Category: personal AnGoL

An argument is frequently put forth that the government made a huge profit on the bailouts. This is an impossible stance to counter. It’s like trying to quantify how plaid something is. Sure, in an environment in which the chief bailout recipients were allowed virtually limitless access to free capital; affirmatively non-prosecuted for severe regulatory violations (like rigging electricity prices or laundering money for drug cartels); repeatedly saved from crippling litigation by sweetheart settlements; an

Source: Matt Taibbi on the 10-Year Anniversary of the Crash – Rolling Stone

…He spoke with Knowable Magazine…. “One of the experiments we did compared the ability of individual ants or colonies to distinguish light levels. We found that when light differences are tiny, the colonies make better decisions than individual ants do. It’s a nice example of the wisdom of crowds—groups can improve their acuity or precision by combining the efforts of many relatively noisy, imprecise individuals. But where there’s a big difference in brightness, the individuals working on their own actually get the question right more often than the colony does. That surprised us, because we were expecting the wisdom of crowds to work across the board.Our best guess is that there is a downside to the way these colonies integrate information. One animal finds a dark nest, and she’ll recruit a nestmate with a probability that depends on how dark the nest is. Another ant will find a competing nest that’s maybe a little bit brighter, so she’ll recruit a nestmate to that with a probability that’s a little bit lower, because the nest is not quite as good. The ant who’s been recruited then decides herself whether she’ll stick with that nest and start recruiting still others to it. That allows the colony to detect a small difference in light level and move to the darker and better nest. But sometimes, just by chance, one ant makes a mistake and recruits others to a nest that’s not very good. If the ants she recruits also make a mistake and get too excited about this not-very-good nest, then pretty soon you can have an amplification of the error—the madness of crowds. That doesn’t happen often, but it’s a danger that’s always present. For an individual ant, that can’t happen, because she has to do everything on her own. If it’s obvious which nest is brighter, then an individual ant can solve it on her own with a high probability of being right. And since she doesn’t have this danger of falling into a positive feedback cascade, then maybe she can do better in those cases than a colony can…

Source: Grasping Reality with at Least Three Hands

Japan’s GDP growth lags most other developed economies, and will likely continue to do so as the population slowly declines. But what matters for human welfare is GDP per capita, and on this front, the country excels.

Source: Japan’s Successful Economic Model by Adair Turner – Project Syndicate

Daily Cadence of OPS Meetings
09.20 PS
09.40 HCP
10.00 Cosaint
10.20 MW
10.40 BFS
11.20 DTC
Agenda:
Status of activities/goals last Friday
Activities/goals today
Activities/goals tomorrow

If you want to say something don’t.
Stop
Think
Determine
When
How
What

Is Java in Jeopardy? Is Java in jeopardy? Check out this post to learn more about recent changes in the Java release cycles and one developer’s thoughts on the future of this language.

Source: Is Java in Jeopardy? – DZone Java

BY MARIUS ROBLES7 MINUTE READ It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants.
 We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea. Was this what we had in mind when we started seeking transparency, traceability, and sustainability of our food

Source: What the future of food will look like in 2038.

1. Becoming overwhelmed with possibilities First, you have to make big decisions about what you want most, Dalio writes. That means focusing on some priorities while letting go of others. “While you can have virtually anything you want, you can’t have everything you want,” he explains. “Life is like a giant smorgasbord with more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. Choosing a goal often means rejecting some things you want in order to get other things that you want or need even more.”

Source: Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio: Quit these bad habits to achieve your goals

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. If you’re not changing and evolving, you’re relying too heavily on knowledge rather than imagination. You’re relying too heavily on experience rather than creativity.

You’re stuck in the past. You’re living out a predictable life. And predictability is nowhere to be found in courage and creativity. As Sir Ken Robinson said, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Seth Godin similarly said, “If you’re willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to becoming an artist.”

Source: Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do

There’s a problematic shift that happens to many successful and creative people. Eventually, their creative well dries up. They get out of the habit of doing and creating and shift to passively accumulating information or accolades.
They become far more calculated in every decision they make. They stop being iterative, failing, changing, learning, and being imaginative. They begin relying far too heavily on their prior knowledge and experience. At some point, they reach a cap on what they are interested in learning, because true learning involves risk.

Source: Life Doesn’t Reward You For What You Know, But For What You Do