April 2, 2009
I've talked about graphing before and I don't have a lot of time to explain, but I thought I'd answer a friend's question of what my current project looks like. It looks like a upward sloping green blob with an exponentially decreasing slope.
Mar 18, 2009
I thought I should write this down although I'm not entirely sure that it's a good idea.
There's a certain combination of situations that a person reacts to in a very strange way. I watched 12 Monkeys last night at the long recommendation of my friend Discord. The guy at Scarecrow at the register said that he really liked the movie. After watching the movie my friend Discord calls me up and tells me he's done with his finals and that we should hang out next week. Today I took a catnap after dinner with my friendly neighbor cat. When I woke up I was feeling very healthy like having drunken coffee. I drank tea today. I walked to Scarecrow and saw my friend Rocky and asked how he was. I got two videos because it was 2 for 1 night (Wednesday). One was Welcome to the NHK 4 (which I have been watching since Sunday). The other was Linda Linda Linda. The guy at Scarecrow (different from the first) said that he really liked the movie.
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Mar 16, 2009
Normally I don't like posting funny pictures of cats, but I thought this one has a good enough reason. In case you aren't watching in horror already, you may find the clip offensive.
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Feb 21, 2009
I feel positively ill and I think I should share what made me think that perhaps the stimulus is over our heads. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. It's a number that is so large that most people can only think of it as a part of the GDP or the cost of a modern war. George W. Bush spent over a trillion dollars during his term on wars that should not have been fought in the first place. So why should we really worry about a trillion dollars spent right here in USA on stuff we should be concerned about: jobs and infrastructure improvement? A trillion dollars is more than we bargained for when we looked at the economy. When we saw banks failing and the auto industry in turmoil, the IT industry downsizing like crazy, and mortgages going belly up, we saw numbers in the hundreds of billions being tossed around. Each time it was a blow to our confidence because we saw how incredibly badly the math was being done. People have described the failure of the economy much better than I possibly could, but the obvious explanation is that we have lost jobs, lost wealth, devalued everything, and put everyone on the brink of collapse. If we had a number of how bad our economy is right now, it'd be huge but I don't have the exact numbers for it.
So the stimulus is the answer that congress and the president that we elected chose. That number we know quite well. Along with interest, the stimulus will cost $1 trillion dollars. How much is that? Well, let's try to calculate it in terms of things we do know about: wage and salary. If the stimulus was going directly to minimum wage jobs at $8 per hour (more or less depending on the state), it would generate 60 million jobs for a year. Since the US population is 300 million, that means it would employ 20% of the US population. But that includes children, people who weren't employed before the economic 'collapse'. The number of employed people in the US in 2007 was 153 million. That means that the stimulus would employ 40% of the working population. The unemployment rate is only 7.6 percent, so let's calculate how many years it will alleviate unemployment entirely: 40% / 7.6% = 5.2 years. In the president's address he said the stimulus would employ 3 million Americans, so let's take a look at what percent of unemployment he's talking about alleviating: 3/153 = 2%. So unemployment will go down to 5.6%, which is slightly more than it was last January. Not bad really. But that means that the stimulus is not going towards hiring people, it's going towards funding infrastructure (roads, levies, schools, police, fire, and alternative energy loans). Who profits from buying material and loans to alternative energy companies? I don't think I do. Do you?
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