Archive for March, 2010
Ross • 23rd Mar 2010 • Living • athletics, half marathon, race, running, sports, stafford
I ran the Stafford Half Marathon for the second year in a row on Sunday. I was pleased to find out today that my chip time was in fact 1h53m15s, more than a six minute improvement on last year’s 1h59m50s. Considering, I’d only run once between November and this race, I was pretty pleased with this performance, even if I was beaten by a man dressed as dalek.
Stafford Council put on a good show. The locals turn out in large number, are friendly and supportive. The town is pleasant, with a lovely park area near the river. There are some wonderful properties on the countryside section of the route. Re-entering town you go through a housing estate where a man dressed in a bear suit offers ‘Strongbow station’ to passing runners. Not many runners take up the offer, but I was tempted.
I am fully aware that I look like a constipated speedwalking pigeon in the above photo. For your further amusement, there are more photos of my looking terrible in different ways here.
Running is not really my sport. Although I am getting better at the mental side of things (being in a race is good for interesting things to look at) I don’t think I will ever have the physique to be competitive at distance, whatever training I undertook. I run not because I love running, but because I love being outside, exercising on sunny days, and seeing what I can do. I don’t think I will ever run a marathon, but doing more than one Half each year is a possibility. I am thinking of the New Forest Half in September.
Ross • 19th Mar 2010 • Living, Thinking • beliefs, ideology, markets, morality, outlook, rand, Thinking
Is it worthwhile to try and summarise your beliefs as concisely as you can summarise a career? It is certainly difficult. Here is my latest attempt, for my About Me page:
Philosophically I am highly individualist, objective and rational. I apply rationality to my primary aim, the pursuit of happiness, although I have an unusually low discount rate. In others, I value honesty and candour. I despise collectivism, due to the contraints it puts on human thought and its tendency towards generating tribal conflict. I doubt the sincerity of those who act against their apparent incentives, which I treat as an indication of undisclosed incentives rather than virtue. For these reasons, I value the entry of market-based systems in most areas of life and society.
This does not capture everything, but it does catch what Rand might have called my ‘predicates’.
Ross • 18th Mar 2010 • Learning, Thinking • business, charter cities, ecological, economics, green, work
I have just come across Harvard Business Review‘s summary of ideas to watch in 2010. It’s great. Best bits:
- A Charter Cities plug
- It turns out that workers value progress in their workplaces. They like to hit project milestones and get stuff done. Managers don’t realise this.
- Short discussion of green bond financing for ecological building retro-fits.
There is also an ethically dubious encouragement to ‘hack work’. While I think this is valid in some cases, I don’t think it is a model that one should promote. In a good organisation, it shouldn’t be necessary, and the ideas that need to be promoted are those that fix the organisation, not learn to work around it more cunningly.
Ross • 17th Mar 2010 • Thinking • behaviour, career, climate change, environment, ethics, morality, psychology, work
Recent research suggests that being green may make you mean. This is a specific example of ‘moral compartmentalisation’. Ian Leslie thinks that this also occurs in the workplace: people who put their family first feel they don’t need to be nice at work. It’s an appealing theory.
Ross • 1st Mar 2010 • Uncategorized • air miles, airmiles, arbitrage, california, economics, finance, hacks, money, pudding, reward, saving, usa
Why the museum of arbitrage? Well, because if arbitrage existed now, I would be doing it rather than writing this.
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself.
Recognizing a good thing, Phillips bought 12,150 servings of pudding for $3,140, claiming he was stocking up for Y2K. Then he enlisted the Salvation Army to help him peel off the UPC codes, in exchange for donating the pudding.
He mailed his submission to Healthy Choice, and to their credit they awarded him 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles, enough for 31 round trips to Europe, 42 to Hawaii, 21 to Australia, or 50 anywhere in the United States.
There’s no downside. Phillips also got Aadvantage Gold status for life with American Airlines, which brings a special reservations number, priority boarding, upgrades, and bonus miles. And he got an $815 tax writeoff for donating the pudding.
Lifted wholesale from Futility Closet.
