Do you know how I feel?

I feel tired
I feel hungry
I feel stupid
But this coffee
will change all that.

-- Do You Know How I Feel?

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow breaks the Internet. Into time zones. Since people seem to prioritize who they chat with, he hypothecates people living according to preferred time zones where they can chat with their friends.

Of course, one of the really cool things about the 'net is that people can share ideas half-way around the globe (say from Singapore to the United States ;). So part of this is the lol-worthy idea "wouldn't it be funny if the Internet was self-invalidating". The bad thing is that does not make a self-validating book.

He propped several pillows up on his headboard and fired up his comm. Immediately, it began to buzz and hum andchatter and blink, throwing up alerts about urgent messages, pages and calls pending. The lightness he'd felt fled him, and he began the rotten business of triaging his in-box.

-- Chapter 16

Financial Crises : Lessons from the Past, Preparations for the Future

Largely concentrating on 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis, this series of essays pulls apart what happened, and possible lessons for the future.

Four Distinctive Features of the Resolution Phase (of Banks)
First, the distribution of loan losses and other sources of capital deficiency was not uniform from bank to bank...
Second, resolution efforts had to address both privately owned and state-owned banks....
Third, information about the extent and incidence of losses among banks often evolved slowly. Rarely do we observe a one-shot resolution and recapitalization. More often, there are several waves, each separated by several months...
Fourth, a sharp currency depreciation was often in the background, influencing the timing, nature, and scale of the recapitalization... Devaluation in these circumstances tended to improve the country's international economic competitiveness, speeding the recovery of output and employment.

-- Chapter 7, Starting Over Safely, Rebuilding Banking Systems

Bernard Baruch by James Grant

Baruch seems to have made his first money by negotiating ( or being given?) a percentage share in the profits of a brokerage (A A Housman) while working there during one of its lean years. Profits and losses from aggressive leveraging show up in his early years; it's not clear that he wasn't just lucky to have used leverage when he had little capital and then not (or little) when he did. This apparently allowed him to survive the 1929 Crash.

(Daniel) Jackling, who was born on a farm in Missouri and whose boyhoood dream was to own 108 acres free and clear, believed in one great idea. It was that a meager copper ore could be profitably mined if there were enough steam shovels to scrape it from the surface and enough mill capacity to refine it. The site he favored was a desolate canyon in Utah. "It's in Bingham," explained Colonel Enos Wall, Jackling's partner, "and it's a mile wide and as long as a railroad...." Jackling, a big, ruddy man, laid out his theory to Baruch in about 1903. Baruch was impressed by the idea, or the man, or both, and he bought "a good many shares" of Utah Copper Company. He was the exception.... Over the next decade, Utah would yield 617,785 tons of copper, pay $76 million in dividends, accumulate $48 million of working capital and establish itself as the greatest copper mine in the world.

-- Chapter 5, His Own Man

As for Baruch, when he was publicly charged (with insider trading based on his World War 1 Washington post on the Advisory Commission to the US Council for National Defense), he had resolved, first, to clear his name, and, second, to have nothing more to do with politics or politicians. So brilliantly did he succeed in the first resolution that he decided to ignore the second.

-- Chapter 8, Poison-Pen Letter

Having made a fortune in Wall Street under a system of low taxes and limited government, Baruch entered public life to help install a regime of relatively high taxes and intrusive government.

-- Chapter 9, Captain of Industry

Convertibility and Tradeability of the renminbi CNY look good strategically for the Communist Party. First by greed, then by fear.

How to redirect command output to an unnamed file descriptor in bash, so you can use the output easily for fd-only commands (e.g. diff two strings in bash).

pkgs_remote=$(ssh ${HOST_OLD} rpm -qa | grep -Ei '(httpd|php)' | sort)
pkgs_local=$(rpm -qa | grep -Ei '(httpd|php)' | sort)
diff <( echo ${pkgs_remote} ) <( echo ${pkgs_local} )

Barring industry/product demand transformations where demand dwarfs the existing labor supply, it seems that since the Industrial Revolution, we've seen increasing amounts of human capital required to get pretty much anywhere you want. Essentially, it seems like all the low-hanging fruit have been picked, and we need to gear up to reach the tasty heights.

I worry that many college graduates are unsettled nowadays because they did not really learn much.

-- Arnold Kling

I hate it when I have a complex bash script that I need to run and it has lots of steps in it, any one of which can fail. However, NOT re-running all the previously succeeded steps seems efficient. And in some circumstances, running any previous steps prove catastrophic.

I could just run the script and hope it works, and when it fails, fix the failing bits, while removing the already run code, but keeping the variable declarations.

Or I could source this bash script. ;)

#!/bin/bash
set -o functrace
set -o history
set +o noclobber
shopt -s extdebug
[[ ${BASH_VERSINFO[0]} -lt 4 ]] && { 
    echo "BASH Version 4 or higher required by idempotency.sh"
	exit 1
}

idem_debug() {
	[[ "${DEBUG}" != "" ]] && echo "$@"
}
idem_is_command() {
	local cmd="$( echo "$1" | awk '{print $2}' )"
	command -v "$cmd" >/dev/null 2>&1  && return 0
	[[ -z "$( which "$cmd" 2>/dev/null)" ]] && return 1
	return 0
}

idem_debug "idempotency using source file '${0}'"
idem_dir="${0%\/*}"
[[ "${idem_dir}" == "" ]] || [[ "${idem_dir}" == "$0" ]] && { 
	idem_dir="."
}
idem_debug "idempotency using source dir '${idem_dir}'"
idem_file="${idem_dir}/.${0/#*\/}.idempotent"
idem_debug "idempotency using history file '${idem_file}'"

idem_trap() {
	local cmd=$(history 1)
	idem_debug "idempotency checking command '${cmd}' subpart '${BASH_COMMAND}'"
	
	[[ "${idem_last}" == "${cmd}" ]] && { 
		idem_debug "idempotency not re-checking subshell/pipe breakdown for '${BASH_COMMAND}'"
		return 0 # return ok
	}

	! idem_is_command "${cmd}" && { 
		idem_debug "idempotency running non-command '${cmd}'"
		return 0
	}

	export idem_last="${cmd}"
	[[ -f "${idem_file}" ]] && grep -qF "${cmd}" ${idem_file} && {
		idem_debug "idempotency not running previously run command '${cmd}'"
		return 1 # don't run the command again
	}

	echo "${cmd}" >> ${idem_file}
	idem_debug "idempotency running command '${cmd}'"
	return 0
}

trap idem_trap DEBUG

It uses the preexec hack idea from glyph, and I need to write a bunch of tests for it.

I told him about how whole mornings disappeared that way. I pictured a guy looking for his keys so he could get his day started, but he searched by lifting up every item he owned to look under it. Not under the rug. Not under the fridge. Not under the laundry, or the paperclip on my desk. Not under the silverware tray in the top drawer on the left in the kitchen. Maybe I should check the rug again?

-- Frank Chimero

Morning rituals seem retardly important. Over the last week, I've taken to grabbing a Red Bull and walking to work early. When I was in Salzburg, it was matins at the Stiftskirche Nonntaler followed by Semmeln und Kaffee. Back in PA, it was a cold can of Mountain Dew.

Less charitably, I think to myself that it's not the ritual, stupid; it's the caffeine. ;)

The New Financial Order by Robert Shiller

Technocracy-Optimist Shiller describes several financial innovations he'd like to see deployed, and the relevant histories of the ideas. He sees only good in his ideas and does not try to weigh out the pros and cons. E.g. on the ability of governments to track citizens' cash flows.

The inability of citizens to evade and cheat offers opportunities for social planners. We will be able to achieve a more equitable income distribution because we will be observing it more accurately.

-- Chapter Five, New Information Technology

While governments continue to fund criminal enterprises with blanket prohibitions, it seems likely to me that there will be a continuing war of advances and countermeasures in laundering money.

Given this one-sidedness, his histories of financial innovation provide the best reading:

A breakthrough of worldwide significance occurred in the United States with an 1811 general act of incorporation in New York State. Not only did the act set the precedent of allowing any business that satisfied minimum requirements to incorporate, but it also initiated the radically new step of specifying that all investors in New York corporations have strictly limited liability. Before this act corporations were usually creatures of government, enjoying a government-sanctioned monopoly, and incorporation ws not available to business at large. Moreover, creditors of failing companies could in principle seize all the personal assets of each stockholder, even those holding few shares, until the debt was repaid.

-- Chapter 17, Major Financial Inventions

Knowing this makes the first chapters of PanicOnWallStreet more intelligible.