I majored in government in college, then got my PhD in economics. These subjects fascinate me because government and the economy shape our lives so profoundly. Government and the economy are intertwined. A capitalist economy without government regulation will lead to exploitative monopolies, extreme inequality, labor abuses, unsafe food & medicine, child poverty, a permanent underclass, privatized (or lousy/non-existent) roads/telecoms/police/schools/jails, no help for the homeless, mentally ill, destitute elders, etc., and air/water pollution, environmental degradation, global warming, and many other harmful “externalities” (privatized benefits and socialized harms)....

October 1, 2023 update: PCWorld ran a long article praising KeePassXC: “KeePassXC: The friendlier free offline password manager” My neighborhood held a fun block party last night. While chatting, a neighbor said something like, “God forbid someone gets ahold of my password because I use the same password on every website.” I immediately thought: This is a disaster waiting to happen; I must tell him about KeePassXC; and, There must be MILLIONS of people just like my neighbor who find it too hard to remember or record hundreds of passwords, so they just reuse the same password everywhere (or use a pattern that slightly tweaks their password across websites)....

September 4th note: I began this essay June 30th to rage against our radically right-wing Supreme Court’s absurd and offensive ruling that the US Constitution permits discrimination against LGBTQ people. I didn’t publish till September because their ruling is but a symptom of right-wing hatred and intolerance, which have profoundly dangerous consequences. Legalizing and normalizing hatred and intolerance leads to violence, and America proves week in and week out that hate-fueled violence plus easy access to semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 is deadly....

[Jerry Seinfeld told me] the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day....

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal. …The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn… A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.” – T.S. Eliot, 1920 Most ideas you’ve ever thought, someone else thought them before you. And – as I learned to my dismay as a graduate student searching for prior literature on countless exciting “new” theories I thought up – most of the best ideas you’ll ever have, someone will have already beaten you to them....

(2023-09-02 update: I want to recommend three great books I’ve read since posting this: Humanocracy: Creating Organizations As Amazing As the People Inside Them by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value by Melissa Perri, and Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman) (2023-06-13 update: I loved this talk by “Joy, Inc.” author Rich Sheridan. His brief discussion of estimates, deadlines, and commitments brilliantly captures the essence of why fear-driven tech workplaces are so unpleasant and underproductive....

Motorola funded a study which involved rewriting a telecommunication system used by the emergency services from C++ to Erlang, focusing on productivity gains. Depending on how you calculated, the code reduction in the Erlang system achieved a result of 4-20 times less code. The 20 times reduction assumed the OTP libraries to be part of the Erlang standard libraries, which they are. As C++ did not have a generic OTP, the original project had to implement a good part of it....

For many years, Optimum.com has held a monopoly over high-speed Internet service in my area, so we’ve been stuck with them. As a monopoly, Optimum has gotten away with providing horrible customer service and jacking up prices to ridiculous levels. Customers had no alternatives, so Optimum got away with it. Luckily, there’s FINALLY – in 2023 – competition in our area! So, a few weeks back, my wife called Optimum to complain about our absurd bill… way more than double what the new competitor in our area, Frontier....

Congress has recently considered banning unruly passengers from flying on commercial planes. American Airlines flight attendant Pedro Enriquez laments that this remains just an idea: “It is disappointing to me that a passenger who was arrested for physically assaulting and spitting in a flight attendant’s face can continue to fly on commercial airplanes here in the United States”. Last week, my family took a vacation during our kids’ spring break. My wife, daughter, and I were blessed with wonderful weather while visiting Lake Ontario, the Erie Canal, and two of the Finger Lakes while our son – serving as principal trombone of the All-Eastern Orchestra – was rehearsing for his concert....

(Source: Robert Reich, The Biggest Economic Lies We’re Told) There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. – Warren Buffett (Source: Jon Schwarz, The Murder of the U.S. Middle Class Began 40 Years Ago This Week, The Intercept) A major reason Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency in 2016 was his skill at tapping into the very real and legitimate frustration and anger many Americans feel toward the rich and powerful, who seem to have hogged all the economic gains of the past fifty years for themselves....