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Visar inlägg från januari, 2021

The endowment effect

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"For most things are differently valued by those who have them and by those who wish to get them: what belongs to us, and what we give away, always seems very precious to us."         — Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics book IX (F. H. Peters translation)   "The best thing with having a Black Lotus, is that you have a Black Lotus"        — Martin Beer (paraphrased)   Back in my student days, I had a ritual of sorts at the start of every summer. If you go for higher education in Sweden, you get a small stipend and a loan every month to cover your basic needs. During summer there are typically no classes however, and you'll have around three months each year without that “student income”. So the reasonable thing is to find some seasonal work to pay the summer bills. My seasonal employments as a student included grocery stores, home care facilities, janitorial work, postal services, retirement homes and stock houses. One summer I worked down the harbor, unloading co

2020 Retrospective

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"2020 is every Nic Cage movie, without Nic Cage."   - @DadThatWrites, July 19, 2020 Without going too deep into the whine mire, I think we can in good conscious acknowledge that, generally speaking, 2020 wasn't that great. Yeah, I know a lot of positive things happened. The vaccine development was astonishing. Polio got extinct from Nigeria, and with that from the whole African continent. Chile was declared free from landmines. The number of people dying in terror attacks declined for the fifth year in a row, and is now 59% lower than in 2014. Sudan stated they will end child marriage. Many countries started phasing out excessive use of plastic. There was a Brexit deal. And there's some sort of baby boom for lions and elephants in Kenya. And that's of course just scratching the surface. But in spite of all the good, 2020 was pretty rough. Human interactions were fewer and further between. Meeting people moved from being a necessity to a luxury.