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    <title>Tony Klausing</title>
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    <description>Recent content on Tony Klausing</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Against Coronavirus Nihilism</title>
      <link>/posts/coronavirus-nihilism/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/coronavirus-nihilism/</guid>
      <description>The coronavirus nihilist is someone who emphasizes the prevention of coronavirus-related deaths over and above of all other social costs, cultural costs, economic costs, and health costs of the #StayHomeSaveLives strategy. Examples of coronavirus nihilism are everywhere. Coronavirus nihilists are politicians, Medium censors, cable news personalities, white collar Zoomers, Instacarters, public health experts, and anyone who is by default indignant and angry when confronted with the idea that broad-based lockdowns might be ill-advised.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>What I&#39;ve Been Reading in 2019</title>
      <link>/posts/books-2019/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/books-2019/</guid>
      <description>2019 was a year of some great reads, some expected gems, and some fun surprises.
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Ogilvy ad executive Rory Sutherland was an unexpected gem. It mostly describes the peculiarities of real-world consumer behavior. It proves more convincing and entertaining than the contrived experiments of behavioral economist writers like Kahneman or Thaler. Sutherland&amp;rsquo;s book is also a welcome antidote to utilitarian focus-on-growth economic planning.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Textual Analysis of 672 EconTalk Podcasts</title>
      <link>/posts/textual-analysis-of-econtalk-podcast/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/textual-analysis-of-econtalk-podcast/</guid>
      <description>I&amp;rsquo;m a big fan of EconTalk, a podcast hosted for over a dozen years by the great spoken word champion of classical liberal ideas, Russ Roberts. Russ is a scholar formerly of George Mason University, now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I appreciate Russ&amp;rsquo; candor, his good-naturedness with all types of guests, and the general subject matter of the show: serious&amp;ndash;but not too serious&amp;ndash;applied microeconomics.
Since I&amp;rsquo;ve invested several weeks of my life (!</description>
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      <title>Response to Bruce Schneier on trust, privacy, and bitcoin</title>
      <link>/posts/schneier-on-blockchain/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 09 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/schneier-on-blockchain/</guid>
      <description>Bruce Schneier has written a formidable screed arguing against the usefulness of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies in Wired magazine, &amp;ldquo;There’s No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology&amp;rdquo;. This is significant coming from Schneier, who has literally written the textbook on Applied Cryptography and has written more than a dozen books on data privacy and cybersecurity.
In this essay, I will respond to a few of his remarks on the subject and try to point out where I think he is mistaken.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>What I&#39;ve Been Reading in 2018</title>
      <link>/posts/books-2018/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/books-2018/</guid>
      <description>The cold has set in and the end of the year approaches. A good time to take stock the year&amp;rsquo;s reading material and set goals for the year ahead.
2018 started with some true-life yarns spun by the inimitable energy of Winston Spencer Churchill, 1873-1965. I would have thought reading a pile of musty books about an old Brit would be a worse chore than figuring through a calculus workbook .</description>
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      <title>Steven Stoll&#39;s &#39;Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia&#39; review, and some thoughts on Marxist historicism</title>
      <link>/posts/ramp-hollow/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/ramp-hollow/</guid>
      <description>It&amp;rsquo;s evident from reading Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Fordham University history professor Steven Stoll that Prof. Stoll cares deeply about Appalachia. Stoll writes with great empathy about the gentle slopes and shade and colorful personalities found yonder. His book, published a couple years ago, explains how the &amp;ldquo;household mode of production&amp;rdquo; of the West Virginia smallholder—plot farming, a few livestock nibbling on the underbrush, selling what little surplus you yielded—was cut short by timber companies then Big Coal in the denouement of a Great American Tragedy.</description>
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      <title>Jacob Bronowski and designer people</title>
      <link>/posts/designer-people/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/designer-people/</guid>
      <description>In a wonderful 1974 interview on YouTube with Michael Parkinson, Jacob Bronowski has a telling segment regarding the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, an infamous victim of the drink. Bronowski knew Dylan Thomas rather well. Parkinson asked whether Bronowski, a buttoned-up mathematician, ever regretted not living the Bohemian life of a gifted poet like Thomas.
 &amp;ldquo;Of course I regret having never written poems as beautiful as Dylan Thomas,&amp;rdquo; Bronowski quipped. And the dialogue continued:</description>
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      <title>Calculating Bitcoin returns with mean hodl times using Monte Carlo simulations</title>
      <link>/posts/btc-monte-carlo/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 28 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/btc-monte-carlo/</guid>
      <description>Bitcoin&amp;rsquo;s volatility scares away many investors, which makes sense. If you bought BTC in late 2017, you would be sitting in a deep financial hole for the entirety, so far, of 2018. But te late 2017 run-up subsided quickly, as did the spike in late 2013. On the whole, Bitcoin&amp;rsquo;s price movement has been, needless to say, upwards.
I had long wondered what the average return would be for someone who bought BTC at a random time over the past five years, and held the bitcoin for, say, one month.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Charles Mann&#39;s &#39;The Wizard and the Prophet&#39; review, and some thoughts on environmentalism</title>
      <link>/posts/wizard-and-prophet/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/wizard-and-prophet/</guid>
      <description>Once at dinner was in an argument about the environment, and I was lone wolf in a torrent of acid words. My companions wailed that for all of our tarring and feathering of Mother Earth and its humble creatures, our descendants would be worse off. They prophesied that so long as our appetite for land and water and resources remains unsated, we will eventually exhaust the natural stocks and &amp;ndash; lo!</description>
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    <item>
      <title>The zen of economics</title>
      <link>/posts/zen-of-economics/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/zen-of-economics/</guid>
      <description>While plodding through “The Glory and the Dream,” William Manchester’s encyclopedic tome about the middle four decades of the American twentieth century, I came across a surprising passage. For a dozen pages, Manchester had described the dissolution of American prosperity during the Great Depression—a truly squalid state of affairs involving starved vagabonds, ruined business owners, pathetic farmers, meningitis killing 95% of its victims, closed schools, and malnourished children.
Then comes this:</description>
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      <title>Bitcoin as Digital Picassos</title>
      <link>/posts/picasso/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/picasso/</guid>
      <description>One of the easiest and cleverest ways, I reckon, to describe the cryptocurrency phenomenon to neophytes is to liken its remarkable run-up in value to the likewise remarkable run-up in value of Picasso paintings.
Just a couple of months ago, Picasso’s Femme au béret et à la robe quadrillée (Translation: “Woman in beret and checkered dress”) went for $69 million at Sotheby’s. Recent years have seen Gauguins and Cezannes command several hundred million dollars at auction.</description>
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      <title>Setting up Local Bitcoin and Ethereum Nodes on a Dedicated Linux Machine</title>
      <link>/posts/nodes/</link>
      <pubDate>Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/nodes/</guid>
      <description>In my experience, to properly interrogate the bitcoin or ethereum blockchain, network, and all their associated programs and scripts, it is best to dedicate a standalone Linux machine. These programs require a lot of horsepower, storage, and network capacity. Often they must run uninterrupted for hours or days at a time. For these reasons, a dedicated computer is advisable.
Also, as public blockchain projects come from the Linux open source lineage, Linux will be the easiest way to run a full node and interact with the latest and greatest features of cryptographic and networking technology, like homomorphic encryption techniques and the Lightning network.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>Sir Karl Popper and the Unended Quest for the Open Society</title>
      <link>/posts/popper/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/popper/</guid>
      <description>Populists through the ages have used rhetoric to its most horrific effects, swapping truths for untruths, discourse for edict, and peace for coercion. Resisting the bully&amp;rsquo;s dastardly proclivities and undergirding the foundations of a free and open society are those who affirm the principles of democratic free speech, respect for others in the search of truth, and the formal scientific method. One of those intellectuals who resisted the tempting aura of the authoritarianism, central planning, and Fabian socialism in Britain and, to a lesser extent, the United States in the mid-20th Century was the great Austrian philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper, who was a professor for many years at University College London.</description>
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    <item>
      <title>8 Startup and Code Ideas for 2018</title>
      <link>/posts/startup_ideas_2018/</link>
      <pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/startup_ideas_2018/</guid>
      <description>Idea #1: Sell life insurance via a mobile app to the young and healthy Warren Buffett counts the among the economic pillars of Berkshire Hathaway several insurance companies, GEICO and Gen Re prominent among them. For decades, Buffet has enjoyed the free cash flow these insurance premia rake in. And from as early as 1967, Buffett was acquiring such obscure insurance agencies as National Indemnity Insurance and National Fire and Marine Insurance have provided to spin the Twentieth Century&amp;rsquo;s most impressive financial flywheel.</description>
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      <title>Letter on tokenization</title>
      <link>/posts/letter_on_tokenization/</link>
      <pubDate>Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/letter_on_tokenization/</guid>
      <description>The promise of tokenization is a exciting prospect in the blockchain space. Organizations such as the DAO and various ICOs highlight the trend, having enjoyed eye-poppingly large funding rounds on dubious credentials. We may tsk-tsk this speculation, but if ICOs foretell what truly global and unfettered capital markets will look like &amp;hellip; then it&amp;rsquo;s pretty awesome. From the seeds of speculation, may great ideas and products flourish! And the beneficiaries of a half-trillion dollar crypto windfall can send their bits to whomever they please.</description>
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      <title>Wallace Stevens, the Poet Laureate of Bitcoin</title>
      <link>/posts/poet_laureate_of_bitcoin/</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/poet_laureate_of_bitcoin/</guid>
      <description>Should there be a Poet Laureate of Bitcoin, the great modernist Wallace Stevens of Hartford, Connecticut, USA (1877-1955) would surely be a top candidate. For those who will say that cryptography isn&amp;rsquo;t enough alike poetry to warrant an official poet of it, channel your inner poet for moment and let your imagination roam &amp;hellip;
Because, you see, Mr. Stevens was a special case. He was at once astonishingly imaginative and disciplined and practical.</description>
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      <title>No Sports</title>
      <link>/posts/no_sports/</link>
      <pubDate>Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/no_sports/</guid>
      <description>I remember some years ago meeting a programmer who made a remark about how different a world we would have if there weren&amp;rsquo;t any sports. &amp;ldquo;Imagine what we could accomplish when we used the money and energy from sports in more important areas like health and education,&amp;rdquo; he said.
I objected to his premise, arguing that sports was innately human. I had in mind the thought that if a world without sports and games existed, then a world without humans must be such a conclusion&amp;rsquo;s distopian prerequisite.</description>
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      <title>The Hidden Fallacy of Paper Clip Maximizing-Robots and Supergoals</title>
      <link>/posts/on_bostrom/</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/on_bostrom/</guid>
      <description>I take issue here with the notion of presentient and nearly deific artificial intelligences who shall, it is supposed, be programmed to achieve at all costs a &amp;ldquo;supergoal&amp;rdquo; &amp;hellip; only later to wreak accidental havoc on their hapless human inventors.
Consider a specific incarnation of the idea: the meme of the paper clip-maximizing super AI, popularized by Oxford University&amp;rsquo;s Prof. Nick Bostrom. It &amp;ldquo;seems perfectly possible,&amp;rdquo; writes Bostrom, &amp;ldquo;to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal.</description>
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      <title>Good evening, and welcome</title>
      <link>/posts/welcome/</link>
      <pubDate>Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
      
      <guid>/posts/welcome/</guid>
      <description>Dear reader,
Thanks for visiting my blog and welcome. I plan to write about economic history, art, the history of ideas, crypto systems, and whatever else comes to mind. Feel free to contact me @tonklaus.
Special thanks to the author of this useful tutorial about creating websites with Hugo, a Go app that generates static websites like this one.
Cheers, Tony</description>
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