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Interest Rates
The Fed made a big cut in interest rates today. These days everybody looks to the Fed to fix all economic problems, but the funny thing is that they don’t really have very much control. Since the dot com collapse, the U.S. economy has been driven largely by the housing market. Homeowners were able to…
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E-mail Encryption
Most e-mail is sent across the net unencrypted. People who run local e-mail clients generally use unencrypted SMTP to send their e-mail and use unencrypted POP to retrieve their e-mail. People who use web-based e-mail have an encrypted session to their provider, but the e-mail is sent from their provider to the provider of their…
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Facebook Conspiracy
Here is a Facebook conspiracy theory. I thought it was amusing, even though it makes little sense. The author has forgotten that the first rule of capitalism is to make money. There is no need to appeal to exotic plans for how society should be organized when there is money at stake.
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Ethical Investing
Ethical investing is the practice of not investing in companies which engage in ethically reprehensible behaviour. There are many varieties, but, for example, some people refuse to invest in companies which sell tobacco. Does this make any sense? There are presumably two goals here. One is to punish companies which act badly, in the hopes…
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Moral Instinct
Steven Pinker wrote an interesting article in the New York Times magazine this Sunday. I’m not a big Pinker fan. I think he tends to simplify a little too much, and sometimes falls into the classic error of evolutionary psychology: thinking that a plausible explanation is the right explanation. This was a good article, though,…