Welcome

I'll be sharing my research interests.  Please comment!

Inspired by http://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2020/01/12/why-research-blog/

I'll also be posting old essays from the early 2000s.

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Short cash Half-Life and Shortsighted Social Planning

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Here's some research on inflation rates throughout history, for consideration in what kind of economic conditions help societies engage in long-term projects, which I assume are some of the fruits of social health.  I'm interested if the basic relationship shows up historically, and also in estimating what actual inflation rates tend to work well. In summary, I find while a society may grow with cash half-lives from 30yr down to a couple years, that lower rates are destructive: half-lives shorter than a year or two coincide with historical examples of market collapse in the short term, or social collapse if carried on.  In contrast, a cash half-life significantly greater than 30-40 years coincides with important periods of flourishing. I find it more intuitive to work in terms of cash half-life than inflation rate.  To convert from a 2% rate, or InflationRate=0.02 (which the US Fed targets but never delivers) to a half-life, means to find how long it takes 2% inflation to erode
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Atomic Weapons are Insane

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This Is Bad. (First published at freality.org, Dec 01, 2003 ) The first nuclear explosion was done by the U.S. Government at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. That explosion had the explosive force of detonating 19,000 tons of TNT, also notated as 19 kilotons or 19KT. At that time, the lead scientists of the project weren't sure what the effect of the explosion would be, and there was a serious concern that it would lead to a chain reaction in the atmosphere and possibly burn off the entire atmosphere of our Earth. Thankfully, that was not the case. However, the beginning of the so-called "nuclear age" was no cause for celebration. On seeing the explosion, John Oppenheimer, the chief scientist, quoted the following passage from the religious text, the  Bhagavad Gita : "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." The U.S. Government decided to use this new technology on large Japanese cities during WWII, by detonating 15KT and 22KT devices over Hiroshima and Nagas
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