Category: Money

I’m sure that many other people have noticed that stores are offering a lot more items with a Halloween theme these days, and that there are already Christmas themed items available on shelves. The Christmas stuff in particular seems a bit nuts, since it started appearing more than two months before Christmas. However, I am…

The current news about bad management of credit risks by banks reminds me of one of my ongoing concerns about the modern financial markets. Modern finance is very large and very complex. Once upon a time financial markets were relatively straightforward: you bought stocks, bonds, future, options. These are not simple instruments, but it’s fairly…

One thing Hofstadter discusses is reasons to be irrational. I was recently thinking about this in the context of tax refunds. In the U.S., if you underpay your taxes during the year by less than $1000 or so, you can just pay the difference on April 15 and all is well. (The total amount you…

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, psychohistory is the scientific study of human behaviour. Psychohistorians are able to predict what large numbers of people will do. However, the theory only works when the people are unaware of the predictions. In the original Foundation trilogy, the goal of the psychohistorians (the Second Foundation) was to create a…

The web has always struggled with the issue of how authors (or, as they are now called, content creators) get paid. I’ve been working with free software since before the web existed, so this question of how to get paid is not a new issue for me, but here I want to focus on web…