There is at least one semiconductor test platform which uses Excel workbooks as the programming interface. Automotive chips going in to new vehicles today are being tested for functionality using Office 2003 and VBA
The article doesn’t mention lyrics, which has to be one of the biggest contributions a singer provides to a song. Being able to emote through language in addition to music may as well double the effect a song may have on people.
I bought a newer K&E probably 10 years ago. I brought it to college and even took it as a calculator backup to a few exams. It’s still on my desk in the office.
But I find it mostly stays on my desk. Operating a slide rule requires intentionality, and most of the time I really only want a quick answer. An RPN calculator is probably a permanent fixture on my desk.
I should get more use of my slide rule, though, just to practice that intentionality: sharpening the estimation skills needed to get the order of magnitude right, and the planning skills of what scales to use, what order, etc. so that the calculation is quick and the result is accurate. These skills are still quite useful in the present day, and few times do they come up as well as when using a slide rule.
This paragraph summarized the piece fairly well. It describes the ideology that the author thinks central bankers have:
> The answer may be down to the grip of an economic ideology espoused by tenured Harvard Professors like Larry Summers and Ken Rogoff. Both appear to believe that inflation exceeds in its power all other threats. And that inflation is largely caused by rising wages (even as real wages are falling) - or even the expectation that wages might rise. That to suppress wages and therefore inflation, central bankers are required to continue hiking aggressively even if this does depress demand, raise unemployment and slash wages further.
I don’t think that’s true though. The most mainline Keynesian would say that inflation has many more causes that just wage growth. And since one of the charter goals of the Fed is to reach maximum employment, I would imagine that rate hikes are trying to minimize impact on workers while still keeping inflation down (their real wages intact).
The author, in my mind, has tunnel vision for workers’ rights and wages, and won’t see the impacts of 6% inflation on the lives of that same working class. The rhetoric makes me think that they’re boiling the frog for a more commanded economy.
> The author, in my mind, has tunnel vision for workers’ rights and wages, and won’t see the impacts of 6% inflation on the lives of that same working class.
The very next paragraph after the one you quoted:
"today’s inflation is caused by commodity market speculation, not wages. And if workers demand higher wages to deal with the inflationary impact of higher energy and other commodity prices - that is a consequence, not a cause of commodity price inflation"
Commodity market speculation is also caused by too much cheap money sloshing around with nothing productive to do, and the solution is still to increase interest rates. By the time central banks decided to raise interest rates, wage growth had already lagged behind inflation, so workers demanding higher wages is not enough to offset inflation.
> Commodity market speculation is also caused by too much cheap money sloshing around with nothing productive to do, and the solution is still to increase interest rates. By the time central banks decided to raise interest rates
That's a fair statement, but the timing is crucial, as you seem to note above, and the timing of the interest rate hikes is what the author is criticizing:
"But as importantly, through lack of analysis, regulation, oversight and foresight - central bankers have shown this last week they were prepared to use high rates to risk and even precipitate bank failures and global financial instability. They have done so, and continue to do so by deliberately tightening monetary policy into heavily indebted economies, with falling real incomes. Economies that have still not fully recovered from both the GFC and the pandemic."
"In other words, their effective preference is for class war over financial stability."
"The big question central bankers must address is this: why did speculators and venture capitalists notice these imbalances while they and financial regulators did not?"
> wage growth had already lagged behind inflation
Wage growth almost always lags behind inflation, because it's much easier and quicker to raise the price of goods than for workers in general to demand and receive wage increases.
>The most mainline Keynesian would say that inflation has many more causes that just wage growth.
Yeah, but I don't think Summers and Rogoff are mainline Keynesians. They're Chicago School neoliberals, IIRC, and their training and career experience really has been within the ideology that inflation is a function of the bargaining power of labor and you purchase low inflation by wage repression.
I used ledger for 2019–2020 and by the end of it I had scripts to pull just about everything automatically, whether via OFX, Plaid, CSV, or PDF. It became a drag when I realized that I’m starting a new job, I’m opening new accounts, &c., and all my tooling would have to be constantly changing.
Now two years later I’m porting my details into Beancount (the tool whose documentation is linked), and I’ve changed my approach to one that seems much more sustainable: once a month, download statements and enter them in with some templates to assist. Maybe I use a CSV parser for credit cards and other high-frequency accounts, but for what I want out of plaintext accounting, I don’t need hours of weekly time to keep decent finances, but perhaps an evening a month.
If you don’t mind me asking, what’s your use case or motivation for having sub-weekly updates to your financial picture?
Because of that article I bought a hot water bottle on Amazon. I’ve had it for about a month now. It’s very pleasing to use to heat a bed in a way that an electric blanket isn’t: it is much faster at warming, gives you heat in exactly the place you want it, and you don’t fear your house burning down using it.
Being a plan 9 nerd, I originally found 9ime [1] when I wanted a compose key in windows. It serves the same purpose and has the same default compose key of right-Alt. I’ve yet to be frustrated by it enough to switch to wincompose (but the UX is certainly better).
From my previous research on whole-house fans, they are a wonderful device to have so long as you live in a place where the nights are cool, and most importantly, low-humidity. Unfortunately where I live and it’s 80+% RH at night, a whole-house fan would just give me mold.
Modern US houses, at least in much of the country, aren't built to be livable or to survive themselves without year-round temperature control. Partly, this is because optimizing for building survival and inhabitant comfort without AC and with only limited heating is at-odds with designing for efficient whole-house heating and cooling.
Notably, you don't want a very tight, low-outdoor-air-exchange envelope and tons of insulation in your walls if you're going AC-free and not also trying to start a mold farm. And if you want efficient AC you don't want tons of huge, openable windows on every single wall, at the end of every hallway, in all rooms, et c, nor an open, breezy attic (which helps a ton with temp control if you don't have AC, but is just wasteful if you've got it)
AFAIK design for minimizing AC power use and design for being able to tolerate not having AC are a "pick one, and only one" kind of thing.
[EDIT] Oh, and not strictly related to AC efficiency, but it takes a lot more skill and care in material selection to build a house that won't have all kinds of problems after just a few years of natural outdoor temperature swings, in the molding, flooring, even wall alignment & finishes (drywall, mostly, these days), so of course no-one bothers anymore—let the interior hit 90s in the Summer, swinging a bunch day-to-night, with high humidity, and parts that aren't near your heating source reach below-freezing temps at night in the Winter, and your interior will age at least 5 years for every 1 actual year, thanks to damage from huge amounts of expansion and contraction, unless it's designed to account for that. Ditto with aligning houses for optimal airflow, as far as the direction they face. Why bother, since it's always gonna have whole-house AC and heating? So no-one does.
