Money

Linknote — 11 June 2020 — 19 words

Human-centred approaches — Politics — Society

Currency in colour: a visual guide to 157 banknotes around the world — Salman Haqqi — money.co.uk

A fun analysis of the world’s banknotes, their colours and contents: who and what features on them, and where.

Note — 19 November 2019 — 139 words

I was in a meeting once where someone pitched a really unrealistic idea. I don’t remember the details exactly. But let’s assume this idea depended on pigs being able to fly.

“But how will the pigs fly?”, we asked.

“Oh, we’ll have an algorithm.”

“OK… But, we don’t understand how the algorithm make the pigs fly?”

“I just said, the algorithm will sort that out.”

“But you haven’t explained how?”

“With the algorithm.”

“Algorithms can’t make pigs fly.”

“Algorithm!”

She spoke to two Apple reps. Both very nice, courteous people representing an utterly broken and reprehensible system. The first person was like “I don’t know why, but I swear we’re not discriminating, IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM”. I shit you not. “IT’S JUST THE ALGORITHM!”.

— DHH (@dhh) November 8, 2019

Don’t devolve your thinking to an algorithm.

Linknote — 26 October 2018 — 53 words

Economics — Society

Lottery math is human math

It’s irrational to buy a lottery ticket. And yet, millions do, even more when the prize is huge.

As economists will point out, people don’t buy a lottery ticket for an x% chance of winning millions. They buy a lottery ticket for to dream of winning millions.

Article — 10 September 2009 — 833 words

The value of GDP

Current affairs — Economics

There was an interesting blog post over at the Telegraph by Geoffrey Lean over the weekend. He asked if GDP is “past its sell by date”, noting that “the EU is due to publish a paper which will conclude that GDP is too limited a measurement.” I agree with the view that GDP doesn’t tell […]