Skip to main content

Go over the Fiscal Cliff: Bond Style

There seems to be an obvious approach to the impending fiscal cliff:  Fall off it, and then get rescued - Bond style.

Why?  Well, the short-sighted Republicans who have signed onto the "no new taxes" mandate will never back down - that would involve admitting they were wrong.  So, there will be no Grand Bargain.

The Fiscal Cliff, however, has new taxes built in, so they would not have to vote for it....they could just let it happen.

If both parties got together today and started to negotiate a "plan to put in place as soon as the fiscal cliff kicks in", they can have their cake and eat it too.  The Republicans can actually negotiate a post-cliff tax cut, the Democrats can allow some cuts to Government spending while rescuing a few key areas....everyone is a winner.

Chances of this happening: about 0%




Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...