The Economics Debate: Jobs and Automation

In the ongoing online economics debate over technology, jobs, and automation, the Luddite Fallacy and Lump of Labor fallacies are often invoked. However, the there is a point of common confusion, which is if the goal of technology is to replace labor, then over the long-term labor cannot compete with technology. I believe technology will… Continue reading The Economics Debate: Jobs and Automation

Biology as a Sorting Mechanism

Some try to frame the left/right dichotomy as a battle between ‘order’ vs. ‘chaos’, but it’s more like ‘egalitarianism’ (forced equality) vs ‘hierarchy‘, whether such hierarchy is biological, social, and or economic. The far-left may deny individual exceptionalism in favor of a ‘blank slate‘ approach, because they believe the state should be able to ‘perfect’… Continue reading Biology as a Sorting Mechanism

Alt Right, Part.. Whatever

From The Daily Beast: Meet Milo Yiannopoulos, the Appealing Young Face of the Racist Alt-Right Analyzing a subset of the alt-right who call themselves “neoreactionaries,” Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains this important distinction, “Most modern libertarians are individualists, motivated by a desire to prevent the masses from oppressing the individual… “Neoreactionaries are not individualists… neoreaction places… Continue reading Alt Right, Part.. Whatever

I Can Tolerate Anything Except Factual Inaccuracies

This story is going hugely viral: Economist Removed from Plane for Algebra The outpouring of sympathy and firestorm of righteous indignation, similar to that observed after the Ahmed Mohamed clock story, is more evidence we’re in an era of the ‘STEM celebrity‘, of which economics is part of. Had an obese snoring passenger been removed… Continue reading I Can Tolerate Anything Except Factual Inaccuracies

Donald Trump Wrong About Treasury Bonds

Even though Josh Brown of the Reformed Broker leans ‘left’, I agree stiffing treasury bond holders, hurting America’s credit worthiness and causing a multitude of problems in the process, is a bad idea: The whole world runs on the premise that US debt is risk-free in terms of return of principal, backed up by our… Continue reading Donald Trump Wrong About Treasury Bonds

Guest/User-Contributed Content is Clogging Google

In 2011 and 2012, Google introduced sweeping updates to minimize low-quality, thin content on its search results. However, there seems to be a new type of ‘spam’ that is more subtle but also annoying: user-contributed content, also known as content farms. For the sake of simplicity, assume there are three types of sites: Sites run… Continue reading Guest/User-Contributed Content is Clogging Google

The Biotech/Heathcare Scam Bubble Bursts

In early 2015, I expressed sentiment of healthcare and biotechnology being a ‘scam’, divided into two parts: 1. The ‘scam’ of exorbitantly priced treatments (orphan drugs) for rare diseases, which are paid for by taxpayers. Since policy makers have this fixed belief that every life is worth saving at any cost, drug companies have an… Continue reading The Biotech/Heathcare Scam Bubble Bursts

The Logical Inconsistency of Collapse-ism

From Aeon Physics is on the verge of an Earth-shattering discovery The mere announcement of what might be the first signs of a new particle, delivered at the end-of-the-year LHC seminar on 15 December 2015, sent theorists into a frenzy. Expectations are so high that there are already 338 scientific papers on the possible nature… Continue reading The Logical Inconsistency of Collapse-ism

Zerohedge

This is pretty funny…and maybe old news to some The real identities of ‘Tyler Durden’ and Zero Hedge have been revealed The identity of the bloggers running Zero Hedge has long been the subject of speculation in the financial community, with Ivandjiiski often cited as the likely source of much of the site’s content. As… Continue reading Zerohedge