I am just a regular

I'm not sure what exactly I'm doing with these other than passing along the works of people who appear quite a bit wiser than I. Not that there's anything new there.

complex factors of learning racism

This one is really complicated. I see it expressed all the time that "racism is learned". But really that only applies to what we know as overt bigotry or hatred. The sort of subtle group favoritism, something that also applies to issues like nationalism or sports rivalries, is also learned, but it's mostly learned out of something "normal", group behavior or identity. And tolerance or acceptance, something necessary to overcome both types is also learned.

cold, rational markets

Obviously temperament seems to play into the nature of ideology. But this does raise the question: who is right? Because it seems appropriate to consider that we need both the cold rational types AND the people who give a damn to be right at certain times, particularly when formulating public policies. So the trick is more when to tell the difference. As a practical example, the cold rational type tells you when you can't afford a house or a car or some other expensive purchase, or how to structure the expense in such a way that it will. The emotional concern tells us what to do with it once we own it or impulses us to act and buy something we really wanted, and all we're really doing by acting rationally is tracking it in such a way as to make it as beneficial to ourselves in the financial way (by waiting for a sale or a deal). So where does that apply to public policies, things like minimum wages which seems to be structured out of a "feeling" preference rather than an examination of its efficacy as a policy itself (something which is rather uglier than our feelings of providing a few extra dollars to a few poor folk at little overall cost or risk to ourselves).

Report card on reform
market based reform instead
I did question some of this myself. But my focus was more on the consumer end. And looked at abstractly, many of these reforms generate substantial costs for consumers and businesses without really benefiting anyone, such as by fixing interest rates or setting up monitoring of CEO payment and bonuses. Maybe this just goes back to the super-rational tendencies to not be concerned with "feeling" better about things, like say "sticking it to the man" by fixing an upper limit on compensation packages. Something that economists and generally intelligent people didn't associate directly with general economic problems. Though income disparity in general was naturally a problem to be attacked, there were more constructive ways than this (education, control of health care costs, general tax reforms, etc).

And really it seems more natural to offer an escape clause than to tell the banks how to run their business.

poker and zugzwang

If nobody has picked up on it, if someone on the Internet talks about something relating to game theory, it tends to end up here. Even Dark Knight's Joker routine was basically a rehash of the Prisoner's Dilemma over and over. Poker is one of the more basic applications of game theory (why I ended up using it to explain my moral theory).

Catcher in the Rye 2

Or not. I thought this was interesting for the same reason anyone else would. What exactly is the law on referencing a famous character or literary plot in a new work of fiction written by a different author? Well it looks like it's whatever the judge looking at the case thinks it should be. When a work is old enough, and well-read enough by the public, then they sort of just permit it.

libertarians are the civil rights movement It's easy to confuse the age old value of liberalism, fostering individual merit and potential, with the "libertarianism" of state's rights advocates like say, Gov Wallace. It's a problem that persists to this day wherein state's rights-ers can claim that it should be up to states and local governments to either ban or accept the rights of homosexuals to marry with the implicit knowledge that they will move to ban such things anyway while giving the appearance of being fair-minded. And yet actual libertarians look at the problem and say "it shouldn't be up to any government at any level to restrict the rights of any individual on the sole basis of their sexuality." I constantly find new battles to fight with people who claim to be libertarian for this reason. They're only "libertarian" until it is inconvenient to them or some moral principle: abortion, gays, racism, xenophobia, national security, whatever. It's really annoying that nobody seems to know what this is.

going out on a highbrow note

Yup. Use your pee to lure the dog back home. Sounds perfectly reasonable.



I'm not quite sure what this all is, but it does not occur to me that I'm coming up with or expressing anything. I appear to be merely collating data.