I made myself a rule for email a couple of weeks ago:
The inbox will be smaller each time I check my mail.
I eventually agreed that the rule doesn’t apply when I’m sending a new message out; this keeps my workflow productive and simple. I’m checking email less often and my inbox is now at 16 messages. Win.
I’m not at rock bottom, because a few of the messages are important but hard to move (things that will take concerted effort over time to finish), but I’ll get there eventually.
posted on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 at 11:58 | permanent link | view comments
On Tuesday when I started this little experiment, I had 359 messages in my inbox. This morning I have 45. I’m calling that a ‘win’.
I have, with one or two exceptions, made sure that each time I checked my mail that there was at least one fewer message in the inbox than before I checked it.
The messages left in my inbox are mostly reminders of important (but non-urgent) things I need to do. I’ll find another way to deal with those in the next few days.
I did make myself an exception that if I was sending a message, that I didn’t have to shrink the inbox. That helped me stay productive with my work.
Have I checked my email less? It could be that I’m just hyped up on the idea of a small inbox and eager to file away my messages. Here are the numbers:
- Tuesday: 21
- Wednesday: 13
- Thursday: 9
A little better… but that still looks like the pattern of an email-checking addict to me. Maybe once my inbox gets small enough (I’m shooting for zero… or smaller!) I can deal with the craving better.
posted on Fri, 09 Sep 2011 at 08:04 | permanent link | view comments
Email is a problem for me: I check it too often and do too little about it when I check it, making for an unwieldy inbox. I think I’ve come up with a simple rule (it’s been working for me so far) that will help me beat my inbox:
The inbox will be smaller each time I check my mail.
This rule has two desirable economic properties:
work will get done each time I check email (in the form of answering, filing away, or deleting messages), even if it’s only one email. Eventually this will force me to deal with messages that are over a year old.
I will check email less often, as there is now a price for doing so
I’ll let you know how it’s going next week.
posted on Tue, 06 Sep 2011 at 10:52 | permanent link | view comments
Letter to Senator Orrin Hatch on the Finance Reform Bill
Find your own senator here.
Mr. Hatch,
I am worried that Senator Dodd’s new finance bill (AYO10306.xml)[4] will harm small business investing by angel investors by requiring all investors to have a minimum amount of capital, requiring startups to undergo an SEC review, and subjecting angels to burdensome regulation.
I’m not an angel investor, but as a small business owner I’ve used them over the years to give necessary liquidity to my fledgling businesses. Small businesses represent a sizable piece of the US economy, as I’m sure you’re aware. Yes, many of them fail, but that risk is already borne by the investors who knew what they were getting into, and the economy at large is largely insulated from their failures.
Federal oversight will add no additional protection (unless the SEC has a magic crystal ball that will indicate whether a business will succeed or fail), and will hamper creative startups who had to really “shop” their idea until they found an investor who “got it” (e.g., Google, Microsoft, Apple all represent risky startups of this kind).
Please see:
and:
For the US economy to become strong again, we need the kind of innovation and jobs that come from small businesses. Please leave small business regulation alone—it’s worked remarkably well, even in these tough times.
I hope you’ll work with Senator Dodd in repairing this bill in these areas.
Scott Wiersdorf
posted on Thu, 13 May 2010 at 07:58 | permanent link | view comments
In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.”
But precisely what was useless and harmful turns out to be Krugman’s own espoused Keynsian beliefs. John Cochrane explains:
Most of all, Krugman likes fiscal stimulus. In this quest, he accuses us and the rest of the economics profession of “mistaking beauty for truth.” He’s not clear on what the “beauty” is that we all fell in love with, and why one should shun it, for good reason. The first siren of beauty is simple logical consistency. Paul’s Keynesian economics requires that people make logically inconsistent plans to consume more, invest more, and pay more taxes with the same income. The second siren is plausible assumptions about how people behave. Keynesian economics requires that the government is able to systematically fool people again and again. It presumes that people don’t think about the future in making decisions today. Logical consistency and plausible foundations are indeed “beautiful” but to me they are also basic preconditions for “truth.”
Cochrane’s short paper is a really beautiful response to Krugman and his archaic, causality-reversing Keynsian answers to everything.
Paul, there was a financial crisis, a classic near-run on banks. The centerpiece of our crash was not the relatively free stock or real estate markets, it was the highly regulated commercial banks.
Ouch.
posted on Tue, 06 Oct 2009 at 08:07 | permanent link | view comments
Too insulated from risk to fail
This article miffed me a bit:
In recent months such big banks as Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) have rolled out newfangled corporate credit lines tied to complicated and volatile derivatives. Others, including Wells Fargo (WFC) and Fifth Third (FITB), are offering payday-loan programs aimed at cash-strapped consumers. Still others are marketing new, potentially risky “structured notes” to small investors.
There’s no indication that the loans and instruments are doomed to fail. If the economy keeps moving toward recovery, as many measures suggest, then the new products might well work out for buyers and sellers alike.
But it’s another scenario that worries regulators, lawmakers, and consumer advocates: that banks once again are making dangerous loans to borrowers who can’t repay them and selling toxic investments to investors who don’t understand the risks—all of which could cause blowups in the banking sector and weigh on the economy.
I’m not so much concerned about the stupid products these banks are peddling. As the article states, these products may work out well in the end. What concerns me is that the article completely misses the obvious question that nobody seems to even ask anymore: is it the role of the US government (paid for by my taxes) to prop up bad businesses?
When giant corporations are backed by the good faith and credit of the United States Federal Treasury—no matter what—then these corporations have no incentive to curb risky behavior.
And today we have the same management teams that got us into this mess, still running strong. Goldman is doing better than ever, in fact.
We have a perfectly good way to deal with bad businesses in the US: let them fail. When an entity files for Chapter 11, the assests are sold off, often in pieces, to new management. This has worked for some extremely large businesses in the past, and perhaps if we could fix some of the mistakes we’ve made in the past and let financial institutions bear their own risks, they’d stop being stupid.
The financial industry borrowed their Dad’s Corvette, drove it off a cliff, then goes back home and asks for a new car. Dad gives them a new car with a “now don’t do that again!”
It’s not working for me.
posted on Thu, 06 Aug 2009 at 10:36 | permanent link | view comments
Remember a few weeks ago when I griped about global warming? What bothered me wasn’t that we have fringe groups, conspiracy theorists, and “deniers.” These folks will always be with us in everything (sometimes they’re even right).
What bothered me was that there seems to be a legitimate case against the predominant view and few scientists in the mainstream are addressing it directly and scientifically. Almost nobody from the scientific “consensus” community are taking these people on, rather they’re using name-calling and ostracism to maintain their position. It also bothers me that scientists feel they have to stoop to “consensus” and PR smear campaigns to make their point.
Consensus is fine—great—for some things, but not in science:
If the brightest minds on Wall Street got suckered by group-think into believing house prices would never fall, what other policies founded on consensus wisdom could be waiting to come unraveled? Global warming, you say? You mean it might be harder to model climate change 20 years ahead than house prices 5 years ahead? Surely not—how could so many climatologists be wrong?
What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.
(tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com)
I would argue that there are even more things than psychology that aren’t being talked about, including climate change, because of this fear of consensus. Politicians and business-types are the kinds of people who look for consensus of opinion—that’s because they don’t actually know or do anything. They mobilize opinion to get other people to actually think or do. But scientists are different—they’re doers. Science is for observing, gathering, analyzing and interpreting data with confidence intervals. Maybe come up with a theory. Scientific disagreements should be about the data and its interpretation, not posturing and raspberry-blowing.
Scientists are of course entitled to have opinions as much as the next op-ed writer, but a scientist is expected to have some rigor and discipline when engaging in and refuting arguments. More importantly, a scientist is expected to be a thinker capable of ignoring the ridicule of his or her peers to get to the truth of a matter.
An article in the New York Times recently wrote about how Groupthink might be the culprit of our financial crisis (read: “collapse”):
In his classic 1972 book, Groupthink, Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.
(I think Peter Schiff would agree.)
When scientists bond together and form a consensus, science itself is imperiled. Because scientists are human and care about what their peers think, they take a big risk of stifling creative, scientific thought. Science is, at its core, the opposite of what we achieve by consensus. Science needs naysayers and village idiots every bit as much as the respectable, well-groomed, mainstream thinkers.
Paul Graham wrote an essay called “What you can’t say” that puts it even better:
Of course, we’re not just looking for things we can’t say. We’re looking for things we can’t say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.
Another way of putting it is Bob Sutton’s “strong opinions, weakly held.” Whatever we call it, it’s something more scientists need to learn apparently. We’re not in high school anymore, and any scientist who puts popularity and peer acceptance ahead of their scientific rigor, even in their spare time, is doing more harm than good.
posted on Fri, 24 Jul 2009 at 16:59 | permanent link | view comments
From What went wrong with economics:
In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
Alright, maybe not all of economics is bunk, but I think a lot of macroeconomics was simply invented by economists to justify their own positions. Even economist John Kenneth Galbraith (lousy Keynesian) said:
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
Create an academic field around a small idea and pretty soon your experts in that field will be finding new ways to justify themselves. It’s true in every field. We do this in the name of science, of course, but the trouble is that there aren’t enough people in the world to say “Hey, your entire field of study is stupid and wrong. You’re making things worse.”
Well, I’m going to say it here: Macroeconomists, you’re making it worse. Stop pretending you have answers. You don’t. I don’t either, but I’m not pretending. Stop talking to policy-makers. Tell them that you don’t know and nobody else does either. Tell them that maybe we ought to consider getting out of debt as a country, to spend less than we make, as a lark, you know, to see what happens. Then please find another area of study.
posted on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 at 11:06 | permanent link | view comments
No Such Thing as Nuclear Waste
I’m a fan of nuclear power. I was delighted to come across this recent article in the Wall Street Journal.
So is this material “waste”? Absolutely not. Ninety-five percent of a spent fuel rod is plain old U-238, the nonfissionable variety that exists in granite tabletops, stone buildings and the coal burned in coal plants to generate electricity. Uranium-238 is 1% of the earth’s crust. It could be put right back in the ground where it came from.
Of the remaining 5% of a rod, one-fifth is fissionable U-235 — which can be recycled as fuel. Another one-fifth is plutonium, also recyclable as fuel. Much of the remaining three-fifths has important uses as medical and industrial isotopes. Forty percent of all medical diagnostic procedures in this country now involve some form of radioactive isotope, and nuclear medicine is a $4 billion business. Unfortunately, we must import all our tracer material from Canada, because all of our isotopes have been headed for Yucca Mountain.
What remains after all this material has been extracted from spent fuel rods are some isotopes for which no important uses have yet been found, but which can be stored for future retrieval. France, which completely reprocesses its recyclable material, stores all the unused remains — from 30 years of generating 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy — beneath the floor of a single room at La Hague.
“Nuclear waste” is only waste because it was designated so by Presidents Ford and Carter in the 70s.
posted on Wed, 17 Jun 2009 at 22:28 | permanent link | view comments
but does it work?
Any money I receive will be spent on new pens (Pilot G2, of course).
posted on Wed, 10 Jun 2009 at 22:20 | permanent link | view comments