One of the best jobs I've ever had was manual labor: I was a bellman for a hotel. My primary job responsibilities included lifting heavy luggage in 100-degree heat, being yelled at by cranky guests, and running around non-stop for 10-hour shifts. What made it great? I was almost completely autonomous, and I got paid a little bit of money every time I did some work. There was almost always a direct consequence when I did good work, and nobody told me how to do my job. (My boss didn't even work on the same shift!)

I've worked a lot of much more "comfortable" jobs since that time, and I've had a lot of time to think about why that luggage-monkey job was so much better than nearly all of the intellectual gigs I've held. So far, I think it boils down to a simple point: there's no worse tyranny than being told how to think. No matter how much luggage I lifted, I was always free with my thoughts. But when you work in an industry where your thoughts are your primary output, it's inevitable that someone (or something) will try to consume all of them. When that happens, you're on a path to burnout.

I hate the idea of paternalism and as someone involved in the small business arena I really wish the government out of my way most of the time. However, people affect others. You buying an SUV increases the aggregate demand for gasoline which raises the price of gasoline and so I pay more at the pump because you bought an SUV. Maybe that shouldn't be regulated, maybe it should. You pollute and lower my standard of living. Maybe it should be regulated, maybe it shouldn't.

The problem is where libertarianism typically draws the line. Shooting me: not ok! Investing in risky stocks that destabilize the economy creating a panic that loses millions of jobs and causes enough chaos in my personal life: that's ok (according to the original poster).

I do have a lot of respect for Milton Friedman - in fact, he argued that one of the functions of government was to combat the neighborhood effect of things like pollution. However, most libertarians I know today aren't so keen on things like pigovian taxes to correct differences between marginal social cost and marginal private cost.

And part of this goes down to freedom of choice. Let's say I decide that a fireworks display would get people together watching it, having BBQs, etc. I could get dominion over the most choice seating from the government, but plenty of people would be able to watch for free - a positive externality. So, there is an argument to be made that this should be subsidized because people won't create enough fireworks displays if they have to pay for it themselves since they can't capture the revenue from the benefits because people can freeload. However, not everyone gets to decide for themselves whether they would appreciate this event. Maybe you hate people and don't want to socialize. Either way, it's unfair to take money from you to pay for something that you might not want.

So, there are two issues: first, there's the issue that I don't want people messing up my life too much. So, there should be (in my opinion) limits on how much stupid risk someone should be allowed to take given that those risks often affect other people. You want to destabilize the economy? No, not ok. Second, there's the issue on how much we should be individuals or how much we should be a society when it isn't such a dire situation. Should the government chip some money into a parade? Should the government encourage community? How far should the government go on pollution? I'm sure no libertarian would argue that the government shouldn't regulate dumping nuclear waste into my drinking water, but what about a coal plant, what about CO2 from cars?

Libertarians aren't foolish people. It's just that often times I find myself thinking, "well, that's fine and good for you, but it doesn't scale." Like, it's fine to let someone like Warren Buffet do whatever the hell he wants. He's responsible, stable, and smart. As we've seen recently, even CEOs commanding many millions a year in compensation aren't able to work without a net.

The problem really is that freedom doesn't exist. There's definitely more freedom and less freedom, but freedom doesn't exist. Why? Because your actions affect me. The fact that some geniuses at Citibank and others screwed up makes it harder for me to switch jobs, means raises are going to be nil this year, etc. The freedom they had took away freedom I had. And so it becomes a balancing act and often I get lectures about freedom as if it isn't such a balancing act.

How do you deal with this balancing act? I don't know. It's hard. You want to maximize happiness. This is probably my biggest beef with libertarianism because freedom != happiness even if there is a strong correlation. Maximizing freedom for freedom's sake just seems silly to me. Anyway, it isn't always clear how to maximize happiness and in some cases you just try to do the best you can and fail. I really hate any pure philosophy. I just don't think any of them apply in life. And libertarianism, in its pure form, just doesn't work. People affect each other. If you're willing to bend libertarianism a bit and keep a strong eye on freedom while making sure you keep in mind how one's actions affect others (both directly and indirectly), I respect you.

Hopefully that was halfway coherent. We'll see tomorrow morning.

Start working on your contacts...you have 7 months to build connections...so that if shit hits the fan, you have somewhere to go fast.

  1. Programmability in something other than VBA (Python?).
  2. Online spreadsheets like Google.
  3. Better search and replace.
  4. Ability to reference tables through URLs so they could show up in blogs and in HTML.
     Something like this: http://ycspreadsheets.com/joe/doc1.ss?s=1&block=a1:c10. This
     should produce HTML that some javascript can replace in my blog with the table pulled
     out of the spreadsheet.
  5. Ability to pull and reference data dynamically from online sources. For example,
     imagine a spreadsheet cell that pulled the current stock price of GOOG every time it
     was viewed. And the rest of the spreadsheet would naturally update automatically.

Excel isn't a database but a lot of people use it like one anyways.

This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can go back for another hit.

Elevator pitch: It's like Flickr for collateralized debt obligations.

The perverse irony of modern society is that it's orders of magnitude easier to be a consumer than a producer. I don't mean that producing requires more psychological investment and effort; that's a given, in any case. I mean that society makes it much easier to fill the role of the consumer than the producer. You can consume cheaply and easily, as if the world is begging people to consume.

Producing, in any meaningful, useful, and psychologically sustainable context, is very difficult. Most people don't get to do it. At the very least, you need an audience. Realistically, you also need people to pay you to produce, which means that your odds of getting meaningful work are long (unless you're the only one skilled enough to do the interesting work, the people with the money take the meaningful projects and throw you the scraps). Consequently, 85 percent of people cannot attain work that is more valuable or interesting than watching TV. This is why we're a nation of non-producing consumers.

Yes. I doubt there is another way.

Do you know how tech book publishing works? It's not fiction publishing -- publishers aren't deluged with a large pool of manuscripts from which they can pick out the best ones. The financial incentives are very poor: Unless they target a very broad audience (see: David Pogue) tech book authors don't make enough royalty money to reimburse them for their time. So publishers must approach potential authors in advance, woo them, and sign them to book-publishing contracts before the books are written. Since they can't offer enough money, the publishers must approach people who have other incentives -- e.g. existing experts or inventors who want to promote themselves or their tools. Unfortunately, the skills required to become an expert in something like XML are not necessarily correlated with the skills required to write a good book about it. And, of course, it can be hard to identify an expert in advance. And it's often better to hire a lesser writer, or a lesser expert, than to have no book on a particular topic in your product line.

Once a book is delivered (if the book is delivered -- a lot of authors burn out in the process), the publisher can work with the author to edit it, but the option of rejecting the manuscript is probably difficult and expensive and politically nasty. So, once written, I suspect that a tech book tends to be published. Might as well let the reviewers and the public do the dirty work of deciding that it's bad. Particularly since there are many subspecialties where a badly-written book is far better than no book at all.