Month: May 2010
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Market Complexity
The stock market gyrations last Thursday may be a nice example of the issue of complexity I’ve discussed in the past. When the financial markets are too hard to understand, failure modes become unpredictable. Because there is profit in complexity, or at least the chance of profit, we can expect more of this going forward.…
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Government spending
Greg Mankiw, a well known economist, has a nice picture of projected U.S. government spending in 2020. Refer to this when you hear somebody say that we can balance the budget by eliminating waste. I believe that this picture does not cover things like the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which the Bush administration funded through…
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When Titans Clash
I didn’t expect to like the recent remake of Clash of the Titans much, but I was pleasantly surprised. Most movies of this sort have a simple underlying theme. For this movie the theme was going to be that humans could stand on their own and did not need help from the gods. But, due…
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Blackberry
I spent several hours this weekend pruning back the blackberry bushes in our back yard. It’s not really a yard, as our house backs onto a hillside too steep to build on. We hardly ever go there ourselves, so it’s covered by plants fighting for their little bit of sun, nature green in thorn and…