Category: Uncategorized

It has been a while since I wrote about online journalism. In this post I identify characteristics of authors and articles that go viral. There is a tendency to dismiss journalism as not a ‘hard’ or substantive subject, compared to more intellectually rigorous and less ideologically-motivated subjects such has math or computer science (STEM subjects).… Continue reading Online Journalism: Themes of Viral Articles

Not a whole lot in the news. The Trump impeachment Senate trial is a farce. Trump’s approval ratings are climbing again, now at 43% according to 538, which is the highest in months. The left’s gambit has failed. The left hoped that by impeaching Trump, even if on the flimsiest of charges, that enough undecided… Continue reading News Updates

I read lefty publications in order to take the pulse of the entirety culture-war landscape. If I just read right-wing blogs and magazines–the handful that still remain and are updated at at least regular intervals and haven’t yet departed to Twitter, Podcasting, or YouTube–my perspective would be limited. The article What’s the harm in reading?… Continue reading Smart-Left vs. Regressive-Left

A reason why I talk about the stock market and economics a lot is because those are the two issues that policy makers are also most concerned with. We are living in a world increasingly dominated by economics and capital, as opposed to culture, even if the latter gets the most media coverage, and culture… Continue reading The Great Freeze

Rationality is defined as “…the quality or state of being rational – that is, being based on or agreeable to reason. Rationality implies the conformity of one’s beliefs with one’s reasons to believe, and of one’s actions with one’s reasons for action…When the goal or problem involves making a decision, rationality factors in all information… Continue reading Thinking rationally: 3 examples

In the prior section, I calculated the volatility parameters for three major market index 3x ETFs: UPRO, UDOW, and TQQQ. In this section, I need to calculate a sample market cycle for the Nasdaq 100 index in order to estimate TQQQ returns. This is harder to do than compared to the the S&P 500, owing… Continue reading 3x Leveraged ETF Strategy Guide, Part 2b

See part one It took longer to complete this section than expected owning to the difficulty of modeling historic stock market returns. Market returns to some degree follow a normal distribution, but ,rather, markets are more characterized by regimes. This means there are long periods in which market does well, followed by long periods in… Continue reading 3x Leveraged ETF Strategy Guide, Updated for 2020, Part 2

The srticle Education and Men without Work Just skimming the comments, there is the withholding of judgment against young, able-bodied men who, for whatever reason, choose not to work. There is no puritanical moralizing about the ‘virtues of work’, or how ‘people should not be lazy,’ or how ‘one must choose between work or starvation/poverty’;… Continue reading Is a post-scarcity economy possible? It’s already happening

Incentives matter. Why is the Euro banknote the most commonly forged currency? Because it’s easy to forge? No, because the consequences are much more lenient compared to forging US bank notes. You forge US banknotes and the secret service will surround you; for euros and the Europol may do something, but likely won’t. It’s like:… Continue reading Incentives matter

Saw this article going viral There Is No Case for the Humanities Among the tech-smart, there is a sort of cognitive dissonance of both supporting technology in so far as promoting progress and well-being (such as reducing global starvation and infant mortality), but also nostalgia and respect for the “old ways of doing things.” Traditionalism… Continue reading Is there a case for the humanities?