount of coal burnt. The global economy virtually guarantees that Chinese will pick up the drop in demand and hence price of coal and then ship products made using that energy to the U.S.)
4. Certain policies may have the paradoxical effect of preventing other environmental policies from being enacted. (Banning coal increases the cost of using electric cars relative to regular cars. Ironically, powering electric cars with a coal-fired power plant is less pollutive than using regular cars.) There is therefore an issue of which order these policies should become implemented.

Awesome. This pretty much validates my skepticism towards petty environmentalism. If you want to save the earth, stop eating meat and take public transport. Or invent some new awesome resource saving technology like this for books. I have been waiting for that to come out. Now that it is, hopefully the cost of books will plummet. Goodbye shipping charges, hello self-published titles. Wait until I start pirating books on that. Awesome.

A Collection of Sorts

2009-04-20T23:26:00.004+10:00

I'm making a mental note here.

Things to return to:

1. Polyester Books
2. Paperback Books
3. Comedy Festival
4. Brunswick St Bookstore
5. Hill of Content
6. Brunetti
7. Crumpler on Brunswick St
8. Knog on Chapel St
9. Ha Long Bay on Victoria St, Richmond
10. Lord of the Fries
11. C&B
12. Outre at 249-251 Elizabeth St
13. Camy Shanghai Dumpling off Little Bourke St (near corner of Swanston)

Also, a functioning public transport network.