We should focus on building "unaffordable" housing, Scott Sumner | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Save for DMCI the rest of the condo builders of our country are either high quality and expensive or low quality and expensive or low quality and afforable.
DMCI is in my opinion the only one in the good quality and affordable group.

Many left-wingers start with the false assumption that society needs to build more “affordable housing”. In fact, in any well functioning society the vast majority of the new housing being built would be “unaffordable”, that is, out of the price range of the median income.To see why, consider the nature of economic progress. During the Middle Ages, most people lived in miserable hovels. Today, most people in America live in nice houses and apartments. This transition occurred because the new homes being built tended to be superior to the existing stock of homes, at any given point in time.Moving to higher quality homes is an important part of economic progress. Because one year’s worth of new construction is only about 1% of the existing stock of homes, it’s difficult to rapidly upgrade the quality of our housing stock. But if we are to make any progress at all, it’s essential for new homes to be of much higher quality (and hence more expensive) that the average of existing homes. New houses should be unaffordable to average people.

Source: We should focus on building “unaffordable” housing, Scott Sumner | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

This Is the Most Important Fallacy You’ve Never Heard Of

What mistakes do we make in evaluating our decisions?There’s this word that we use in poker: “resulting.” It’s a really important word. You can think about it as creating too tight a relationship between the quality of the outcome and the quality of the decision. You can’t use outcome quality as a perfect signal of decision quality, not with a small sample size anyway. I mean, certainly, if someone has gotten in 15 car accidents in the last year, I can certainly work backward from the outcome quality to their decision quality. But one accident doesn’t tell me much.

Source: This Is the Most Important Fallacy You’ve Never Heard Of

rePost::Why Do Smart People Do Foolish Things? – Scientific American

The ability to think critically, on the other hand, has been associated with wellness and longevity. Though often confused with intelligence, critical thinking is not intelligence. Critical thinking is a collection of cognitive skills that allow us to think rationally in a goal-orientated fashion, and a disposition to use those skills when appropriate. Critical thinkers are amiable skeptics. They are flexible thinkers who require evidence to support their beliefs and recognize fallacious attempts to persuad

Source: Why Do Smart People Do Foolish Things? – Scientific American

rePost::The Beginner's Guide to Deliberate Practice | James Clear

The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice By James Clear    |    Continuous Improvement, Deliberate Practice, Self-Improvement In some circles, Ben Hogan is credited with “inventing practice.” Hogan was one of the greatest golfers of the 20th century, an accomplishment he achieved through tireless repetition. He simply loved to practice. Hogan said, “I couldn’t wait to get up in the morning so I could hit balls. I’d be at the practice tee at the crack of dawn, hit balls for a few hours, then take a break

Source: The Beginner’s Guide to Deliberate Practice | James Clear

Making the Jump to Go: A Guide for Java Developers – DZone Java

If you’re a Java developer like me, chances are you’ve heard rumblings of the trendy new language that came out of Google: Go. And if, like me, you’re always looking for ways to code faster and better, you may be asking yourself whether any of your existing applications are good candidates to move to Go. While not every Java application should be ported to Go, in many cases, Go is a more productive development framework than Java. There is, therefore, a great deal of value in understanding what Go can do;

Source: Making the Jump to Go: A Guide for Java Developers – DZone Java

rePost:Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker

In the second phase of the study, the deception was revealed. The students were told that the real point of the experiment was to gauge their responses to thinking they were right or wrong. (This, it turned out, was also a deception.) Finally, the students were asked to estimate how many suicide notes they had actually categorized correctly, and how many they thought an average student would get right. At this point, something curious happened. The students in the high-score group said that they thought the

Source: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds | The New Yorker

rePost: Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

When the results came in, they revealed an enormous performance gap. The best outperformed the worst by a 10:1 ratio. The top programmers were also about 2.5 times better than the median. When DeMarco and Lister tried to figure out what accounted for this astonishing range, the factors that you’d think would matter—such as years of experience, salary, even the time spent completing the work—had little correlation to outcome. Programmers with ten years’ experience did no better than those with two years. The

Source: Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You

Musings 2017 07 29 2209

Watching Roy Basa’s story in MMK tonight can’t help but wish that people understood that intergenerational poverty and social immobility is the main problem of our country. Something infrastructure projects cannot overcome.
Strengthening healthcare through PhilHealth and funding the public hospitals helps in solving the number one cause of financial calamity in the Philippines.
K-12 helps in funding the low hanging fruit in education. Making high school graduates employable or equipped for entrepreneurship.
CCT program create incentives for parents to force their children to school. Before senior high you have to graduate from high school. Before you go to high school you have to graduate elementary. Before you go to elementary you have to graduate from kinder. The financial incentive of CCT helps create senior highschool graduates that hopefully make a dent against inter generational poverty and lack of social mobility