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Showing posts from February, 2020

The Flipped Economy, Pt 1.

A few days ago, on the phone with a friend, I found a sentence coming out of my mouth that I wasn't sure I agreed with.  I don't remember the exact words I used; it was something like "The chief shortage in today's economy is access to enterprise buyers," but here's what I meant: We have enough stuff.  We have stuff coming out of our ears!  But this cheers no one; what we are actually concerned about is cash flows . A basic economics class talks about capital investment in this way:  a company, to become more efficient, invests in equipment, or factories, or technology, and thus creates more goods, or the same goods at a cheaper price, etc.  This is what "economic progress" supposedly looks like. Except..."stuff" isn't what people actually buy.  Most people's expenses go into rent, food, education, and health care.  To be sure, "stuff" is an input to the prices of those things, but...is it?  Really?  The real expen

Playing Around With J

I pasted the following into a group chat with some friends.    "J is pretty great" |syntax error |       "J is pretty great"    "I don't know how to do strings in it" |open quote |   "I don't know how to do strings in it" |         ^    "It has normal infix notation"         "It has normal infix notation"   |syntax error |       "It has normal infix notation"      5 + 3 8    NB.  Adorably, you start comments with "NB."    NB. J is an offshoot of APL.    NB. APL has a fun history.    NB. Ken Iverson was a math prof @ Harvard, and he got sick of math notation    NB. (Just my kind of guy)    NB. So he made up his own, and brought in a bunch of his own symbols    NB. It was just that---notation, had nothing to do with computers---    NB. until he went to go work for IBM.    NB. They wanted him to name his new programming language, but Iverson, who    NB. just wanted to change t