I’m headed to Vancouver, B.C., to check out a city I haven’t visited in more than a decade and ski at one of the world’s premier ski resorts, Whistler-Blackcomb.
On Wednesday, I’ll be seeing Erik, who is currently attending UBC. Good times.
My first grade was just posted, but I haven’t looked at it yet because first I must do my Winter Quarter 2009 grade predictions! This quarter I took my first PMP class and my first Econ class at the UW, so those are new variables, but hopefully my guage isn’t too far off.
Economics 485 — Game Theory — 3.8
I did well on the first test, average on the second, and I feel I did well on the final
CSE P 505 — Programming Languages — 3.8
I averages in the low 90s on the homeworks, and I did well on the final, but so did a lot of people.
CSE M 584 — Security — 3.6
I feel I did well on the final, but I missed a homework and botched a second, and got a bad grade on one of the larger labs because I wasn’t careful enough (although my partner and I very successfully and quickly implemented the exploit). Oh well.
In quarters past, I have often finished my finals by the Tuesday of finals week, effectively giving me a couple of extra days off. This time around, however, all of my finals were at the end of the week, with Security on Wednesday at 8:30am, and Game Theory and Programming Languages on Thurday, at 8:30am and 6:30pm, respectively. It was a very late way to end the quarter. Nevertheless, I felt that I did pretty well on all my finals.
As evidenced by the late hour of this post, I have already let my normal school schedule slip significantly. The primary culprit tonight was Concurr, the web-based space strategy game that I working on with several others. Tonight, it was Theo and Shai working with me to implement new features, fix bugs, and generally have a good time.
For the first time since I tore my ACL, I played tennis. My roommate Matt and I headed down to the local tennis courts for some court time. It has been a long time since either of us played, and we were both pretty rusty but after a while we got warmed up and it turned into a real game.
Matt ended up winning 6-1, 7-6 (7-4), and I realized that my wrist muscles are not what they used to be. On the other hand, I was playing a lot better in the second game, and if we make a habit out of this we may end up getting significantly better.
My knee felt great throughout and, just as with the frisbee I’ve been playing on Sundays, I’m not noticing any pain or swelling after vigorous activity. The sporting life is good again.
I did, and it was very good.
Thanks to Bobby for giving me the opportunity!
Several days ago I wrote about the broken window fallacy. Tonight while listening to Barack Obama address Congress, I grew troubled when he argued for supporting failing banks because “getting lending going again” would provide benefits that essentially mirrored what the broken window fallacy talks about: a young family that otherwise couldn’t would be able to obtain a loan to buy a house; some company would hire workers to build the house; the workers would have more money to spend in their communities; and so on.
Recall what the broken window fallacy says:
The basic idea is that it is temping to think that a hoodlum breaking a baker’s window stimulates the economy because the baker must go buy a window from the glazier, who then can go buy additional things from others in the community and so on.
It sounds strikingly similar, doesn’t it? I don’t think it is a coincidence. So, I immediately started wondering, where is the broken window in the lending example? When a bank creates money through a loan, whose window is metaphorically broken?
My guess is that there is no specific victim, which is why this is so insiduous. Instead, the loser is, in some way that I don’t fully understand yet, a large group of us — perhaps all of us, and the winner is a small group. I am beginning to belive that the only way to not be hurt by the banking system, in aggregate, is to be partaking of loans yourself — to be leveraged yourself. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem too strange that this nation is addicted to debt. It is simply the best response to a set of incentives enshrined in law by our government.
My good friend Scott has some good advice on what to do about the financial crisis: vote with your dollar and take your money out of the banks that helped get us into this mess.
Both of my banks (JPMorgan, formerly Washington Mutual, and U.S. Bank) have recieved TARP money, so I will be moving my money out of these banks and into a well-run bank, perhaps Charles Schwabb, following Scott’s lead.