My first Rails project: Trump Promise Tracker

I'm excited to announce my first project using the Ruby On Rails web framework: Trump Promise Tracker, available at www.trumppromisetracker.com. The goal of TPT is to neutrally assess, based on the most literal interpretations, the truth value of Donald Trump's promises as a candidate. Building the site was mostly an endeavor to teach myself Rails, but also now this website exists, so that's nice!

I have a few goals for the content of the site and would love to have a few volunteers who would like to moderate the site with me to steer us towards those goals. This will require no programming knowledge! See the "Running TPT in the Future" section below if you are interested in that. In the meantime, I'm going to explain the development process and some of what I learned.

Gathering the Data

TPT was inspired by a Washington Post article listing 282 of Donald Trump's campaign promises. I wrote a Python script using BeautifulSoup that scraped all of the promises and sources embedded within, copying them into a CSV file. I then went through several times to edit the list, splitting "promises" that actually contained multiple pledges into their own entries, and removing ambiguous stuff that will never be settled such as his promises to "make America great again" or "give you everything." I generally tried to remove every instance of the word "and" by splitting that promise up; I was moderately successful, but sometimes that conjunction was necessary.

I uploaded the data through a rake job that I wrote with the help of a Stack Overflow thread. I actually did most things with the help of a Stack Overflow thread. I love Stack Overflow.

Building the Site

I started out knowing basically nothing about Rails, so I started reading Michael Hartl's Ruby On Rails Tutorial to gather enough to make me dangerous. I decided to use bitbucket for my git repository and Heroku for hosting. I created the app, established a resource for the promises, and populated the promise list through the rake job described above. I then added authentication through the Clearance gem for administrative accounts and began working on building a resource to handle the submission process for edits.

My original plan was to incorporate a unique submission system in which the submitter is required to pay some very small fee (25 cents was my goal) for submitting. The idea is that this would stop the spam that such a site would inevitably attract while providing some small amount of financing to hopefully cover the cost of hosting the site. Paypal has a micropayments option that would make this feasible (averaging about 12 cents in fees on each 25 cent payment) and incorporating a bitcoin option would be great as the fees are close to nonexistent. However, after spending a few days looking at the complexity of adding payments, I decided to put this on hold and just use a captcha instead.

Getting the edit resource to interact with the promise resource was something that I had to spend a lot of time researching. I ended up describing a has_many and belongs_to relationship between edits and promises in their respective models, making integration simpler, as each edit is attached to a promise. I plan to add a list of edits on each promise's page, something that intuitively seems fairly simple.

I used URL parameters to pass form data between resources, a useful but seemingly amateurish way of handling that job. I'm open to learning more back-end methods. The params method has a wealth of questions and answers online, which is useful for developing but often makes me feel like I'm not actually learning much about the method because I am able to find solutions that allow me to nearly copy and paste code. Granted, I successfully completed the project, but I worry that my implementation may have flaws in ways I don't understand. Working as a professional Rails developer with bosses and colleagues who can point these things out would be incredibly valuable.

Making the site less ugly and the log pages more useful required that I get involved in Bootstrap, a handy CSS framework released by Twitter that helps idiots beautify their pages. I don't claim TPT is anything wonderful to look at, but what I was able to do with the log pages is totally because of Bootstrap. The overall look of the site comes from the most basic template from Start Bootstrap, an excellent repository of Bootstrap themes to get a novice up and running.

Speaking of log pages, I really enjoyed building the functionality on the administrator site to Push or Reject suggestions. These were methods I had to build into the controllers for edits and new_promises and getting them to interact with the promises resource was a fun challenge. Getting everything working correctly (and then fixing all the stuff I broke along the way) was really cool. 

The last resource added was the new_promises resource, which was kind of an afterthought when I realized people would probably also like to suggest promises that I missed. I borrowed a bunch of code from the edits resource and would probably like to modularize the code some more in the future to simplify any changes that need to be made. In the meantime, however, the site is working and looking great.

Running TPT in the Future

I've never created a site that might actually be a going concern as a project. How much of my future time will it consume? Will I be so sick of it two months from now that I regret doing any of it? If this develops a following, will I really want to spend time moderating the submissions everyday?

Further development seems like a fun and profitable endeavor, but I'm not sure that moderation does. For that reason I hope to find some moderators who have an interest in tracking how President Trump measures up to Candidate Trump and are willing to put some time into providing this public service. I will provide all technical support and am open to ideas on how to expand the project to make it more useful, and we can include your name and bio on the About page so that you can show off and resume it. Just a thought!

Already I know a few things need work. Many of the sources the Washington Post provided are hour-long YouTube videos of Trump speaking; those links should point to where specifically in the video he made the pledge. Also, our pledges are paraphrases of his statements, something I did on purpose to avoid the perception that we were mocking him; this might not be the most accurate way of reporting, though, so we will see if any disagreements flow from that. Some of the sources in general might not be terribly accurate, and I hope the "crowd" can point out those instances. 

Alternatively, perhaps nobody is interested and I will get tired of moderating and this project will die, which I'm also not opposed to. The mission was to learn Rails, and the mission was accomplished. I'll keep this alive for as long as it seems reasonable to do so, but for me, TPT is already a success!

Small Adventures In Data: Billboard Music

My Facebook-only friend Greg Newburn recently asked a question:

Greg is a world-renowned internet poster so I try to serve him in any way I can. I also have recently been picking up SQL and Python and love a project where I can try my skills, so I jumped at the opportunity to help.

The Billboard data that I found on Mode Analytics seemed useful at first but it only gave year rankings, and there are zero recording artists with five number one hit singles if you are describing "number one" as "number one for the entire year." A little investigation revealed that Billboard actually publishes weekly (I should know this already) and the hunt for weekly data lead me to this wonderful post where, at the bottom, a Python-language web scraper for gathering weekly chart data was provided.

I copied this into Jupyter Notebook and let it run, slowly, until Jupyter Notebook crashed somewhere around 1972. That's enough data for me, so I cleaned it up in Excel, uploaded it to Mode, and got cracking.

My first attempt that produced reasonable results was fairly simple:

But, predictably, it didn't work very well, as artists with similar names were not grouped together, lowering their count:

The sad ending (for now) is that I need to work on my actual day-job stuff and I really don't know how to fix this. You can view my work here. Any suggestions are welcome, but I'll probably be looking more this evening. I know there are some more advanced matching methods in Python, maybe I'll finally figure out how to use Python on SQL queries!

So far it appears that there are no near-misses who suffer from this issue but this is probably biased against rap/hip-hop artists as their artists names tend to include featured artists that would mess up the GROUP BY command. Will look again this evening.

My guess for now: 17 

Double taxation

Imagine you are a doctor who has an extra $10k to spend after a year of budgeting. You have narrowed down your purchase decision to two options: a pair of new jet-skis, or an investment in a local restaurant. From the jet-skis you get a return of glorious fun with perhaps a special someone, and from the restaurant investment you get a return of equity and the capital gains that comes from dividend payouts. The returns from the jet-ski option are not taxed by the government besides sales tax and licensing (you can't tax fun!), but the returns from investing the restaurant - I suppose this is responsible behavior - well, those are subject to a whole bunch of taxes.

This has always been my understanding of the argument against double taxation, that you have earned the money once by seeing patients and were taxed then, and now you will be taxed a second time if you take the responsible option of investing your money. How unfair! Let's cut capital gains tax!

Actually, it's sort of the same idea with labor.

If I have 40 hours a week to toss around, I can lay in bed all day reading blogs (patently irresponsible) or I can get a job. I've taken my time and have done a responsible thing with it and now I get taxed for it, while the government has not found a way to tax my blog reading. Unfair!

But wait, that's not double taxation. So is double taxation actually important? Why is taxing the money I make working so much better than taxing the money I make investing? Perhaps it is that time flows to use freely, while the money to invest had to be earned.

Also, I've got something on equivalence of consumption and income taxes and Say's law, but I'll post later when I'm not exhausted. 

Could democrats also like the fourth amendment?

Sometimes he binges and eats the first and second amendments, as well.

The three-hundred-plus pounds of patriotism the media has dubbed "Chris Christie" challenged libertarians in a media event last night, according to the Washington Post:

As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.

This is really exciting for me, not because I give a shit about Chris Christie's opinions but because he points out that this strain is going through both parties. Indeed, the recent vote on libertarian representative Justin Amash's amendment to ban NSA dragnet spying drew a surprising amount of support from both sides of the aisle: 94 Republicans and 111 Democrats voted for an amendment that the leadership from both parties railed against. The amendment failed (of course) but by the extremely narrow margin of just twelve votes, with even John Boehner lowering himself to go down and cast his nay.

It's good to see a paradigm of authoritarianism-vs-libertarianism on an issue, especially when it is crossing party lines. I've always felt a libertarian-Republican presidential candidate will need to draw votes from both Republican and Democratic bases in order to succeed (with some Christians and many foreign-policy hawks jumping ship from the GOP ticket). While the classical set of Paul voters would be fiscally conservative, socially liberal individuals from both parties, attracting voters on the not-being-a-police-state front is also an excellent boost for Paul in 2016.

For more analysis on Christie's remarks and what a gross statist he is there's a Reason blog post my friend Alan shared on Facebook.

Freedom from purpose

Imagine yourself going to a fabulously interesting and culturally rich city, some exotic metro area you've only seen in movies. Perhaps for a few it is New York City or Los Angeles, but I am thinking more along the lines of Seoul, Buenos Aires, or Hong Kong (developing countries are much more interesting).

You spend weeks looking through websites and blogs about the city. What an amazing place! You've planned out all the interesting destinations you will visit and each night you are deluded with dreams about the excited and fascinating people you will meet. The energy of the city is so obvious it comes alive to you even now, thousand of miles away! Your own life, though satisfying, seems like a comatose state compared to the constant night parties and day adventures of this destination metropolis.

Oh, but one thing: you are going on business and will have no time to do anything interesting.

Your trip has a purpose, you see, and you must execute that purpose. There will be a factory tour you are to take part in, several meetings with your foreign contemporaries, and every meal is planned with some manager trying to sell you their services or investor who you must woo. You know these people and they are all inescapably dull and long-winded, interested only in themselves and the most base aspects of the industry. Perhaps you will get to see a party from your hotel room as you get ready for bed, but keep the evening voyeurism brief: you've got early meetings every day you are there.

Your trip now sounds like a complete drag, and in such an awesome city! This is what it is to have a purpose in life.

Facing the fact that you have no purpose to live is facing that you were not sent here on a mission, but instead on a vacation. The natural urge with a vacation is to plan plenty of downtime, broken up by attractions and activities which allow you to fully experience and enjoy the location and context of your break. As aforementioned, you should not think of this hedonic resolution as a purpose, as your happiness is only as consequential as you are, and you are gloriously inconsequential in every way.

I guess I don't understand, to some degree, why people are so adverse to the idea that their lives are purposeless, as if they want their lives on earth to be some kind of prison sentence. Seeing that you have no purpose means there is no failure or success at life, and there is instead just living. Can anything be more liberating?

On God

I spoke before of my belief that no creator exists. This is a critical link in my chain of thought, and if I am wrong here than my arguments would be irreparably destroyed.

I have never been an athiest until recently. I was raised in a conservative Christian household and was made to go to church from a toddlerhood until I moved out of my home at the age of nineteen. Until late middle school I was a devout Christian, at which point I began to drift. I became almost completely apathetic by the age of seventeen and have considered myself "apatheistic" since then, and have always disdained any theological conversation as moot.

During all these periods of time, however, I have suffered with the question of purpose. I did not feel "called" to go into ministry as a youth and I couldn't imagine a God that would make it my purpose to run a company or fix leaky pipes. My strategy for dealing with this crisis (over a stretch of roughly a dozen years) was to continue looking for a purpose while not wrecking my life in such a way that I would be unable to complete my purpose once I discovered it. This was an emotionally exhausting period of my life. The fact that my purpose was unknown meant I could never know if sitting back and watching TV for an hour would make me fail at my purpose! It is impossible to ever relax under such conditions.

So when I came to asking direct questions, for the first time, about the purpose of my life, I followed a reasonable progression. My life would have to be given purpose exogenously ("objective" purpose). In fact, a purpose would be a reason for my life to exist, so my existence must be tied to this purpose. But that implies that I exist on purpose, that some thing purposely created me. 

Here, finally, a theological discussion that was not moot. I should note that my philosophically inclined friends were aware of my aversion to theological debates, so you can imagine my surprise when I quickly and firmly answered of course there can be no creator. It came out as if it was inside me for years, just looking for an excuse to be relevant!

Am I right in thinking that no creator exists? Well, the way I think about it is this: if I was never told of a creator and only had knowledge of physical theories of humanity's origins (evolution, big bang, etc.), then would I feel the need to inject into the theories a metaphysical creator? Is there a hole that needs to be filled or an inconsistency that needs to be corrected?

I can't think of one, besides the problem of ultimate origin: what created the matter that took part in the big bang? Where did that stuff come from? But even here, I see no reason for a creator. If we invoke a creator to explain the origin of all matter, then we have simply raised to a new metaphysical plane the same issue and I can ask "where did the creator come from?".

Injecting a God into origin stories is unnecessary and contrived. This was never of consequence to me until I realized its importance in the question of existential purpose, at which point it became a paramount and critical point.

Happiness is not a purpose

I've lately been asking people to tell me what the purpose of their life is. I hope you can now understand why I write this in a blog instead of talking about it with people.

Often times, people might concede that their life has no objective purpose, but that their subjective purpose is their own happiness. This sounds novel enough: it is common wisdom that you should try to be happy! And while I agree that this is an agreeable goal while you are on earth, it should be made very clear that this is not a purpose.

Imagine a machine, let's call it a Zarathustra, and to give you a picture in your head let's say the Zarathustra is ten feet by four feet, is covered in red sheet metal, and has only a few levers and claws coming out at strategic points. It's a very mysterious machine! But I can tell you the purpose of the Zarathustra: it is to fix the Zarathustra. Not other Zarathustras (let's say there is just one in the universe). No, the Zarathustra exists solely to fix itself.

Does the Zarathustra have a purpose?

Of course it doesn't. The Zarathustra sounds like something you would find in a Ripley's Museum or some other parody emporium. No serious person would want a Zarathustra, they are totally without purpose! As is the person whose only purpose is their own happiness.

But wait, you say! I've misunderstood you. You intend to not only make yourself happy, but others happy as well! You care for others, as does every human, and the purpose of your life is the happiness of others.

Well, let me adjust my metaphor for your new critique. Perhaps we can imagine the Zarathustra machine being discovered by General Electric and the executives, in a fever of excitement, rush it into mass production. The public sees the obvious value of the Zarathustra machine, especially with the refinements that GE engineers have made: now, the Zarathustra can also fix other Zarathustras!

Soon, every household has a Zarathustra. If your Zarathustra breaks, you can simply call your neighbor and ask him to bring over his Zarathustra (hopefully they've been made smaller at this point, but I still like to imagine them as red). All the Zarathustras in the world can fix all the other Zarathustras in the world, and we can see why they were so popular!

Obviously, this too is idiotic. No person would want a machine that fixes only machines of its type and has no other functions, as the machine has still no purpose. Likewise, a person who lives to make others happy has no purpose.

So far it seems to me that the mind rebels at the idea of there being no purpose for existence. I first pursued this avenue because of the violence it seemed to hold - certainly anything that stirs such internal controversy is important to consider! But for years I avoided it, just as others avoid it now by constructing these illogical purposes.

You have no purpose and not accepting this truth is building a worldview on lies. It will be your undoing.

How I realized my life has no purpose (and neither does yours!)

I will use this as a place to record things I am thinking about since they are not suitable for most forms of conversation. I should note that I don't read philosophy so this will seem very obvious to people who do.

Thaler theorized on the idea of a dual-self model. In this model a planner-self with a low discount rate sets plans for a myopic doer-self to execute with the predictable high-jinks that come with such a wise planner trying to cope with such a boorish doer. I hoped to follow the advice of approaching this problem as a principal-agent problem and consequentially cutting deals with my doer-self for meeting goals. However, I was surprised to find that this worked very poorly, so I began to investigate.

I have never felt a sense of accomplishment or relief after finishing a goal, I decided, and it was because I still felt I was falling short of a larger goal or purpose by relaxing. I have never known what my purpose is and the idea has always haunted me. My general strategy has been to not fuck things up terribly so that when I eventually discover my purpose I can execute it.

But is it reasonable to think I have a purpose? I've been looking for one for at least ten years now, you'd think I'd at least have some leads by now. Well, I thought, what does having a purpose entail? Having a purpose implies purposeful creation. Somebody had to want me here, which is funny because nobody wanted me here. We are all products of a natural process of evolution.

Thus I was cast into the process of having an existential crisis. It seems funny now to think about how much it bothered me, but I felt it critical at the time that I keep soldiering on with intellectual honesty and curiosity. Many people, it seems, try to find a hack to avoid coming totally clean: I've created my own purpose! I reject this as intellectual dishonesty, as stupid as a car or a refrigerator designing their own purpose. And now that I've accepted what I believe to be true, I view it as strange.

A self-inflicted purpose is only for the truly sadistic. We were put on this earth either to accomplish some end or we were put here on "vacation". I believe we are here on vacation, and giving yourself some sentence to serve out while you exist is silly. You can have goals, but you need to realize that goals are not purposes. You have no purpose and you cannot change that.

Thank God somebody said it

Mittens is above all this poor-people talk.

While Mitt Romney is probably one of the more unlikable public figures to ever be unliked, it's important to note that he hasn't gotten a fair shake on taxes.

The reason centers around the fact that most of his income (along with Warren Buffet, who has been patently misleading the public on the topic) is derived from capital gains and dividends, which are taxed at the corporate level before being passed through to the individual. In essence, it is a type of double taxation which occurs pretty directly - your money doesn't just get taxed when you get it, but it gets taxed while the check is still in the mail as well. This makes his actual tax rate much higher.

The more orthodox case of double taxation also applies to Mitt, and it's even more important. Imagine you are a doctor who has an extra $10k to spend after a year of budgeting. You have narrowed down your purchase decision to two options: a pair of new jet-skis, or an investment in a local restaurant. From the jet-skis you get a return of glorious fun with perhaps a special someone, and from the restaurant investment you get a return of equity and the capital gains that come from dividend payouts.

Obviously, the returns from the jet-ski option are not taxed by the government besides sales tax and licensing (you can't tax fun!), but the returns from investing in the restaurant - the option that provides a real return to the community - well, those are subject to an unhealthy dose of both corporate and personal taxes. This means that our tax code is biased against productive spending, and for that reason we try to keep the percentage rate as low as we can (hence lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains).

Mitt Romney has made piles of money, so I understand some of the punches thrown over his tax rate. Spraying venom at a policy that keeps money employed in useful ventures instead of extravagant luxuries, however, is not a reasonable attack. Let's hope people remember that after the political dust has settled.

Pay or You Hate France!

What a complete asshole.

I love seeing French attitudes towards wealth. Bernard Arnault, a rich guy French guy, is leaving the country after President Hollande announced he planned to tax his type at 75% percent:

A day after French President Hollande made his case for new taxes, the public responded angrily to a report that its richest man, Bernard Arnault, was trying to avoid taxes by heading to Belgium.

Story here. Interestingly enough, there seems to have been a lack of outrage from French citizens when the Rolling Stones moved there as tax exiles from England.

I'm fascinated by the tax situation in France right now. I've seen a few stories pop up about how wealthy people were going to be fleeing the country, but it seemed pretty fluffy and was being pushed by conservative bloggers. I wasn't sure if individuals would really take the plunge. Turns out at least one did.

The Real Crisis in Europe (in pictures)

This is getting weird.

Spiegel is running an interesting story about the incredible challenges faced by a certain profession during the Euro debt crisis. Politicians? Bankers? Accountants? Of course not. This drawn out downspiral has most drastically affected photographers:

Stratenschulte is a photographer with the German news agency DPA. He has been photographing euro coins from various angles for the past three years. He tries to convey the complex crisis in images. The problem is that the crisis won't end, which means Stratenschulte has to keep coming up with fresh ideas. 

His colleagues have resorted to using children's toys, arranging a plastic shark to look like it's eating a Lego man holding a Greek flag. They have photographed coins in a free fall. Rumor has it that one photographer poured gasoline on coins to try to make them glow with heat.

The problem is capturing in photographs something which cannot be photographed - purely abstract economic occurrences. I personally prefer the pictures of Merkel and other important people looking angry or friendly while sitting in rooms full of fine wood furniture. It captures the actual events that are happening, but it does of course leave out the immense ramifications of those events. A burning Euro coin does help bring home (at least for Europeans) how critical the shifts are, but to foreign viewers it is a picture of a piece of metal on fire. I never found it very moving.

Be sure to flip through the slideshow and read the humorous captions.

Competing with Apple in More Ways...

Samsung is apparently going to crack down on its manufacturing partners for possible labor violations. This surprises me, as I wouldn't imagine there being much money in being nice to poor people. Perhaps, though, Samsung will be offering the trendy youth something Apple has not: guilt-free conscience.

From the Reuters article:

"If supplier companies are found to be in violation of our policies and corrective actions not taken, Samsung will terminate its contract with those supplier companies," Samsung said.

It needs more Bernanke!

You are boring the Ben Bernank.

For the millionth and a half time, the NYT reports:

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, delivered a detailed and forceful argument on Friday for new steps to stimulate the economy, reinforcing earlier indications that the Fed is on the verge of action.

I'm uncertain if viewing this situation with proper perspective is particularly flattering to the Federal Reserve at this point. I at least hope we can start draining some excess reserves instead of just throwing more money at the system mindlessly.

Also, an interesting note I didn't know about:

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has said such action would be counterproductive, and has pledged to replace Mr. Bernanke at the earliest opportunity.

Way to make friends, Mitt!

Aw China, you so crazy!

I don't know what this means, but it's evil.

I'm contrarian by nature, so I've always been pretty bearish about China's next ten years. Maybe it's a knee-jerk reaction to communists (I'm still living in 1952 and I wasn't yet alive then), but I prefer to trace my doubts to the fact that it's a completely corrupt state with out-of-control shadow industries and an economy so in danger of overheating that occasionally a factory spontaneously bursts into flames.

That's why I find this story in the NYT to be so deliciously enjoyable. It's pure madness that a country can grow at 10% a year and not run off of a cliff occasionally, but there is always a sea of lemmings faithfully trusting in the Chinese leadership's all-wise aversion to ledges. Long-term, the state is going to need reforms - long-standing institutions which relied on that (very little remaining) nationalist Communist pride will be ripped to shreds by capitalism in the next thirty years. Short term the country is going to be massively unstable as rapid industrialization, regime uncertainty, a corrupt business environment oftentimes outside of regulation, and a government obsessed with maintaining the facade of  ultra growth multiply business cycles to painful extremes.

China is given a pass by a media that is more interested in whipping up fear over the country's ascent then by pointing out its probable failures. It's going to be interesting to watch this play out.

I wrote limericks!

I somehow stumbled upon the limericks page of Dr. Mesterton-Gibbons, a mathematics professor at my school. He has been doing a limerick of the month for years, and his online collection reaches back to 1996. While looking at this I realized I should be working on behavioral economics, so I naturally decided to write limericks about it instead.

One should note that there is (apparently) a strict rhyming scheme to limericks which I have completely ignored. That disclaimer being given, here are my efforts:

On shifting reference points:

A lottery player who had won

Said “finally, I’m in for some fun”

But while his wealth lifted

His reference point shifted

So his u­₂ over u equaled one.

On mental heuristics:

So many shortcuts in our thought

With errors our results are wrought

Heuristics are okay

In your day-to-day

As long as the President you are not.

On loss aversion:

Jen suffered such aversion to losses

When choosing her boys and her bosses

That at 34 she found

After looking around

That this was half of her trouble’s causes.

On prospect theory:

The model of utility expected

Was aged and quite well respected

On it we had built

A sandcastle of silt

‘til Kahneman conjectured we prospected.

On altruism:

Economists modeled humans a la carte

Thinking souls wouldn’t fit on the chart

But dictators show

What little we know

About the depth of the human heart.

On a Loewenstein paper:

Economists yearned for a pure thinker

As feelers force modelers to tinker

But as Loewenstein alludes

More predictable moods

May belong to the visceral rum drinker.

My poor, oft-deserted ideas

My poor, poor ideas.

I like the idea of deliberately being inconsistent in one's ideas. People adopt an idea and make it part of their identity, siding with a team or trying to carve out a unique vision of who they are. But you don't own ideas; they exist whether you live or not.

This might be what makes ideas so powerful and so destructive. I've seen people go through the weirdest logical jumps and make the lamest assumptions to make sure their idea makes it through scrutiny unscathed. There is nothing worse than someone defending an idea and completely wrecking their integrity in the process. Theories are not, for most people, a way of making sense of the facts, or trying to find a true pattern within them. They're convenient devices which shield us from the hard job of thinking.

So this is why I constantly disagree with what I said three days ago. And why it doesn't really bother me. I'd rather be totally detached from ideas and willing to disown them at any moment when I decide they have some fatal flaw than to be obsessively holding onto them for fear of admitting I am wrong.

If I'm inconsistent in my ideas, does it make my ideas somehow weaker? If my ideas survived the scrutiny of others merely on the basis that I seem like a legitimate source for ideas, then clearly this person is not actually evaluating my ideas and is instead applying a very crude heuristic to select the ideas that sound most reasonable. If that's what people do, fine. I don't want to be right in someone else's perception, I want to be right in actuality. If I turn out conflicting ideas on a daily basis, then yay for me! I'm thinking inconsistently and producing a wide range of ideas and am much more free of an ideological influence.

Also, there is an awesome story about Africa on the intertubes today and I really think it is worth a read.

Chinese lending slumps, world watches with baited breath

PROTIP: You want the graph to have less of those big changes and more of the little ones.

From Christopher Balding:

From 2008 to 2009 new local currency loans rose from 3.48 trillion rmb to 10.32 trillion according to the PBOC for an annualized increase of nearly 300%.  If economic history tells us anything about rapid increases in credit, it implies that those loans should start going bad in the very near future. 

This is a really impressive graphic that shows the massive spike in government lending in the crisis, a result of the government ordering banks to lend more to help prop up the economy. This was taken by Western writers to be a great strength of the Chinese system, that central financial regulators had such immense power. Great quote from a Forbes editorial from 2009:

Chinese officials essentially forced the banks to lend to support the stimulus program. So state enterprises were forced to borrow. China Aviation Industry Corp., for instance, had to borrow $49.2 billion from 12 Chinese banks this spring. Its general manager, Lin Zuoming, complained in April that he did not know what to do with all the cash. 

We see now that an increase of almost 300% in one year may have had a backlash following it. Are we going to see rolling defaults coming soon as debt cannot be rolled over or extended in these tighter credit conditions? I'm excited to watch.

Dollar Shave Club - kicking in the rotten door of the dumbest oligopoly

The double-edge safety razor seemed like a humorous devolution to me. Purchasing the first pack of replacement razors for your Gillette or Schick shaving product is a coming-of-age event for any young man, when he realizes life is going to be expensive. I actually took part in this system of obvious rent-seeking for a few years before I applied my interest in economics and realized that if there was competition in shaving, prices would fall. Competition in the cartridge razor market is stymied by proprietary cartridge connections, but for my luck the safety blade market is humming at something dramatically closer to a competitive equilibrium. So I returned to the shaving technology of fifty years ago and felt, in net, quite advanced for the change.

It never once occurred to me, though, that there is a massive pile of money to be made in taking down the oligopoly that exists in shaving.

Your handsome-ass grandfather had one blade. And polio.

It seems obvious now. For how much I do like my safety razor, it's not exactly user-friendly. As my dad discovered when I got him one for Father's Day, you can cut pretty sizable gashes in your face with these things. There's sort of a trick to using one effectively. Also, you have to replace the actual razor itself - which involves taking an unbelievably sharp sliver of steel out of a little paper wrapper and dropping it into place. I haven't cut myself yet doing it, but I imagine when I do it's going to be the World Series of cursing.

However, there is absolutely nothing special about cartridge razors that would stop a competitor from jumping in. The biggest cost to switching is the original razor handle, and if a startup were to, say, sell a subscription service to help subsidize that, they could easily break in. So what is needed is a competitor to bring Schumpeter-esque destruction upon the big razor companies. They'll need to sell an effectively designed cartridge razor, be low in cost, effectively market to young men, and preferably operate outside of the normal channels of distribution.

I bring you Dollar Shave Club. I'm not sure if I'll sign up - I'm torn, as I do sort of miss cartridge shaving, but I still have a ton (tonnnn) of safety razors left. But I do like what these guys are doing. So go watch their video, it's pretty funny.

Control of the purse

A recent Times article hits on the idea of campaign finance since Citizens United becoming more diversified, ripping away control from party bosses.

The idea of quietly showing a candidate the door is an idea that harkens back to the days when the political parties were run by a handful of power brokers — before “super PACs,” the Tea Party and politics by Twitter diminished the influence of the parties.

“It was a time when the party bosses controlled the access to money and to the media,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin, a political historian. “They really could tell people to do something or other. I don’t know who those people would be today.”

The Super-PAC's have crushed the party fundraising establishment and the Internet has crushed the media establishment. Perhaps, in an ironic twist, a more democratic process has emerged from Citizens United?

For the love of math

Over the past several days (and perhaps it was building up weeks beforehand) I've really taken a liking to mathematics. 

You vill take ze mathematics and you vill like eet.

This is weird, as I failed freshman algebra in high school. I hated math. Nobody took the time to explain to me that if you want to do anything serious (read: sciency) you need to have a rigorous understanding of upper-level mathematics. It all seemed like a pointless exercise that I would willingly subject myself to in grade school when it was easy, but once it required any thought from me I rebelled against it. But then came college, and the kindling of my passion for economics.

So I set myself out to learn to love math. Nobody liked their first sip of coffee nor their first cigarette nor their first alcoholic beverage, but people are addicted to these things for a reason: they're great. I postulated that perhaps my relationship with mathematics would be the same way, that perhaps mathematics (and maybe everything) was an acquired taste. All I needed to do was immerse myself in it, force myself to face it and take a cheerful attitude about it. I needed to want to love it as well as expose myself to it.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is a book about Paul Erdős, a 20th century Hungarian mathematician who was extremely prolific in his publishing and extremely eccentric in his habits. The aggressive, intellectual rat-race view of mathematicians you get from movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting wasn't something I could fall in love with, but this Erdős fellow was poor, weird, and happy. He really loved math, and it allowed him to live in his own little world where he didn't need the things that other people need. He is now extremely famous among mathematicians, but fame never seemed to be his goal as much as the joy of solving problems. I feel moved by a witness so fervent in his faith. 

This book not only gives the story of Erdős, but also some of the story about mathematics. From Pythagoras to Euclid to Newton to Riemann to Gödel, the evolution of mathematics and mathematical proofing takes the weirdest and most intriguing turns. So many who like mathematics use the word certainty to describe the field, but it seems to me that, again and again, so much of what we thought we knew in this perfect undertaking turns out to be an oversimplification of the case. The words "non-Euclidean geometry" are exceptional for carrying the properties of being both bizarre and cliche. And the idea that so many of the problems are the most difficult yet the most accessible - Fermat's Last Theorem, for instance, a simple conjecture which stood for 350 years before being proved - makes an interest in mathematics one which is immediately accessible.

If I'm to go to graduate school in economics, an intensive education in mathematics is going to be required. If I am to be good at my craft, which I aim to be, I must have a passion for all types of math. It will take immense sums of time and effort, and will require changes fundamental to my personality and lifestyle.

But I think it can be done.