One Small Step From Game Trading on Steam

Trade gift games for items on steam (beta)!  I know, you can’t trade used games.  Interestingly, this will create additional mild demand for games, adding value as a currency (and increased liquidity).

I wonder if that means some indie games will become common currencies.  Also, if I were feeling speculative, I’d open a fresh steam account, trade currency games into it, wait for their value to become inflated, and then sell the currency account on ebay to get a return on my investment.

This is Worrisome

You can’t sit on millions and millions of additional unemployed people and not look like you’re helping them.  Eventually, they’ll decide they have nothing left to lose.

Missing the Point: the US doesn’t ‘fund’ itself via taxes

Two articles off the Big Picture, both discussing the S&Ps downgrade (which, by the way, seriously?  You guys rated toxic waste CDS compiled from fraudulent RMBS AAA, which then proceeded to blow up the economy, and have the gall to rate the United States of America lower?).  This one and this one.  Both assert the US funds itself via taxation, which is equivalent to asserting a bank funds itself through reserves and is equally false.

Banks do not fund themselves through reserves, and governments (especially currency issuing governments) do not fund themselves through taxes.  Banks acquire reserves in order to shore up capital reuirements for liabilities already issued; governments tax for a similar reason.

This shouldn’t be that confusing, though I guess we’re all mostly still bogged down with the notion that you lend money to a bank which then lends it back out ad infinitum through “fractional reserve lending”.  What hogwash.  Why would any banker tether themself to such a system?  Think about that for a bit.  In the meantime, go read this guy.  While he’s more MMT and I lean to the Ciruitist reading (I find Circuitist systems to be more theoretically sound, and consider MMT to be a specific application which describes a more limited set of models than a Circuitist mode), he’s nevertheless incisive and refreshing.  And contrarian.  Always listen to your naysmiths.

Right When the Market is Looking for Safe Investments

When markets tank, investors start looking to re-distribute their capital allocations…unloading high-risk and medium-risk  assets in favor of low-risk investments…because the risk premium just collapsed.

And just when that’s happening, the government is looking at reducing spending and therefore cutting into bond sales, reducing supply for one of the best risk-free options on the table.  That will will cut into yields, which will in turn cut into private investment cash flows.

And wouldn’t that reduce the floor under the risk premium?  I think so.  Gold, by the way, becomes a dangerous option when liquidity dries up in the face of demand.  As long as people are buying into gold in order to hold it, and doing so faster than the rate of supply, the price will continue to grow…but the volume of the actual gold market will decline.  As liquidity declines, price volatility tends to increase (because relative supply and demand compresses…this tends to increase the impacts of price shifts).  If this is driven by growing problems in other potential assets, as soon as those other assets stabilize, investors will exit gold.

That will undercut the price, potentially drastically.

Bear in mind that gold is a poor investment, generally, for a very simple reason: it offers no cash flow.  It is poor as capital.  I’m not saying don’t use it as an investment hedge; do that, please!  It is a way to hedge against outside factors impacting the value of currencies, for instance.  However, as a straight-up capital or financial investment, its fundamentals are poor in a healthy economy, as it produces no cash flow.

Precisely

My thoughts exactly.

Markets Are Sharks, and They Smell Blood in the Water

I was skimming through this article on Naked Capitalism (yeah, yeah, lots of links from there), and I realized that the article refers to markets as…predators.  Then I noticed this is a common reference, that markets are thought of as a sort of parasite, sucking the capital from an area until it dies, and scurrying for cover.

Except markets don’t do that…market players do.  See, if there’s something for a part of the market to feed on, then another part of the market is offering that for sale.  And it says something that we consider the predators to be doing the right thing, while the prey, who the predators have by the balls, can get shellacked and it’s their fault.  They shouldn’t have played ball with the big boys.

But how, exactly, do you escape the Hobbesian state of a Global Market place (which by definition is rather inescapable)?  And what’s left when the hyenas have cracked the bones and suckled the marrow from even the meanest of suckers?

Utility Maximization

Normally, I wouldn’t take the time to defend Neoclassical Economics.  It’s a generally silly way of looking at economic behavior; however, WHY it is silly is actually rather important.  For this reason, it’s sometimes necessary to point your intellectual guns at the people attempting to broadside it from the wrong direction.  I’m a fan of saving what is worth saving, as it were.

Which brings me to this article I found on Naked Capitalism (a great site, btw).

The initial thrust of the essay is to attack the notion of “rational actors” by pointing out the obvious: people act irrationally!  Mr. Pilkington offers up a few simple examples of this, provides one possible counter-argument from neoclassicals, and then neatly skewers it.  Interestingly, “acting rationally” remains completely undefined…it seems to be taken to mean acting in such a way as to perfectly maximise utility, which would indeed be an absurd property to assert is held by beings who are also asserted to be lacking tremendous amounts of information.

However, that is not what is meant by serious economists talking about a rational actor.  Mr. Pilkington quotes an economist on this, and then proceeds to more-or-less completely misunderstand the what the quote is saying:

The hypothesis of rational expectations means that economic agents forecast in such a way as to minimize forecast errors, subject to the information and decision—making constraints that confront them. It does not mean they make no forecast errors; it simply means that such errors have no serial correlation, no systematic component.

Pilkington claims this asserts people have perfect knowledge, and that any time they make a mistake it’s an anomaly.  That isn’t at all what is being asserted.  What’s being said is that people make decisions in order to maximise their robustness against Knightian Uncertainty.  People confront uncertainty which is immeasurable and unknowable, given their current information constraints, so they try and make it so their actions are as little affected by the unknown as possible.  Since people are making these decisions against a backdrop of absolutely unquantifiable risk, their responses will have a random component to them (guesswork) that will be necessarily inconsistent among actors.  That, in turn, implies there can exist no consistent error to their guesses…unless that error grew out of some background system of responding to unknown factors of a certain kind.

In which case, I would assert there is a reason people act that way, and they are thus being rational.  And I can make that assertion because rationality does not imply making perfect decisions, but rather making acting in a way which is consistent with a set of rules.  We may call an action irrational because it feels to obtain an externally defined goal, but if that decision comes as the result of a set of rules, then the decision was arrived at rationally.

Since in general I think it’s safe to say people make decisions based on rules (known or unknown), they are acting rationally and are therefore rational actors.  They fail to perfectly maximise utility due to their lack of omniscience, but the limits of local knowledge have long been a point of interest in sociology, psychology, and economics.

No, the point where Neoclassical Economics falls down is when they assume that the aggregation of decisions of a mass of actors operating within information constraints cancels out the individual errors, and this is a failure to understand the scope of Knightian Uncertainty in decision making…effectively, Neoclassical Economists think that all risk is quantifiable, even if we haven’t done so yet.  They lack any conception of a absolute uncertainty.

To continue on, Pilkington goes on to lambast the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which I am happy to depict in the harshest light possible.  Seriously, it is an idea whose scope is so laughably limited in application that its hard to conceive of taking seriously.  The unfortunate problem is that EMH wasn’t really taken seriously; instead, it was used as a sort of idealized model that markets approximate, a notion rather like the relation of Newtonian Gravity to General Relativity.  Assume markets come close to approximating a truly efficient market, open up a single variable to observation, and see how a particular market differs.  It’s actually a pretty solid foundation for experimental economics, but for one problem.

Markets really don’t at all approximate an “Efficient Market”, due to the existence of Knightian Uncertainty.

 

Google+

I think I prefer it to any of the other social networking methods out there…except for one, key thing.

It still fails to support, seriously, personas rather than people.  For me, each site I visit and interact with derives from a persona…not necessarily what people know me as offline, but some subsection of my personality that’s relevant when dealing with that site.  It fails on the anonymity notion…fails to embrace that part of the internet.

See, it puts forward the illusion of real people…but with a modicum of effort, I could create a fake persona, get it on Google+ or Facebook or Myspace, and fool everyone.  In fact, I believe I could fool them faster than I could o na forum, because the users are led to have faith that these are, in fact, real people.  The social engineering is dramatically simplified by the way the sites look.

I prefer the anonymity to be obvious, so that deceit is inherently harder to pull off: we’re all hiding and we all know it.

WoW Web API

I know, I disappear for a while, and all I’ve got when I come back is…

WoW has a new web API that I only just now saw.  I’m late to the party, but man is that cool from a web-coder standpoint.

Yes, I’ve been stupendously busy with late nights at work…that honest to goodness is what I’ve been doing.  On the brightside, I’ve learned a lot!

How I Know I’m probably Not Reading the Same Thing Everyone Else Is

I was reading this article on the history of Myspace, and I came across this quote:

“Using .NET is like Fred Flintstone building a database,” says David Siminoff, whose company owns the dating website JDate, which struggled with a similar platform issue. “The flexibility is minimal. It is hated by the developer community.”

My first thought was “What?”.    Even in 2005 .NET had a robust toolset and was built on on established and well-supported webserver architecture: ASP.  Granted, it was easier to deploy on a LAMP server, which has a really robust community behind it, and JSP I imagine had a much larger population of knowledgable devs at the time, but still.

And this move to ASP was brought about because:

At that point it was too late to switch over to the open-source-code software favored by developers; changing would have delayed the site for a year or two just as it was exploding in popularity. The easiest move, says DeWolfe, was to switch to .NET, a software framework created by Microsoft.

What?  Why would that at all be easier than building a LAMP set up or Java-driven set up?  In any case you have to completely re-write the server…

And then I remembered I was completely nitpicking details that were mostly irrelevant.