Curt Doolittle

Source: Facebook

  • PRIVATELY RUN CITIES IN HONDURAS The Hoppeian government made real?

    http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_HONDURAS_PRIVATE_CITIES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-09-05-22-36-19THREE PRIVATELY RUN CITIES IN HONDURAS

    The Hoppeian government made real?

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-06 12:50:00 UTC

  • HAD A WHOLE GLASS OF WINE! No serious allergic reaction. Just a twinge. No hango

    HAD A WHOLE GLASS OF WINE!

    No serious allergic reaction. Just a twinge.

    No hangover effect.

    Slept like a baby, after being awake for 41 hours.

    Looks like gall bladder was the culprit.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-06 12:35:00 UTC

  • People need institutions both formal and informal to help them cooperate despite

    People need institutions both formal and informal to help them cooperate despite their different feelings and objectives. instead we try to argue with one another in order to make each other agree independently of those institutions. As if any of us actually listens to or comprehends the other.

    Our institutions were designed to establish priorities among males who had extremely similar interests.

    But today we have clearly divergent interests. If only because of gender and family structure preferences. And our differences are magnified by the technology that has made us prosperous, the addition of feminine majority, and group diversity.

    If you diversify a population without altering its informal and formal institutions to allow for more complex cooperation – not upon ends but upon means – you will have institutional failure. The purpose of government is to help us cooperate despite our differences. The idea that we seek some form of truth in government is both an artifact of our prior homogeneity, the absurd bias of our democratic religion, and our belief in controlled choice rather than experimental cooperation.

    The market instead allows us to collaborate on means even though we might pursue different ends. Government as it is currently structured by contrast requires that we have similar ends or the fantasy that we can persuade one another to possess similar ends.

    When in fact it is both impossible for us to know what those similar ends should be, and given our various conflicting strategies about life in general, it is impossible for us to come to consensus on those ends. Or even understand all but a few of them.

    We are prisoners of a set of institutions that have failed us and that cannot help us cooperate in our current state.

    In most civilizations people abandon attempts at improving the government. That is the course we are on.

    Having our civic culture handed to administrative government accelerated that decline as well as our divergence. Cowering in our little spatial boxes we rail at one another about how to think and feel rather than architect institutions that would help us to cooperate on means even if we desire a multitude of ends. And that multitude of experimentation would lead to discovery of solutions none of us is wise enough to conceive on our own.

    Our vanity and hubris brought us here. Why is it that we think the next vanity of our intentions will be an exception to the rule?

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 23:06:00 UTC

  • So that’s who Yogini is! Hi Sophie. 🙂 -Curt

    So that’s who Yogini is! Hi Sophie. 🙂

    -Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 05:51:00 UTC

  • CODE A THON 🙂 Almost finished navigation, roles, permissions and security. Need

    CODE A THON 🙂

    Almost finished navigation, roles, permissions and security. Needs another hour or two. That’s almost 21 hours but I think I need to sleep soon.

    When I used to ski, I’d leave the hill the first time I fell down. It meant that I was tired. Coding is the same. When you start injecting bugs into your code it’s time to sleep. Writing is different. You just keep at it.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 05:47:00 UTC

  • SMELLING the more that my sense of smell returns the more horrified I am at just

    SMELLING

    the more that my sense of smell returns the more horrified I am at just how much of the world simply smells bad.

    I hope I adjust. I can only guess how awful it must be for pregnant women whose senses are exaggerated.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 04:21:00 UTC

  • 18 HOURS LATER: STILL WRITING CODE AT MIDNIGHT On a leather couch, by a fireplac

    18 HOURS LATER: STILL WRITING CODE AT MIDNIGHT

    On a leather couch, by a fireplace, outside a restaurant and bar.

    Ears full of Staind, Breaking Benjamin, Tool, A Perfect Circle, Evanessence, Katatonia, 12 Stones. The occasional Alice in Chains, Nirvana and Nickelback.

    Heaven for a nerd: a tricky business problem, a laptop, good music, the white noise of happy chatter, and access to food. Absolutely priceless.

    Offices are a curse. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 03:10:00 UTC

  • MEN AND WOMEN HAVE DIFFERENT REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES AND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY SOLV

    MEN AND WOMEN HAVE DIFFERENT REPRODUCTIVE STRATEGIES AND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY SOLVED THAT CONFLICT UNDER AGRARIANISM

    But we are seeing, especially in the lower classes, the degeneration of the nuclear family. As a consequence we are seeing polarity in the democratic political systems. Systems that were designed for nuclear families under the property rights system of agrarian production.

    There would never have been a progressive president without the female vote. All we are seeing in politics is the conflicting moral codes which are distributed disproportionately between the genders expressed as divisiveness. While we thing of this as a way of life, or a vision of the future, and to some degree it is, what the statistics show is that it’s little more than who is married or unmarried to whom at what age.

    The other thing it shows is that males are checking out of society as fast as single mothers are becoming politically active. Males will be the minority voters for the foreseeable future.

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 01:29:00 UTC

  • CLANS AND WESTERN UNIVERSALISM HBD_Chick finds yet another exceptional paper on

    http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2012/08/31/the-return-of-the-return-of-chinese-clans/CHINESE CLANS AND WESTERN UNIVERSALISM

    HBD_Chick finds yet another exceptional paper on the impact of different cultural institutions:

    “The Return Of The Return of Chinese Clans”

    “In a clan, moral obligations are stronger but are limited in scope, as they apply only toward kin. In a city, moral obligations are generalized towards all citizens irrespective of lineage, but they are weaker, as identication is more difficult in a larger and more heterogeneous group. We refer to this distinction as limited vs generalized morality.“

    “Institutional mechanisms also differ between the clan and the city: clan enforcement mainly relies on informal institutions, whereas the city relies more on formal enforcement procedures. In terms of economic effciency, these two arrangements have clear trade-offs. The clan economizes on enforcement costs, whereas the city exploits economies of scale because it sustains cooperation in a larger and more heterogeneous community.”

    Source date (UTC): 2012-09-01 01:24:00 UTC

  • PAPER ON HOUSING’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE ECONOMY “What made housing vulnerable to

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139670&http%3A%2F%2Fpapers.ssrn.com%2Fsol3%2Fpapers.cfm%3Fabstract_id=2114620EXCEPTIONAL PAPER ON HOUSING’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE ECONOMY

    “What made housing vulnerable to a bubble? And why has the housing market been so impervious to attempts at resuscitation?

    This Article critically reviews the theories of the housing bubble. It argues that housing is unusually susceptible to booms and busts because credit conditions affect demand and because the market is incomplete and difficult to short. Housing market distress transmits to the macroeconomy through a balance sheet channel, a construction channel, and a collateral channel.

    Housing is unique as an asset class in that it is both a consumption and investment good. It is also the largest single consumer asset and debt class. Because housing is credit-backed and such a large asset class, failure will impact the financial system itself and pull down the economy as a whole. The dual-use of housing, its ubiquity on consumer balance sheets, its highly correlated pricing, and its linkage to the macroeconomy make it a particularly painful type of asset bubble to deflate.

    The credit-backed nature of housing is also the key to understanding why there was a bubble. We argue that the bubble must be understood as stemming from the change in the mortgage financing channel from Agency securitization to private-label securitization (PLS). This shift enabled financial intermediaries — economic, but not legal agents of borrowers and investors — to exploit the information problems inherent in PLS for their own short-term gain. In other words, a set of agency problems in financial intermediation was the critical factor in fomenting the housing bubble.”

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139670&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2139670&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2114620

    Thanks to Adam Levitin at http://www.creditslips.org/

    Source date (UTC): 2012-08-31 21:32:00 UTC