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QE2
In private e-mail I got a pointer to one of the real goals of the Fed’s quantitative easing, one that we’re also seeing in other countries reactions to the Fed’s plans: to weaken the dollar in order to improve the U.S. trade deficit. This is a more plausible goal than the stated ones. By making…
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Quantitative Easing
The Federal Reserve Bank is about to undertake another round of quantitative easing, by purchasing up to $600 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds. The Fed gets to make up their own money—they don’t have to get that $600 billion from anybody else—so this is a way of expanding the overall money supply. The intent…
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GCC Summit
I gave two talks on Go at the GCC Summit last week. The first was about the gccgo frontend: the IR and the gcc interface; for that one I wrote a paper, which is mostly just a miscellany. The second was a Go tutorial, focusing on the more unusual aspects of the language. The one…
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Halloween decline
Every year we have fewer trick or treaters come by on Halloween. This year we only had nine people, three of whom were teenagers who knocked on every door on the street at 9:30. This year I think I finally figured out what is happening. There are some streets in the city which put on…
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const
It took me a long time to understand that the const qualifier in C is overloaded. There was no const when I first learned C. It was introduced in the C90 standard. It was copied from C++, although the meaning of const is subtly different in the two languages. The first meaning of const in…