The wannabe economist in me has been following the BitCoin phenomenon with great interest during the last few months. The algorithmic side of bitcoin is fascinating, but a few things bugged me about the system. One of them was that the maximum number of bitcoins that can ever exist is limited to 21 million. Most […]
June 2, 2011 | Economics | 1 comment
It’s been a year long break from blogging and getting back to writing and getting a so many new visitors this soon is cool. [Thanks HN!] This blog runs on the smallest available Linode 512 instance for $20/month. It runs several sites including family blogs and hobby sites. I run nginx on the front end […]
May 28, 2011 | Economics, Innovation, lighttpd, Nginx, Startups | No comments
The last two scifi novels I’ve read coincidentally both had a machine that can upload several years of education to your brain in a matter of hours. I was ruminating on what the effect would be on education if we invented the instant-edu machine today. Imagine you could instant-edu the Harvard Business School syllabus in a few […]
May 25, 2011 | Economics | No comments
Economists love the concept of opportunity cost because it gives you a the real long-term value of an investment or purchase in relative terms – which is really the only way to calculate value. On Wednesday the DOW hit 10,000 again. The US financial press did their part to ring the bell while the banking […]
There’s a spectacular interview on ft.com today with my favorite FT journalist John Authers with Bruce Greenwald who teaches Ben Graham’s value investing course at Columbia. Bruce talks about behavioural finance and the irrationality of investors, the often ignored mathematical realities of the market, the brutality and danger of short selling (all short sales are […]
In 2002 Warren Buffet sent this stark warning to his investors: “In our view […] derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.” Bill Gross was rumbling about the looming crisis in November last year. Marc Andreessen predicted the “oncoming nuclear winter” on April 18th in Ning’s […]
A great article on wired about the free web economy. Interesting quote: “Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.”
March 14, 2008 | Economics | No comments