tvchurch's comments

"I’ve had a running list for most of the past year—things I want to get better at, projects I want to finish, skills I want to develop. At various points there have been four or five items on it, all getting some portion of my week. I’d rotate between them, make a little progress on each, and feel like I was being productive."

"Then I think about the stretches where I did produce something I was proud of, and they all have the same shape. I’d gotten slightly obsessed with one thing. Not in a dramatic way—I just stopped splitting my attention."

Honestly, a great reminder of how to get things done when you have seven work priorities...

Author here.

DPC is terrific if you have an option near you! Paired with catastrophic insurance, it's a great bet for relatively healthy people.

The DPC Alliance map is well worth a visit: https://mapper.dpcfrontier.com/

And I wrote about DPC a while back: https://church.substack.com/p/direct-primary-care

Author here. I'm definitely not advocating going without health insurance. Just running simple numbers to get some perspective.

I'd like to see health insurance act like insurance again though. Right now it covers absolutely everything, meaning it's more like pre-payment for routine care + insurance.

Insurance isn't for routine, predictable, or low-cost expenses. But we've mandated that our health insurance cover all of those things.

The comparison to car insurance is overused, but it's a good one. Catastrophic coverage + dedicated savings with lower premiums looks more attractive to a lot more people.

Congrats, man. Love this game.

Now get the Word of the Day ported over too!

This is why the internet exists.

Incredible catharsis. Love it.

Always hard to put these number in perspective.

Here's the one that worries me: Interest payments on the debt are projected to grow to 6.7 percent of GDP in thirty years (right now they're 1.9 percent and Social Security outlays are 4.9 percent).

Deficits are projected to be 10 percent of GDP then, meaning 2/3rds of our borrowing will be done to pay off existing borrowing. That's not good.

1) The text box for answers should already be clicked and ready to type in. So when you submit your answer, you don't need to click again to get the next question.

2) To move things along, the correct / incorrect response should pop up on the next page with the next question, text box ready to start typing.

3) Choosing difficulty would be helpful. Multiplication thrown in with addition would be discouraging for a kid who only knows addition.

4) If you'd like to stop, clicking Home at the top should pause the timer. I completed a few questions then wanted to go to home and click around. But the timer kept going, which if I didn't notice would run out and then subtract a kid's progress.

5) In the about section, it'd probably be helpful to explain to non-tech savvy parents that this browser keeps track of your progress with cookies. As long as you're signed in on the same web browser on the same account/computer, your progress will be saved.

Definitely keep going!

"For such a liberal city?"

"The Housing: San Francisco has deeply conservative tendencies for such a liberal city. Its housing supply isn't growing fast enough to keep up with rising demand."

Restrictive housing is more of a liberal phenomenon than a conservative one, wouldn't you say?

Here's Alex Nowrasteh on this topic: https://twitter.com/AlexNowrasteh/status/1164862732102963200

1.4% of all arrests in 2014 were federal.

Most law enforcement is by local or state governments.

This headline makes it seem like 64% of all arrests were for non-citizens. Not at all the case.

This makes me think of Charlie Munger's insistence on checklists: https://www.amazon.com/Poor-Charlies-Almanack-Charles-Expand...

How much extra do NYC renters pay from not building enough new supply?

Or from rent control stifling the development of new supply?

I've got to know more about this. Who set it up? Local start up? Bored engineers?

While the full article is gated at WSJ, John Cochrane and David Henderson write about the lack of quantifying economic costs when it comes to addressing climate change. Their last paragraph:

Climate policy advocates’ apocalyptic vision demands serious analysis, and mushy thinking undermines their case. If carbon emissions pose the greatest threat to humanity, it follows that the costs of nuclear power—waste disposal and the occasional meltdown—might be bearable. It follows that the costs of genetically modified foods and modern pesticides, which can feed us with less land and lower carbon emissions, might be bearable. It follows that if the future of civilization is really at stake, adaptation or geo-engineering should not be unmentionable. And it follows that symbolic, ineffective, political grab-bag policies should be intolerable.

Here's Cochrane's write up about the op-ed: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2017/07/on-climate-change....

Here's the other thing about administrative costs: Medicare's patients cost a lot more per person than private insurance.

In other words, if it costs you $500 in administration costs and one patient has care that totals $5,000 and another has care that totals $10,000, then their administrative costs are 10% and 20%.

And yet we think that if we shifted more people onto a Medicare-like system, we'd save money.

This is closer to what James was trying to get across in the article - how you do engagement means a lot.

I also say this while happily wearing my Readertron t-shirt. He's right - the conversations we had on Reader were very, very good.

I strongly recommend reading about John Cochrane's notion of equity-financed banking (PDF): http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/geor...

It functionally eliminates bank runs and the need for most regulation.

People will be able to bank like normal, but contagion and bank failures go away.

Not all banks need to be forced to go this route. But if you offered banks the option to opt-out of Dodd-Frank if they were 95% financed by equity and retained earnings, I'm pretty sure most would.

Longer essay here:

http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2016/05/equity-financed-ba...

This is a collection of mental models Charlie uses to explain human behavior. It was basically behavioral psychology before the field exploded.

Definitely take the time to read it. While it isn't a peer reviewed piece of work, you'll agree with his justifications simply on the basis of agreeing that, Yup, that is indeed how people act.

Sure. Anyone pro- or anti-wind will say whatever argument they can to try to convince people.

All I'm saying is before we decide to build more wind turbines, we should have an honest accounting of all of the benefits and costs laid out. There are locations where they make sense and places where they don't. And there are levels where some government support might make sense, and some levels where they don't.

Even if people support one form of power generation over another, there should always be a limit.

That's what I mean. Wind might be generated "for free," but one cost is what it looks like.

Another is how many birds it kills a year. (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-many-birds-do-w...)

That's not to say we shouldn't build it. Just that we need to consider what it costs before we do.