Miljenko's Blog

For decades now political scientist and politicians have tried to figure out why the communist experiment in the Soviet Union failed when it did. That it was going to eventually was not as much of a puzzle as was / is why did it happen when it did and what were the proximate causes (as opposed to the ultimate causes if one adopts Jarred Diamond's terminology). My contention has long been that the most destructive weapon against communist ideology was the VCR. With increasing proportion of the population being able to see "how the other side lives", all the propaganda simply could not keep the genie in the bottle. People wanted to have a refrigerator and became unwilling to suffer the trade-off involved in not having a refrigerator so that the country can afford more MIG-17s. What Voice of America or Radio Free Europe could not achieve because they were considered mere counter propaganda and as such inherently not to be trusted any more than home grown propaganda, was ...

Earth is a closed system. Nothing escapes into space that is not launched at escape velocity. Therefore, the water we have is the water we had and the water we will have. Other than the very small amounts of water that get "lost" through chemical reactions converting those molecules of H20 into something else, all of the water that we "use" stays with us. Unlike oil where once we use it up, it is no longer in the same form, water more or less stays the same and thermodynamics gives us a clue to this as there is no energy to be had from water and therefore no conversion of matter into energy no matter what we do with water. We "have" more or less the same amount of water we had a million years ago and we will have the same a million years from now unless we cart it out into space. The issue is what form water comes in and this issue is all a "parts-per-billion" issue meaning that in some cases water is mixed up with salt (in fact 97% of...

I want to take a stand against "Titanic thinking" (copyright MH 2012) By that I mean the kind of thinking that says that Leonardo DiCaprio character is better off having known true love and dying than if he had never met the woman in the first place. Had he never won tickets to the Titanic maiden voyage he would have been WAAAAY BETTER OFF! Even having won the tickets, he would have been better off never having run into the woman because if he had not, given the kind of hustling resourceful character that he was, the odds of him surviving as many others  have were pretty good. The romanticized notion that this was somehow good for him is crap. It was not, he died. She lived and had a nice life.

Just reproducing here something from Bruce Shneier's Crypo-Gram newsletter because it is worth reproducing. "The Folly of Fools,: by the biologist Robert Trivers. Trivers has studied self-deception in humans, and asks how it evolved to be so pervasive. Humans are masters at self-deception. We regularly deceive ourselves in a variety of different circumstances. But why? How is it possible for self-deception -- perceiving reality to be different than it really is -- to have survival value? Why is it that genetic tendencies for self-deception are likely to propagate to the next generation? Trivers's book-long answer is fascinating. Basically, deception can have enormous evolutionary benefits. In many circumstances, especially those involving social situations, individuals who are good at deception are better able to survive and reproduce. And self-deception makes us better at deception. For example, there is value in my being able to deceive you into thinking I am strong...

Author of a book I read ("Spent" by Geoffrey Miller) claims these are actual bumper stickers in Albuquerque, New Mexico: "A PBS mind in a Fox News world" "Don't say ironic when you mean coincidental" "Eschew obfuscation" "If it fits on a bumper sticker, it's not a philosophy" "TV is gooder than books" "Tongue pierthing ith thtupid" "If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat" "Gun control means using both hands" "Get off the phone and crash already" "Jesus would have used his turn signals" "Saturday has a morning?" "Who would Jesus bomb?" "Has anger solved your other problems?" "Sniper: Don't bother running, you'll just die tired" "If you can read this, you're in my kill zone" "Honk if you've never seen an Uzi fired from a car window" "Can't s...

That as a business it is not the kind of business that can run on 10 or 12% capitalization. The risk profile of banking as a business is not any lower than that of a company making widgets or a transportation company and arguably it is actually higher than most. And yet, banks are run on a tiny sliver of capital only (and whether it is 8% or 12% does not fundamentally make all that much difference). In just about any other business, if 10% of your customers walk away - don't buy your widgets, or subscribe to your service or eat at your place, the business may become less profitable or not profitable at all for a while but it would not mean the end of it. In banking, if 10% of your customers (depositors) walk away, you are insolvent and practically out of business. I have no idea what the "right" level of capitalization is for a business that has the risk profile of banking - maybe it's 35% or maybe it's 45%. I am sure it is not 12%. Not that there is much tha...

Living in Canada it is impossible to avoid hearing about hockey, getting involved in hockey .. and that is a good thing. It is certainly the most interesting spectator sport out there. Hockey terminology is used a lot and recently an example occurred to me as I contemplated stages in life as one is apt to after turning 50. So the way I look at it is that I have entered the 3rd period of this particular game given that a life expectancy of 75 years is not unreasonable for a healthy, non-smoking male living in North America. In looking at it this way, the 1st period was all about education. Getting the most out of the process of learning and developing the mind to then be able to maximize the value of that intellect. Masters Degree was at 24 and if one considers the first year at Citibank as training, than that fits rather neatly into the metaphor. The 2nd period was all about family and that includes professional achievement and economic success which were in the function of pro...