Some things I have been thinking about...

I have tried to summarize here some topics that have interested me recently including:

How to think about constant growth, in particular about Inflation and compound interest
What does Financial Independence mean, how much money do you need and what needs to happen in order to achieve it? What section of society have achieved this?
What is Body Mass Index (BMI) and how do you calculate it? At what point can you consider yourself overweight? How many calories do you burn each day while doing nothing? Then how does exercise/diet matter?
Once you are tired worrying about BMI, then you can think about something tasty to eat !
Perhaps when you have had enough to eat and drink, you can pass the time with some cultural distraction, be that listening, reading or watching something.

More recent blog notes can be read below while a list of all my blog notes can be read here

2018:
- June

0 Post(s) for December 2024

Memories from Childhood

~~META: date created = 2016-12-03 ~~

Interesting article from the Atlantic - Traces of time lost¹⁾ about formation of memories in childhood and how memory and what type of memory affects us through our lives.

Pictures from our walk today in the fields close to our house today, which our two younger companions will presumably not remember - at least not like this. But then again, neither will I without the benefit of the picture…

~~DISCUSSION~~

2018/06/11 04:06

Led Astray by the Media

Although I thought I always viewed media reporting sceptically, I have to admit that my world view recently does not seem to match what is actually happening and I wonder if I have been swayed by the media I consume. Examples where I was significantly surprised by recent happenings include the Brexit and Trump votes. I am also surprised that my expectation about what would happen if both of these events came to pass, as they have done, was also not correct. For example, electing a guy who espouses such rhetoric & potentially destabilizing ideologies like Trump, should have I thought led to instability, market uncertainty and drops in business confidence and equity prices. This expectation was apparently wrong as markets have rallied to all new highs after his election. Reality does not match up with my world picture. I am not sure why, but at least that much appears to be true.

Why is this the case and why I am not seeing it? Is it that the news and media that I am reading is so slanted and divorced from reality that I am even unaware of what is driving the real world anymore? Articles are still being written complaining about the electoral college/popular vote or of Russian hackers affecting election results. This seem to me to confirm that the media I am reading is drifting away from a neutral reporting of what is happening in the world and providing a super strong editorial bias for what they wish to be happening. Amazingly, I find myself agreeing with Trump camp statements saying that if the election went the other way, then complaints about Russians hacking emails and the rules of the electoral system would be considered fringe, crackpot conspiracy theories. If I flip it around - this is indeed how such articles appear. Why not accept your side lost and think about why? What message is coming from the electorate.

What explanation is there for markets responding so positively to Trump's election? What am I currently blind to?

~~DISCUSSION~~

View Source: – http://www.fashionusaonline.ru/

2018/06/11 04:06

How I now do my reading - Instapaper & Kindle

~~META: date created = 2016-11-21 ~~

21 Nov 2016 - dob

I have started using Instapaper to gather long form articles I want to read and having them sent automatically on a weekly basis to my Kindle. My impulse is to get away from the 140 Character Twitter snippets of mostly ill thought out garbage and instead focus on long form articles that are properly structured and thought through. There is surely enough noise in the world already without adding more through twitter & other social media feeds. Reading this stuff feels like channel surfing on TV - where in the end your time is gone, you have not gained anything and you have not even particularly enjoyed it. If I am to put in the effort and time to read something, then I would hope that the writer has something interesting to say and has taken the time to write it properly.

I have found a way that I can quickly and easily access the text that I highlight while reading online at this link. The notes & highlighted text are uploaded using the kindle Whispersync function as far as I understand, so you need to have this option clicked in the kindle settings for this to work.

Taken together this allows me build up to a nice collection of articles that caught my interest over time as well as the key points in each article that grabbed my attention.

~~DISCUSSION~~

2018/06/11 04:06

Author Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis (Liar's Poker, Big Short, Moneyball, Blindside, Flash Boys…) has written a new book called "The Undoing Project" about the two psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Economics nobel prize winner Kahneman's “Thinking Fast and Slow” has been a long time on my reading list but I have yet to get to around to it.

Lewis is very good at writing entertaining books and giving insight into areas that do not usually provide the best material for an easy read (Financial system, sport statistics,…). Some of the books are true classics (Liars Poker, Big Short) while other come across a bit rushed and more like an extended magazine article (e.g. Flash Boys) but are still enjoyable. I am a fan, enjoy his writing and therefore somewhat biased though. I am curious to see how this foray into the world of behavioral economics takes him.

Here is an interview of Lewis discussing some of his earlier work at the Haas Business School in Berkeley to get a taste for the type of stuff he writes about:

~~DISCUSSION~~

2018/06/11 04:06

Achill

Stunning views on road to Keem Bay on Achill_Island, Co. Mayo.

…and now on to find something to interest myself in 2017. I plan to look closer into what is going on around me locally in 2017. Perhaps there are some new and interesting events and people to be discovered.