Supply and Demand

For efficient markets, if you want to lower prices you either reduce demand or increase supply.

For inefficient markets, if you want to lower prices you either reduce demand, increase supply, or increase price transparency.

Irony

One thing I really like doing is writing situations where people are embarrased because they’re being unreasonable, but establishing that they’re right.

Trusts

I want to create a series of trusts. The objective of each trust is to give the first person to do a thing a bunch of money. So I’d create the LC Mars Trust, and the first person to set foot on Mars would get a bunch of money. Same for the other planets and the Niner, the first person to set foot on all of them.

The most obvious problem is that I have no money, but I figure this will take a while to accomplish anyway. I’ll park my $1.12 in various investments and in a century when someone does it, they’ll get everything.

Homework problem: At 7% return, how much would they get? Assume volatility is small compared to compounding, and recall A=Pe^(rt).

Secondly, is setting foot on Jupiter reasonable? Or Uranus. Or Neptune. Maybe, MAYBE Venus, but I doubt it. Mars, Mercury, and Pluto are kinda possible, for a pretty wide latitude in the word ‘possible.’

But is that an engineering problem or a physics one? There is (probably) a rocky core at the center of the Jovians. Someone could conceivably plunge through the envelope and make it there. Now if we discover that, say, Neptune is gas all the way down, it ain’t happening. But if there’s a rocky core and it’s just hard to get to, that means it will take longer for the payoff to be obtained. Which means it will compound longer. And that’s half the fun.

Blurbs

Redid Mara’s blurbs. I can’t redo the back cover, that would mean a new cover, but I can rewrite the blurb. Hopefully it’s a little punchier.

This publishing side of the house is weird.

Self-Checkout Machines

I made a quick grocery run.

While I’m in the self-checkout aisle, the machine to my right went down, and one of the managers was fixing it. Panels were open, and she’d climbed halfway inside, little legs kicking on the tile. As I finished my business, she whispered to it, “I hate you. Oh, how I hate you.”

And I wanted to high-five her.