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Installation Install and enable the cron daemon. sudo pacman -S cronie sudo systemctl enable --now cronie.service systemctl status cronie.service # should be active (running) Setup To edit crontab, run crontab -e If you get an error like this, /bin/sh: line 1: /usr/bin/vi: No such file or directory crontab: "/usr/bin/vi" exited with status 127 pass the following commands: set -Ux EDITOR emacs set -Ux VISUAL emacs This defaults to emacs across different Fish sessions. Then with crontab -e add jobs like this. ...

The previous post about fast navigation involved getting to the right directory in the file explorer. Zoxide achieves that functionality for the terminal. To install, run the following. (fzf, fuzzy finder, is optional.) sudo pacman -S zoxide fzf Next, initialize the shell. For Fish, add the following to ~/.config/fish/config.fish. zoxide init fish | source This step differs for other shells: Shell File Line Bash ~/.bashrc eval "$(zoxide init bash)" Zsh ~/.zshrc eval "$(zoxide init zsh)" Fish ~/.config/fish/config.fish zoxide init fish | source Once configured, Zoxide will note your use of cd. It will remember the places you visited. You will be able to then jump straight to the relevant directory. ...

While thinking about sports, I am reminded of the example of topological equivalence showing how a coffee mug is a donut. Many sports are essentially football. Some, such as hockey, ice hockey, gaelic football, american football, rugby, basketball, lacrosse, polo, water polo, etc, are obviously so. The playing conditions, the number of players, the scoring, the shape of the threshold (goal, basket, goal line) and various other details differ, but in each case, there is an object that needs to sent beyond a certain threshold by a team to score points. ...

Background I have been using the Search functionality within the Dolphin file manager for KDE Plasma increasingly recently; however, the speed with which the results would show up left much to be desired. I went looking for faster options and chose Baloo indexing with KRunner, which runs a lot faster than Dolphin crawling through the directories on every search. Setup Step 1: Check the current state balooctl6 status If it says “not running” or “could not be opened,” proceed below. ...

Murray Rothbard begins his discussions about economics from Aristotelian times, but my main interest is in the recent era. The main lessons were around four characters: Richard Cantillon, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Below are my notes, consolidated from previous posts. Richard Cantillon (From Richard Cantillon, the Founder of Modern Economics.) Richard Cantillon (1680-1734), an Irish-French banker/merchant predating Adam Smith, is arguably the founder of modern economics. The book he wrote shortly before his demise, Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, officially published in 1755, was an influential and highly citied document, before it was overshadowed by the retardation of economics that would follow in the form of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776). ...

I remember a piece of writing advice from Brandon Sanderson (I’m not sure if he was referring to the words of someone else) which goes something like this. It relates to individual scenes in the story. Scenes should do the following. Progress the plot, Color the character, or help develop him further, Expand on the worldbuilding or setting. Plot, character, and setting are the three aspects of the story that must be accounted for. Each scene should work on at least two of the three, and ideally all three. ...

In statistics, a marginal distribution refers to the probability distribution of a variable irrespective of other variables. Marginal probability is obtained by adding (discrete case) or integrating (continuous case) the joint distribution over other variables. In economics, ‘marginal’ refers to the incremental change in a variable corresponding to a unit change in another variable. The calculation involves taking the derivative of the relevant function. Examples: marginal cost (change in total cost when one more unit of a good is produced), marginal product (change in the total production for one additional unit of input), marginal utility, marginal tax rate, etc. ...

I finished Rhythm of War recently and am 300 pages into Wind and Truth at the moment. By the reviews I have seen, book 5 of the Stormlight Archive has not been received so well. The change in tone (the modernization of the language) from book 1, the over-elaboration of thoughts, the tedious emphasis on the characters’ mental health, the ‘softness’ of the magic, and so on have been blamed. ...

David Hume (1711-76) was a Scottish philosopher and an influence on Adam Smith. His brief works on economics consisted of several serious errors, as noted by Murray Rothbard below. As a proponent of the quantity theory of money and its corollary, the price-specie-flow mechanism, Hume recognized that the abosolute quantity of money in an economy did not matter: prices would adjust according to the quantity of money in circulation. He believed that changes to the money supply mattered in the short-term; specifically, that an injection of money would stimulate the economy in the short term. However, this effect would disappear as the new (higher) price levels reflected the increased money supply. Hume believed that this adjustment in prices would be quick and proportionate. This is problematic in the following ways. ...

Turgot recognized interest return on investment as the price paid by laborers to capitalist-entrepreneurs for advances of savings in the form of present money. He also noted that interest on money loans tend towards the natural rate of interest through the process of capital rebalancing. Demonstration: If the interest rate is lower than the natural rate, people begin to borrow more and invest in businesses where they can earn higher returns. This relative increase in borrowing will increase the interest rate, making it approach the natural rate from below. If the interest rate is higher than the natural rate, people will divest from businesses or liquidate assets and begin to loan out their funds. This will increase the relative supply of loans, which will decrease the interest rate, making it approach the natural rate from above. Capital rebalancing is consistent with this proposition of David Hume: “no man will accept of low profits, where he can have high interest; and no man will accept of low interest where he can have high profits.” He described the positive relationship between risk and interest rate: Less risky loans would have lower interest and vice-versa. Since government bonds would be the safest, they should bear the lowest rates. Along with the note on the interest rate of governement bonds, Turgot attached how pernicious to the economy such debts would be. They would effectively result in an interest rate floor, diverting funds to sterile investments. Public debts crowd out productive use of private savings by maintaining artificially high rates. Lending and borrowing at interest is a reciprocal contract, advantageous to both parties. Hence, usury laws are absurd on moral grounds: the contracts are voluntary and no one is injured. Turgot also arrived at the Austrian conception of time preference. Interest accounts for the difference in the value of the promise of a sum of money compared to the value of the money available now. The lender of funds needs to be compensated, in the form of interest, for the following: The sacrifice of the utilization of the funds at the present moment, The risk associated with the possibility of losing forever all or a part of the amount loaned. Turgot also defined the concept of capitalization: present capital value of land or other capital good on the market tends to equal the sum of its expected future rents or returns, discounted by the rate of time-preference/interest. Turgot described the relationship between quantity of money and interest. Interest rate depends on the savings-spending ratio of the population. Increase in money supply can both increase or decrease the rate of interest, depending on the spirit of thrift or the spirit of luxury. (The logic is similar to that noted in point 2.) Reference Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995), Chapter 14, 15.