davidcarlton - Tumblr blog

[davidcarlton]

At the systemic level, however, it means our optimizer will be badly broken, and we will all be made the poorer. Megacorp will think I'd be willing to pay $6000 for a plastic roof, and so offer it to me for $5900. But for that price, I prefer the tin. A social resource will have been diverted from a high-value to a low-value use, because our price-discriminating planner erred. Multiply this kind of mistake countless times, and Hayek's “economic calculus” goes haywire. We will have destroyed the very purpose and function of markets in our economy.

Murdering Hayek

Really not sure what to think about this argument, I’d have to think about it a lot harder than I have.  (And presumably I’d also have to either read Hayek or read expositions of Hayek.)   But its’s pretty structurally interesting to me.

[davidcarlton]

Life Lessons From The First Year of Early Retirement

Some stuff in here that I should think about.

[davidcarlton]

Tl;dr · This was going to be a short piece, but it got out of control. So, here’s the deal: Audiophiles who love good sound and are willing to throw money at the problem should now throw almost all of it at the pure-analog pieces: ¶ Speakers. Listening room setup. Phono cartridge (and maybe turntable) (if you do LPs). What’s new and different is that amplification technology has joined D-to-A conversion as a domain where small, cheap, semiconductors offer performance that’s close enough to perfect to not matter. The rest of this piece is an overly-long discussion of what amplification is and of the new technology.

ongoing by Tim Bray · New Amplification

Huh.

[davidcarlton]

Quite a story.

[davidcarlton]

A useful interview for me to hear.

[davidcarlton]

Speaking of the long term, many people assume that rising house prices are a recent problem. But in the United States, the pattern dates to the early 1970s. For almost a century before that, US house prices had been dropping against income. And so Americans treated their house like a ‘commodity’ — a thing they bought to live in. But from 1972 onward, house prices began to slowly appreciate against income. And so Americans started to treat their house like an ‘asset’.

From Commodity to Asset: The Truth Behind Rising House Prices – Economics from the Top Down

I did not know that.

[davidcarlton]

Interesting article about chronic fatigue syndrome, definitely stuff here I didn’t know.

[davidcarlton]

Good podcast episode, gives a nice historical view about what it looks like for things to get better.

[davidcarlton]

Wow.  I’m honestly not sure what I think about this, but it’s pretty striking.

[davidcarlton]

This is kind of amazing, I did not expect a story like this at all.

[davidcarlton]

I take a picture of this painting every time I go to the Cleveland Art Museum.

[davidcarlton]

Neat sounding game.

[davidcarlton]

Cool article about Japanese writing, going rather deeper than most such articles.

[davidcarlton]

Interesting thoughts on (overuse of) JavaScript frameworks.

[davidcarlton]

I still think this hypothesis sounds sensible.