The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

I tried very hard folks, I honestly did. My five years of writing in this space without resorting to talk about Trump come to an end today. (ok, ok. I kind of did before, but at least didn't use his name). Considering that yours truly used to take silly pride in not having the need to wade into the slimy, polarizing, inebriating, shallow, pontificating, and (above all) utterly futile world of "Let-me-shout-to-the-socialmediaverse-my-political-leanings-while-attempting-to-persuade-my-opponents-that-my-political-views-are-the-right-ones", this post is kind of embarrassing. The Author taking pride among friends about NOT talking about Trump Even as entire ecosystems literally  collapse  decades before predictions (and devastate the communities linked to them) as I type this; even as the Russian permafrost thaws --unleashing into the atmosphere anthrax spores that had been frozen there for decades; even as there's a  massive die off  of starfish (a marine k...

Broadcast speech is a public good. Like air. You don't really see it, but it's there; permeating every aspect of your life. You silently feed off of it. You pollute it, and you mess it up for everyone else around you. You know it's dirty. You know it's toxic, and you try to avoid the malicious part of it, but it's always there, a nagging background noise that drones and drones incessantly, chipping away at your sanity. No one really wants to be in charge of keeping it clean, because it's next to impossible to do it. Yes, some high-level, clumsily written rules exist, but nothing that really prevents you or anyone else from spoiling it for everybody else. Oh, yes. The slippery slope argument. You can't contain free speech in any form because then you have to forbid all  speech under this magically simplistic view. And no one wants to live in an oppressive society, right? God forbid someone is forced to use some basic common sense to avoid mocking the...

Is the  blue-dress/gold-dress frenzy  officially over? Good. It was getting crazy for a moment. The way that photograph made people realize that "reality" is nothing more than a construct concocted in our brains opened the door to the collective realization that what we see is actually just an interpretation that allows us to function in the world. We see colors under different shades a different way (the "white" tile under the table vs. the "black" one to its right) because the brain gets confused between perceiving colors during day and night. The "reality" is that they are exactly the same color once you apply the same light intensity. This differentiation needs to occur in our brain; a  mental shortcut  happening in our left hemisphere (the one that connects the past with the present ) tells us that colors look different under the shadows, and shapes  our perception mechanisms to make better decisions in the environments we live in...

Our mind is a surreptitious and tyrannical ruler. We may have a sense of self consciousness (some of us a very  inflated one), but so many vestigial processes rule our brains' functioning that we fail to fathom how little room we actually have to exercise our freedom. No organ in our body has been more shaped by the "trial-and-error" process of evolution than our brain. Our irrationality, biases, fears, addictions, and phobias are all somehow anchored in an ancient and obscure vestige behavior that allowed our ancestors thrive past through harsh conditions. Don't know about that gag reflex that prevents you from drinking perfectly  safe purified sewage/toilet water? There's a reason we innately find excrement and fetid matter gross. Couple thousand generations ago our brains had to incorporate this preservation mechanism to avoid dysentery, cholera, and many more nasty digestive-born diseases. Ever heard of trypophobia , that irrational repulsive reflex t...

There seems to be hysteria these days around AI and algorithm-based consumption. The algorithmic economy  threatens to bring to the realm of the tangible that totem of economic dogma called the "invisible hand." Computers are finally linking --through big data-- individuals' behavior with algorithms that sort them, allowing machines to predict reactions: the "invisible hand" materializes(!). Nothing like predicting human conduct to be able to make money. That damned watch I dared to search for 3 weeks ago in a moment of stupid leisure has haunted me everywhere I go on the internet. Please, stop it Google. I'm not buying it. The idea that we are just soft machines  is a fascinating one. It feeds the collective dread of an algorithmically-dominated Armageddon, making people fret about a time in the not-so-distant future when we will decide nothing for ourselves, and when everything will be dictated by an algorithm --surreptitiously creating the illusion of  ...

Era 1996. Mi universo giraba alrededor de ese experimento social (la Universidad) en donde juegan contigo a que te dan responsabilidades, tú te estresas por cumplirlas, y al cabo de 4 años y medio te hacen creer --quizás sea éste el elemento más valioso del experimento-- que estás preparado para conquistar el mundo. Redacción Avanzada era   una de esas clases aburridas que te imponen para "pulir tu capacidad de escritura." Nada qué ver con tu área de estudio, pero para poder salir con el "sello de calidad" de graduado de esa Universidad había que llevarla --nada como "sellar" a los educandos cual producto ensamblado en línea de producción industrial para emular la moda de cultura organizacional de la época. La de los 90's era el "Control de Calidad." La meta era producir graduados de homogeneidad robótica: Licenciados e Ingenieros  ISO 9000 En medio de esta estructura de rígida monotonía, una tarea trivial. Escrito de 500 palabras donde ...

The dollar. The intangible monetary construct concocted  in its paper form in 1861 to finance the civil war is arguably the United States' most precious asset. Its solidity is underpinned by an enviable  rule of law . It gives good ol' U.S. of A the blessing of perennially low interest rates (which elevates the standard of living of Americans to the tune of $100bn annually ), and the ability to throw in the trash can any resemblance of fiscal restrain. Why be frugal when normal market rules don't apply to you? After all, there is no such thing as a U.S. Treasury bond market " vigilante ." Not in the same way they exist  for any other --more normal-- sovereign bond markets, anyway. We live under a de facto Dollar Standard. Nations hoard greenbacks to bulk up reserves (save some very wacky exceptions ) to have dry powder to prop up (or push down , as recently seen) their currencies when they're under attack, or to buy imported goods. It is a very exorbitant p...