The BLAND Corporation

What if, from the safety and wisdom of some super-advanced Earth, both technologically and morally, we could observe a world that looks a lot like the one our ancestors lived in? What should we do, if anything? Such questions are posed in a scenario that reveals there are no easy answers.

Just watched a PBS Nova documentary called "Mind over money". It's a film about two competing models of economics, referred to in the show as 'rationalist economics' and 'behavioralist economics'. 'Rationalists' model each human being as being self interested and perfectly rational in pursuing the maximization of their own wealth; this results in certain mathematical assumptions that allow for an elegant theory. 'Behavioralists' claim that human beings do not act that way; even if maximization of personal wealth were pursued (which is not always the case), mistakes are often made. I for one believe that the behavioralists are right. It seems common sense to me to assume that nobody can reliably do the kind of mental calculation required by perfect economic rationality, and there are various cognitive biases to skew things the wrong way. But, I stress, this is merely a belief and I will defer to experts that study these things. In any case...

Every once in a while I check the stats for this blog. I don't need to spend too much time there, since I'm not getting that many views (yet :P) but I did notice a few things over the past few days. One is benign. Apparently someone in Estonia really likes this blog; either that, or they've visited the place a lot, anyway. So, hi to my Estonian reader, I hope you enjoy your views here! The other thing is weird. Apparently, one traffic entry source is some kind of 'make money with paid survey' piece of bs. {Update Jan 6th: other suspicious tinyurls keep showing up.} What the? Why? Since when? Though I should also mention that at one point, I was getting views from a google query about Prometheus torrent downloads, apparently. I've got no such things here, so again, why? On the plus side, spam has been so far mercifully non-existent. Yay!