AwakenWithJP
Published on Dec 19, 2017Bitcoin – Ultra Spiritual Life episode 86
In this video, I tell you all about Bitcoin, how it works, and why it’s guaranteed to be the best investment of your life.
January 31, 2018
Bitcoin – Ultra Spiritual Life episode 86
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“Bitcoin is, of course, a mania – a delusion of the sort that human societies are prone to”
Tim Worstall looks at some historical manias and explains how even the maddest of them can yield long-term economic benefits (to society as a whole, if not to individual maniacs):
The UK’s railway mania, the tulip bubble, the dot com boom and other collective economic madness – such as bitcoin – might lose people a lot of money, but they often lay down important foundations
Bitcoin is, of course, a mania – a delusion of the sort that human societies are prone to. This is fighting talk from someone who declared in 2011 that bitcoin was all over. Being wrong is not interesting – it is rare things which are interesting, not common ones – but the psychology and economics here are important.
The classic text on this topic is Charles McKay’s Extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds. Human societies are prone to manias which seem to defy any sense or reasonableness. Certainly markets can be so overcome, although the witch burnings show that it’s not purely an economic phenomenon.
The South Sea Bubble, Tulip mania, railway shares, the dotcom boom and now bitcoin are all part of that same psychological failing of not recognising that prices can and will fall as well as rise. That is the classical interpretation of the McKay book and observation, but modern studies take a more nuanced view.
South Sea and the Mississippi Company bubble were simply speculative frenzies, but the tulip story – while appearing very similar – can be read another way.
It is still true, for example, that a few sheds near Schipol, just outside Amsterdam, are the centre of the world’s trade in cut flowers – the result of that historical episode where a single tulip bulb became worth more than a year’s wages.
We can, and some do, take tourist trips to see the fields of those very tulips today. Modern researchers point out that the tulip was near unknown in Europe, the first examples only just having arrived from Turkey.
The art of cross-pollinating tulips to gain desirable characteristics was only just becoming generally known, and Europe was reaching a stage of wealth where the purely ornamental was becoming valuable.
Yes, the speculation in prices was ludicrous – although the weird stuff was in futures and options markets, not the physical trade, and the absurd prices never actually happened – but the end result of the frenzy was still that the tulip and flower market became and is centred in The Netherlands.
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Tyler Cowen: The Economics of Choosing the Right Career
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 11 Oct 2016As many who entered the labor market following the Great Recession know all too well, graduating with a college degree does not mean you’ll easily fall into a good career. Four-year college graduates with entry-level jobs actually earned more in 2000 than they’re earning today and student loan debt burdens are higher than ever.
Does this mean you should skip college or drop-out? Not necessarily. Unemployment is still lower for those with undergraduate and higher degrees. However, understanding the economics behind the labor market will make finding a career a more manageable task.
The labor market in the United States has undergone many changes in the past few decades. Whereas we once had many manufacturing jobs that required little training or specialized skills, the labor market today demands more people who can work with computers and information technology.
Choosing a good career requires planning beyond getting a college education. You’ll want to carefully consider the career options available for your major, as well any specialized skills you’ll need to build outside of the classroom.
It’s also essential to understand how supply and demand affect your career options. How many people are also choosing that major vs. how many employers are looking for those skills? Is a particular career path susceptible to being replaced by a machine? What about outsourcing in the global labor market? What about laws and regulation – does it require an occupational license?
There’s a lot to think about! Choosing a career is a huge decision and understanding how supply and demand rule the labor market will help you better navigate your future.
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How the Vikings plundered Minnesota
By all accounts, the Minnesota Vikings’ new stadium in Minneapolis is a wonderful structure and fans have been very happy with the amenities provided. However, as Steven Malanga explains, the non-fan taxpayers in the city and the state have a right to feel plundered by the Vikings:
Fans of the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles will travel to the frigid northern city this week because the NFL granted a Super Bowl to Minnesota as a reward for stepping up with more than half a billion dollars in subsidies for the home-state Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium, which opened in 2016. For a city whose mayor recently described it as a “shining beacon of progressive light and accomplishment,” this is some feat, and a reminder that the NFL, whatever its troubles, maintains a firm hold on the taxpayer’s purse in many places.
Vikings owner Zygi Wilf, a New Jersey real estate developer, began pushing for a new stadium soon after purchasing the team in 2005. His supplications became more earnest after the roof of the Vikings’ old home, the Metrodome, collapsed in December 2010. Wilf originally proposed contributing just one quarter of the new stadium’s $1 billion cost, a spectacularly low-ball offer in an era when backlash against stadium subsidies for professional teams increasingly force owners to pony up a bigger share of construction costs. Wilf claimed that he couldn’t afford more, but he wouldn’t release the financial details of his real estate empire. A Minnesota state investigation, undertaken after a New Jersey judge ruled that the Wilf family had defrauded real estate partners in a local project and had to pay them $84.5 million, determined that the family could afford to pay up to $500 million for the stadium.
Even after Wilf upped his offer, the road to the stadium deal was paved with controversy. Minnesota financed a portion of its share of the costs by introducing a state-licensed electronic-gambling game to generate construction revenues, but the game proved a clunker with local residents; to fill the financing hole, Minnesota drew on revenues from its tobacco tax and increased corporate taxes. Then Wilf announced that he’d help finance his part of the deal by charging season ticketholders a seat license fee — prompting a threat from Minnesota governor Mark Dayton to pull government financing. Dayton soon changed his tune, explaining that sports financing has its own ineffable logic. “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports,” he said. “Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”
Though it lent its balance sheet to the deal, the city of Minneapolis, according to critics — including one former city councilman — has been “hosed” by the Vikings. The city officially contributed $150 million to stadium construction, but these observers contend that that figure doesn’t include expensive infrastructure improvements that Minneapolis was forced to make. As part of the stadium package, Minneapolis also agreed to send $7.5 million a year in operating subsidies to the authority running the facility, which amounts to $225 million over the course of the deal. City taxpayers also apparently remain on the hook for any shortfalls in the revenues that back the bonds used to build the surrounding infrastructure. Residents understand little of this financing because, as the Minneapolis Star Tribune noted, the stadium deal “was as transparent as the Berlin wall.”
I’m a (very) long-term fan of the team, but that doesn’t mean I approve of the taxpayers being robbed blind so local fans of the team get to watch the game in a corporate welfare palace. Reason has posted several videos exposing the crony capitalist roots of stadium financing, including most recently this one. I first heard of “seat licenses” in 2014 and they sounded like a bad idea to me then. Back in 2012, when the public support was announced, I was not happy about it.
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Don’t mention Macbeth – Blackadder – BBC
BBCWorldwide
Published on 24 May 2010The palace entertains two distinguished and highly superstitious actors. Blackadder is careful not to mention the name of the Scottish play. Funny clip taken from the classic BBC comedy Blackadder.
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QotD: “Enhancing the user experience”
Once upon a time, computers weren’t all constantly connected to the intertubes. What we call “air-gapped” these days was the normal state of machines back in the desktop beige box days.
Back then, when you bought a program it came in a cardboard box on physical media. You would install it on your computer and it would work the same way from the day you installed it to the day you stopped using it. Nobody could rearrange the menus on WordPerfect or change the buttons in Secret Weapons of the Lufwaffe … Good times.
Nowadays, half the software you interact with doesn’t even reside on your PC. Further, there are whole departments at, say, Facebook or Blizzard or Google whose entire job is to “enhance the user experience”. If they’re not constantly dicking around, adding and removing features, changing what buttons do, moving things around … then they’re not doing their jobs.
We have incentivized instability.
Tamara Keel, “Tinkering for tinkering’s sake…”, View From The Porch, 2018-01-10.
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