From Planet Money
Given a choice between $50 now and $100 in a month, many people would
take the money
now. But offered $50 in a year, or $100 in 13 months,
they'd wait the extra month to double
their money.
Another example from This Wikipedia page
In the experiment, subjects of the study were offered free rentals of
movies which were classified into two categories - "lowbrow" (e.g. The Breakfast Club) and "highbrow" (e.g. Schindler's List)
- and researchers analyzed patterns of choices made. In the absence of
dynamic inconsistency, the choice would be expected to be the same
regardless of the delay between the decision date and the consumption
date. In practice, however, the outcome was different. When subjects had
to choose a movie to watch immediately, the choice was consistently
lowbrow for the majority of the subjects. But when they were asked to
pick a movie to be watched at later date, highbrow movies were chosen
far more often. Among movies picked four or more days in advance, over
70% were highbrow.[3]
Thursday, August 30, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
First Samuel Chapter 8
10 And Samuel told all the words of the Lord unto the people that asked of him a king.
11 And he said, This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots.
12 And he will appoint him captains over thousands, and captains over fifties; and will set them to ear his ground, and to reap his harvest, and to make his instruments of war, and instruments of his chariots.
13 And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers.
14 And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
15 And he will take the tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants.
16 And he will take your menservants, and your maidservants, and your goodliest young men, and your asses, and put them to his work.
17 He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants.
18 And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the Lord will not hear you in that day.
19 Nevertheless the people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay; but we will have a king over us;
20 That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.
21 And Samuel heard all the words of the people, and he rehearsed them in the ears of the Lord.
22 And the Lord said to Samuel, Hearken unto their voice, and make them a king. And Samuel said unto the men of Israel, Go ye every man unto his city.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Sinica
This is my favorite new podcast. Podcast URL is http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/sinica. Blog site is at http://popupchinese.com/lessons/sinica
I first heard of this via This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/467/americans-in-china) wherein the main Sinica guy, named Kaiser something, was extensively interviewed about being an expat living in China for many many years. Kaiser is joined by two or three other very smart, very engaging vernacular English speakers who know China and Chinese extremely well. They are the young, smart, into-their-thing, well educated ones who write scholarly articles and occasionally get stories into the Guardian or Wall Street Journal. They go over the big news stories in China and then focus in on two or three of them, I am pretty sure beer is present. Or they do a historical retrospective on some aspect of Chinese history. My favorite dialog from the current episode, in a discussion of the Manchus (all quotes approximate):
"I don't really know what Manchu [language] sounds like"
"It sounds a lot like Romulan to me"
"You are such a nerd"
"Right, I'm the guy on a podcast talking about the Manchu dialect, what was your first clue?"
When I say big news stories in China, I mean big to the Chinese, not to us. I did not know that Peking recently had major flooding and 34 people died, nor that the Ming Dynasty waterworks held up just fine, but the stuff from the 20th Century pretty much collapsed, nor that this prompted widespread speculation about why the Mayor of Peking's resignation was announced (deep, hall of mirrors Chinese government stuff here). Nor did I know that their health care system sucks. The docs and nurses are very poorly paid and demand bribes for every little thing, you have to buy an appointment from a ticket scalper and patients get treated like shit. The story was deemed important on the "if it bleeds it leads" (they used this very phrase) basis that there is an outbreak of enraged patients murdering doctors, Chinese going postal.
Its not all as big a downer as these stories suggest, especially since they were treated with great sympathy toward both the regular people and for the problems of being a government for such a huuuuuggge number of people. Also, they have a good sense of humor.
I first heard of this via This American Life (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/467/americans-in-china) wherein the main Sinica guy, named Kaiser something, was extensively interviewed about being an expat living in China for many many years. Kaiser is joined by two or three other very smart, very engaging vernacular English speakers who know China and Chinese extremely well. They are the young, smart, into-their-thing, well educated ones who write scholarly articles and occasionally get stories into the Guardian or Wall Street Journal. They go over the big news stories in China and then focus in on two or three of them, I am pretty sure beer is present. Or they do a historical retrospective on some aspect of Chinese history. My favorite dialog from the current episode, in a discussion of the Manchus (all quotes approximate):
"I don't really know what Manchu [language] sounds like"
"It sounds a lot like Romulan to me"
"You are such a nerd"
"Right, I'm the guy on a podcast talking about the Manchu dialect, what was your first clue?"
When I say big news stories in China, I mean big to the Chinese, not to us. I did not know that Peking recently had major flooding and 34 people died, nor that the Ming Dynasty waterworks held up just fine, but the stuff from the 20th Century pretty much collapsed, nor that this prompted widespread speculation about why the Mayor of Peking's resignation was announced (deep, hall of mirrors Chinese government stuff here). Nor did I know that their health care system sucks. The docs and nurses are very poorly paid and demand bribes for every little thing, you have to buy an appointment from a ticket scalper and patients get treated like shit. The story was deemed important on the "if it bleeds it leads" (they used this very phrase) basis that there is an outbreak of enraged patients murdering doctors, Chinese going postal.
Its not all as big a downer as these stories suggest, especially since they were treated with great sympathy toward both the regular people and for the problems of being a government for such a huuuuuggge number of people. Also, they have a good sense of humor.
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