Archive for the “Thinking” category
Ross • 15th Aug 2010 • Learning, Thinking • commodities, eating, fish, food, lobster
Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats.
From Gourmet magazine. It’s notable that gin and oysters were also once proletarian fare. Will Turkey Twizzlers and Ginster’s pies be tomorrow’s delicacies? Less flippantly, there probably is hope for oats, alfalfa and various grains we once fed animals but are no eating ourselves.
Ross • 29th Jul 2010 • Thinking • business, economics, free market, health, heart, medicine, microeconomics, NHS, profit
The next time a zealot headbanger doorsteps you to tell you how bringing proft motives into the NHS is evil, kindly point them to this BBC article:
With its varnished wooden floors and plush sofas the European Scanning Centre looks more like a boutique hotel than somewhere to scan your heart. But it is the first in the country to have a CT scanner that can produce a three-dimensional picture of a patient’s heart with a very low radiation dose….
…Having a CT scan is much safer than an angiogram, where one in every 500 patients suffers a heart attack or stroke….
…The scan is also cheaper, says Dr Kostas Manis, a GP in Bexley. “The angiogram is £1,300, and the private clinic scanner is £900 and we’re negotiating to bring the figure down to £600.”
A better medical service, in nicer surroundings, with less risk, and at less cost. This is why I love competitive markets.
Ross • 21st Jul 2010 • Living, Thinking • britain, economics, finance, government, inflation, investments, macroeconomy, personal finance, savings, uk
The Economist‘s Buttonwood notes that NS&I have just withdrawn their index-linked savings certificates. Like Buttonwood, my wife and I hold these products. Buttonwood thinks that “the government is preparing the ground for a round of debt-eroding inflation.” It’s hard to disagree – NS&I product offers can be treated as revealed preferences, and they now look as if they prefer paying (much) larger nominal rates than (much) smaller real rates. I can think of no other reason why this should be the case, other than inflation expectations. This is likely to be good for the dollar, good for gold and good for UK exporters. But my 2011 ski season may need to be scaled back – perhaps I should have bought slightly more of the certificates.
Ross • 15th Jul 2010 • Learning, Thinking • bonds, business, crime, finance, green, justice, offender, policy, prison, social
During the Peterborough Prison pilot, experienced social sector organisations, such as St Giles Trust, will provide intensive support to 3,000 short-term prisoners over a six year period, both inside prison and after release, to help them resettle into the community. If this initiative reduces re-offending by 7.5%, or more, investors will receive from Government a share of the long term savings. If the SiB delivers a drop in re-offending beyond the threshold, investors will receive an increasing return the greater the success at achieving the social outcome, up to a maximum of 13%.
A colleague told me about these bonds (pdf) this afternoon. They are designed by Social Finance. Bonds with coupons linked to policy outcomes appear to be experiencing a surge in interest at the moment – note also the World Bank’s 2009 Green Bonds and US’s Qualified Green Building and Sustainable Design Project Bonds.
I like the idea of green financial products, but why stop at bonds? Going further in this direction could get us all the way to a Hansonian Policy Analysis Market.
Ross • 10th Jun 2010 • Thinking • apple, design, google, internet, tech, technology, web
Fear of Google’s knowledge about our every purchase, every web click, every move in the physical world was trumped by the public’s craving for information about anything, anywhere. It was an uneasy truce with the devil: give them your innermost secrets, and you can find anything your heart desires.
That’s from a great essay comparing Google to Apple.
Ross • 7th Jun 2010 • Living, Thinking • drinking, dublin, guinness, ireland, travel
Quick thoughts from 24 hours in Dublin:
- I finally understand the point of Ryanair. If you are going to Dublin overnight, with a small carry-on case, the cheap, 50 minute flight from Gatwick is superb. Despite having discovered that you can catch the train to Dublin from London for £30, I’d still be tempted to fly again.
- The city centre is flat, low-rise and lacks the impact and grandeur of Edinburgh, or, frankly, Birmingham. If you swapped out the € signs for £s and got rid of the ubiquitous Ye Olde Worlde Celtic Font (used for everything) you could be in Portsmouth, Liverpool or just about anywhere in the UK. In Dublin, the city is less about the built environment and more about the people, who from the beggars to barmen, seem universally good humoured, friendly and delightful.
- The Temple Bar, the short drinking and partying street, is great fun. Few people from Ireland drink there: expect Brits, Americans and a surprising number of French, all drinking stout to excess in good humour and good song.
- The Guinness Brewery Tour is poor, but worth the €14 for the sample pint in the panoramic Gravity bar. A pint alone normally costs ~€5.50 in the fun parts of town, one effect of heavy Pigouvian taxes. The Jameson’s distillery tour is a much better tourist experience: better explanations, real human guides. Incidentally, John Jameson was a Scot.
- Partly because of the price of the drinks, food in Dublin seems (and sometimes is) very cheap. A full Irish breakfast can be had for €5, even in a high-end café. Oysters are €10 per dozen. However, while Richard Corrigan’s restaurant at Bentley’s Townhouse does a three-course Sunday lunch for €25, the price is the only selling point. I have rarely eaten worse in restaurant of such supposed quality: they served mango sorbet in the same bowl as walnut ice-cream, made an onion soup that tasted like melted garlic butter and even managed to find a way of taking the flavour out of roast beef.
- There is a fascinating exhibit of peat-bog preserved ancient human bodies in the National Museum, but it’s certainly not for the squeamish, and it could put you off biltong for life.
While I lack the experience to pronounce on this, I’m not sure cities are what the Irish are best at.
Ross • 20th May 2010 • Learning, Thinking • capitalism, economics, libertarianism, liberty, philosophy
From Marginal Revolution I learn of the Unincorporated Man, a sci-fi book in which people are born with rights to only 75% of their incomes. The rest is shared between their parents and Government. Further ‘shares’ can be sold to pay for things such as degree courses, or, well, anything I guess. The Government’s 5% share in you at birth represents the only form of ‘taxation’ under this model.
I think this libertarian model is neat, and it makes the share of your income that Governments presume to ’own’ a lot more transparent. Ditto your duty to your parents. However, it does creates an incentive to dupe your investors. For example you could sell stock in yourself to fund a college degree and an MBA, then develop a drinking problem and use the dip in share-price to buy-back your stock. Perhaps the Incorporated Man would need to be audited by doctors?
Apparently, this firm is already pioneering this idea, in Latin America.
Ross • 4th May 2010 • Thinking • canada, olympics, ski, ski cross, skiing, snow, snowboarding, whistler, winter olympics, winter sports
Admittedly, this is a late comment, but I whole-heartedly agree with this sentiment on the Winter Olympics:
Ed Lee said that he was “loath to admit it, as a snowboarder”, but that ski cross, which was new for Vancouver, “eclipsed most of the snowboarding events”. No it didn’t. It eclipsed all the snowboarding events, and all the other events, too, up to and including the arrival of Captain Kirk through a hole in the floor.
Indeed, the big, take-away message from Vancouver was this: ski cross rocks. It makes snowboarding — including snowboard cross, on which it is modelled — look like an old fart’s game. Humps! Turns! Mid-air collisions! Tangling ski poles! These were the weeks in which poor, downtrodden, virtually obsolete skiing finally hit back against the snowboarding scene-stealers and said: “Shove this in your half-pipe and smoke it, you baggy-trousered upstarts.”
From The Times.
Ross • 6th Apr 2010 • Thinking • america, economics, freedom, globalisation, markets, political economy
Just as European nation-states free ride on the American defense shield, allowing them to invest less in military defense than they otherwise would, so too can European individuals free ride on the entrepreneurship that emerges from the American model.
A good point, from Ben Casnocha. As I see it, this is not an argument for America or the American model per se, but rather about having at least one place where free enterprise and free markets reign.
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’.
