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St. Patrick’s Day
Growing up outside of Boston, St. Patrick’s Day was a significant holiday. We even got it off school–though to avoid church and state conflicts it was known as Evacuation Day, supposedly in honor of the date that the British troops were forced out of Boston in 1776. I was quite surprised to discover that this…
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Social Entrepreneurs
A friend of mine who has been working for many years in an area that is now known as social entrepreneurship commented that there is no good economic model for it (he thinks of things like this because he went to business school). This led me to think about economic models for charitable giving. Economists…
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Compiler Warnings
There is an ongoing issue within gcc as to where warnings should be issued. The question is whether warnings should be issued only by the frontend, or whether it is also OK for the optimizers to issue them. The advantage of issuing warnings in the frontend are that warnings are independent of optimization level. Also,…
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Standard Living
According to the U.S. census, median household income in the U.S. has not changed much since 1998. The economy does continue to expand. What is happening is that the richer households are absorbing all the gains, leading to increased inequality. I’ve commented before on whether or not this matters. I’ve now seen a couple of…
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Societal Maximization
What should a society seek to provide for its members? The most basic goals have to be the survival of members of the society and inducting new members into the society. Any society which can not achieve these goals will fail. (The most obvious way to induct new members is to have children, but there…