ergoproxy

Neither... Chess is not a game of skill. Nor is it a game of chance. Chess is a game of memorization-- Memorize all the opening books, all solved end-games, and every famous historical game ever played, and you too can be a great chess player!

David Sirlin has a chess variant called "Chess 2: The Sequel" that uses a three-pronged solution to chess's problem of over-reliance on memorization:

(1) Pick 1-of-6 opening armies: This deals with the problem of memorized opening books.

(2) Mid-line invasion: You win if your King crosses the mid-line of the board. This new victory condition deals with the problem of memorized end-games.

(3) Dueling: Instead of simply capturing a piece, players use a double-blind bidding mechanic with a scarce resource called "stones" to decide the victor. This makes a good memory even less advantageous.

Sirlin's website is here: http://www.sirlingames.com/products/chess-2-print-and-play

From the article: "Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value."

Adam Smith discovered the Paradox of Value: "Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarcely anything; scarcely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it." See An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV, "Of the Origin and Use of Money," Paragraph 13.

Like water, books may have a high use-value, but a very low exchange-value. Ditto for free open-source software.

It's unfortunate that the dominant school of economics today--Neoclassical economics--equates the value of a commodity with its price, whether the market is competitive or not.

By contrast, Classical economists like Adam Smith distinguished between (1) value, (2) use-value, (3) exchange value, and (4) price. Prices are further distinguished between natural prices and market prices--

(1) Value: The amount of labor necessary to the production of a marketable commodity.

(2) Use-value is the amount of discomfort or labor saved through the use of an object. Use-value does not depend on the existence of a market.

(3) Exchange-value: What quantity of other commodities an object will exchange for, if traded. It does not need to be expressed in money prices.

(4) Money prices: There's a distinction between "natural prices" (long-run cost-of-production) and "market prices" (price you actually pay for an object in the market); and these are only equal under conditions of market efficiency, equilibrium, and rational expectations. See the blog post "Adam Smith on Equilibrium" (March 26, 2013) at http://somrh.blogspot.com/2013/03/adam-smith-on-equilibrium....

Canadian poli-sci professor Robert Albritton claimed that capitalists (like Jeff Bezos, presumably) are indifferent to the use-value of the commodities in which they deal, since the only thing that matters to them is the money they make. Source: http://www.nodo50.org/cubasigloXXI/congreso/albritton_31ago0...

This story mentions Fermat's theorem that every prime congruent to 1 modulo 4 is a sum of two squares. Fermat provided no proof of this theorem. There are at least four different proofs, attributable to Euler, Lagrange, Dedekind and Zagier. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proofs_of_Fermat's_theorem_on_s...

It doesn't matter whether robots or humans are teaching your kids, if the whole approach to education is wrong:

Current model of education: Multidisciplinary, value-free, with an emphasis on standardized tests.

Compare this to:

Alfred North Whitehead's reform model: Transdisciplinary, values-laden, with an emphasis on the importance of imagination. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead#Views_on...

Note that multidisciplinary means teaching small parts of a large number of disconnected subjects, whereas transdisciplinarity means teaching a few important ideas that organically link many different subjects and that apply to real life.

International comparisons were also done: US respondents answered the question about the Earth going around the Sun correctly (74%) more often than Europeans (66%). South Koreans answered this correctly 86% of the time.

There were a couple of politically charged questions on the survey:

1. The universe began with a big bang: US answered True only 39% of the time.

2. Human beings evolved from earlier species: US answered True 48% of the time.

Across all 9 survey questions, US respondents answered correctly 65% of the time. Education level was a major factor: "those who had not completed high school answered 45% of the nine questions correctly, and those who had completed a bachelor's degree answered 78% of the questions correctly. The average percentage correct rose to 83% among those who had taken three or more science and mathematics courses in college..." (page 7-20).

Direct pdf link: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/qm/389.pdf

N.B. this is a grad level course. The same author has another set of notes on QM intended for upper-division undergraduate physics majors here: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/qmech/qmech.pdf

He also has an intermediate level course on Thermodynamics & Statistical Mechanics here: http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/sm1/statmech.pdf

Of the billionaires on Forbes top 100, only 1 has a Ph.D. By contrast, a couple are high school drop-outs and a fair number are college drop-outs. Source: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100505134335AA...

Tuition is rising faster than inflation. After 4 years of college, 5 years of grad school, and another 5 years of post-doc work, a Ph.D. could easily accumulate hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt.

So if making money is your main goal in life, skip the Ph.D.

In Tom Perkin's neo-Feudalistic utopia, do I get votes for all the payroll taxes, sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes, and government fees (e.g., car registration) I pay? ("Fees" are taxes too. They're called "fees" by politicians who want to lie about not raising taxes.) Or does Perkins only count income taxes? Nearly 1/2 of gov't revenue comes from individual income taxes. But 1/3 comes from payroll taxes. Estate taxes are only about 1%, half of excise taxes.

I suppose "corporations" will get the vote too; about 10% of gov't revenue comes from them. Not sure what they get out of it, since the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will put multi-national corporations above the law, and allow them to impose new taxes on nations to recoup lost profits from laws that violate their "rights" to pollute and defraud: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/how-can-nytimes-endors...

Will votes be commodified? Can I buy and sell votes on a crappy website built by CGI Federal? Won't Wall St find a way to securitize and infinitely re-hypothecate the vote?

If I bring a big sack of money to the polls, can I purchase additional votes on election day? Will they only take US dollars, or can I pay with Bitcoin?

Can I borrow money to buy more votes?

Can Ben Bernake simply print $15T to buy votes for The Fed? He could choose the next government and monetize the entire public debt--killing two birds with one stone!

When silicon valley execs collude to lower wages, there's effectively one employer for high tech workers; and in a monopsonistic labor market, raising wages doesn't reduce employment, it actually increases employment, increases output and lowers prices--something that's easy to prove by drawing supply and demand curves and considering what happens when we start off with the price of labor below the equilibrium price, and then increase it up to the equilibrium price.

However, silicon valley jobs aren't the same as minimum wage jobs: McDonald's and Burger King aren't colluding and agreeing not to hire each other's workers and so forth.

Moreover, when NJ raised its minimum wage in 1992, what happened was (1) employment increased, and (2) prices increased. This observation fits neither the competitive nor the monopsonist model! These observations were made by David Card and Andrew Krueger.

A resolution for the "Card-Krueger Paradox" was developed by A. Ross Shepherd, Professor Emeritus of the University of Missouri--Kansas City and Published in the Southern Economic Journal on Oct 1, 2000. There's a copy online here (but it lacks the figures): http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Minimum+Wages+and+the+Card--Kr...

His solution boils down to realizing we have an impure monopsonistic market in which the higher minimum wage increases the firm's Long Run Average Cost. So employment goes up, but so do prices.

But we already have $hit for currency--the US dollar. Ben Bernake is pinching off $2.793B/day. Compared with the US dollar, cow pies have actual intrinsic value:

1. You can burn them to make heat or electricity. By contrast, it is illegal to burn US bank notes: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/333

2. Burned cow dung repels mosquitos. By contrast, US dollars attract blood-sucking bankers.

3. Cow pies used in building materials are a cheap thermal insulator. By contrast "cold cash" and "hot money" are just metaphors.

4. Cowpats are a fertilizer and may be used to produce agricultural commodities. It may be true that "Money begets money" (or M-M'). But US currency can't produce real goods or services that people want unless its invested wisely, and right now the US is printing money to blow housing bubbles.

> The Gov has guaranteed all of these!

The word "guarantee" gets tossed around a lot, but it's misleading:

Fannie and Freddie's "implicit guarantee" only means that the government will lend these GSEs funds to ensure timely payments of principal and interest to mortgagees (not MBS investors!), at rates slightly above the government's own borrowing rate, up to the "conforming loan limit" which is $417,000 in most areas. So it doesn't entirely eliminate default risk. And it doesn't reduce servicer risk or interest rate risk at all.

Only in 2013 with QE3 did The Fed start buying Ginnie Mae MBSs with an "explicit guarantee" that entirely eliminates default risk. (These securities still have issuer/servicer risk.) But The Fed is still buying non-Ginnie MBSs as well.

> the Fed actually eventually made a profit on the toxic debt they acquired during the bailouts.

The Fed made $90B in profits in 2012, but they were only able to do this by printing $85B per month in QE. In other words, they're printing profits...something you and I are not allowed to do legally. The bigger question is: If they're printing $1T/yr, why are they only making a measly $90B/yr in profits?

> the Fed is purchasing agency MBSs at market rates

In what way are they "market rates" when the Fed printed $1.5T out of thin air to purchase them? Rather, The Fed is using its market power to set the prices of MBSs.

Bear Stearns failed mid-March 2008. Despite this, on March 27, 2008 Mark Hulbert gave serious weight to Richard Band's prediction of an "uptrend that could carry the blue chip indexes to all-time highs by late 2008 or early 2009. Dow 16,000 here we come!" http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-heading-for-16000-richa...

And on April 18, 2008, Hulbert said "The Dow Theory appears poised to go on a buy signal..." http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-theory-poised-to-trigge...

Following this advice, you would have bought near the top of the market, when what you really want to do is buy low and sell high...

Hulbert is probably the most knowledgeable student of DOW history. He knows that what happens to the DOW in the short run is mostly meaningless noise. He should take his own advice:

"Some psychological researchers, for example, have presented series of random numbers to human subjects and then asked them whether there are any patterns in the data. Overwhelmingly, the subjects claim to have detected patterns in the data.

"We should keep this research in mind as we watch the stock market day in and day out. We may think we have detected a pattern, but that doesn't mean that it really exists."

Quoted from: Market Watch (April 3, 2007) http://www.marketwatch.com/story/dont-read-too-much-into-sto...

It's important to note that the Fed is purchasing these securities at "face value"...they're not doing any kind of valuation.

Lawrence Hunter wrote an op-ed for Forbes back in 2012 saying the Fed's (at the time) "$1.3T" of MBSes were "worthless." http://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencehunter/2012/10/29/are-fe...

My main job was pricing MBSes. The calculation is basically sum of discounted contingent cashflows. Even before the 2008 crisis, back in the mid 90s, I'd often see MBSes with a negative net income. Then I'd get frantic phone calls from upset clients, often accountants or CFOs or brokers, who couldn't understand how a valuation less than zero was even possible, and I'd have to explain how their expected expenditures were going to be greater than their revenues...

I tend to agree with Hunter and Hedges that the Fed's "$1.5T" of MBSes are mostly worthless.

That said, I also understand the reasons why the Fed is making these purchases: increase MBS prices, increase liquidity in the MBS market, and so forth. But the bigger reason still seems to me: bail out TBTF banks.

For the Fed's POV on this subject, they publish FAQs and data on their "MBS Purchase Program" several places:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/reform_mbs.htm

http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/ambs/ambs_faq.html

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WMBSEC

I think people are missing the main point. Debt-equity swaps have been a major tool of the Federal Reserve in bailing out TBTF banks. Here's how it works:

I'm a banker. I paid $10B for MBSes in 2007. Big mistake. In 2008, their valuation fell to $0. So I do a swap with the Federal Reserve. I give Ben Bernake my portfolio of MBSes. And he gives me $10B in US Treasury Bonds he's purchased.

I never would have made a dime off my MBSes. But now, the US tax payer is on the hook for paying me $10B in principal plus interest. Meanwhile, the Fed puts "$10B" of MBSes on its books. Doesn't matter that these debts are worth zero. They get to do it...

Right now, the Fed has "$1.5T" of MBSes on their books from doing these deals. Source: http://money.cnn.com/2013/12/19/news/economy/federal-reserve...

I used to be VP of Mortgage Tax and Accounting at a Wall St. bank back in the 90s, and I try to stay up to date on this fiasco. I don't have a problem with what Chris Hedges said, just how he said it: he said it too fast, and it came out wrong. The main idea is still right.

Chris Hedges took the red pill, and Agent Smith told him, "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I've realized that you are not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague."

The Matrix would have been a better allegory to use than Moby Dick, particularly for HNers. Moby Dick might appeal to Harvard-educated, Arabic-speaking, Vermont liberals like Hedges, but most of us haven't read it and don't want to.

It's not that I disagree with any of Hedges' major points, it's just that I find his presentation erudite, pretentious and snobbish.

Economist Kenneth Boulding summed this up more concisely: "Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist."

And if Capitalism is a "plague," what is the cure? Hedges talks about Marxist revolution, but stops short of calling for one, instead falling back on quotations from Shakespeare, and Kant, and Dante, and Black Elk, and Nazim Hikmet.

So, what is the cure?

1. War and revolutions aren't the answer: If they decimate the population, temporarily reducing resource consumption, decreasing the supply of labor so that wages might finally start rising again after 30 years of stagnation, then what? After all the misery and suffering that war brings, we've bought ourselves a few decades with a slightly more equitable wealth distribution, and put ecological disaster in check for a while, but it's only temporary, and our populations will soon grow themselves back into the same problems all over again.

2. Technology? Increased efficiency will only spur increased consumption. It's called Jevons paradox. Technology will only speed things up.

3. Accelerationism... Help the capitalists steal all the wealth and push us over the edge of ecological disaster. Evolution will make sure something else succeeds us.

4. Enlightenment: In the Gospel of Thomas, Saying 56, Jesus said, "Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse."

The world is already dead, and there's nothing Chris Hedges can do about it! Whenever something we love dies, we experience mourning. The stages of mourning are--

Denial - Most of the people in the world are stuck in this stage.

Anger - This is where we find revolutionary groups like the Tea Party and OWS.

Bargaining - I think this is where Hedges finds himself. He really thinks there's a way to resurrect the planet--Art, Poetry, Novels--but he doesn't seem sure.

Depression - Lot's of people struggling at this stage. About 800,000 to a million people commit suicide per year.

Acceptance - Doesn't mean you're ever going to be happy again. It just means you're awake to reality.

The NSA's been around since 1952, but what the 2001 Patriot Act did was to amend the 1978 FISA law to setup secret courts to issue secret warrants to conduct secret searches, and the NSA only had to report the number of such warrants obtained per year to Congress, meaning there was no real accountability. The US Constitution allows for spying on US citizens, but there was supposed to be accountability to the Courts and Congress. Now the checks and balances are gone.

But what percentage of felons register as Libertarians?

Funny how people aren't that interested in politics until they go to prison... 35% of Americans aren't registered to vote. Only 57.5% of eligible voters actually vote. Among eligible voters, 25% identify as Republicans, 35% as Democrats, and 40% independents.

A mere 0.1% of the prison population are Nazis, but they account for 20% of prison murders. I'd rather be in prison with a Democrat than a Nazi if those were my only two choices.

Probably the main reason so many convicted felons are Democrats is that felons don't get to vote. Like voter ID laws, voter caging, poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and gerrymandering, non-violent drug felony convictions are just another tool used by social conservative elites to deny the vote to the poor and minorities.

Interestingly, Republican Rick Santorum argued for the restoration of voting rights for ex-offenders. On this point, he agrees with Pres. Obama.

As many as 10 percent of the minority population in the US is unable to vote, as a result of felon disfranchisement.

This is so, because there are disparities in arrest decisions. There are disparities in decisions to prosecute an arrestee for a felony or a misdemeanor. George Zimmerman, darling of the Right, was arrested for felony resisting an officer with violence in 2006; but because his dad is a retired Judge, he got to plead to a misdemeanor, and got no jail time. As soon as they charged him with murder in the Martin case, rather than negligent homicide (what the cops initially charged him with), I knew the prosecution's case was architected to result in acquittal; the non-vigorous prosecution proved me right--my high school mock trial team could have made mince meat of his defense.

Blacks convicted of the same crime as whites get longer sentences. 4 out of 5 convicted felons get no jail time at all, instead getting "alternative sentencing" like fines, probation, parole, halfway house, rehab; and there's racial disparity in these jail versus alternative sentencing decisions.

White collar criminals who actually go to jail have it worse than the media makes it seem. But most pay a fine and don't get any jail time. And much of this stuff never gets to the point of arrest or prosecution anyway.

55% of Federal prisoners got sentenced for drug felonies. 96% of Federal prisoners are there for non-violent offenses. We've spent $1T on the War on Drugs, and it's been a cataclysmic failure. http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/06/opinion/branson-end-war-on-dru...

Congress never outlawed drugs so much as they abused their power to regulate interstate commerce in order to authorize a drug scheduling system. The FDA decides the particulars of the drug schedule. As President, I would (1) grant a full pardon to all non-violent drug offenders, (2) abolish the FDA's drug scheduling system, (3) direct the Justice Dept. to deprioritize prosecution of non-violent drug offenders, (4) order the FBI and DEA to deprioritize all investigations into non-violent drug crimes.

I'd also prioritize crackdowns on white collar crime: fraud, embezzelment, tax evasion. There'd be big shift in the makeup of felons' Party affiliations after 4 years with me in the Whitehouse.

The only thing all libertarians hold in common is a strong belief in individual freedom. Different factions of libertarian construe freedom differently. Noam Chomsky opposes Corporate power, Government power, and Patriarchal power in the family. The Tea Party primarily opposes the power of the Government to tax. My big problem is with Tea Party elites who are really only interested in 0% capital gains taxes, and could care less about lowering regressive payroll taxes and excise taxes. As an individualist, I only take responsibility for my own words and actions. I don't accept responsibility for others--not even other left-libertarians, and certainly not Tea Partiers.

Over time, technology will solve this problem. Professors will get replaced by robots and pre-recorded video lectures. There's already NLP AIs that can grade research papers. Technology to check papers for plagiarism and grade tests have been around for some time. Professors will go the way of the Blacksmith...

Tim Cook borrows $150B and uses it to buy Apple stock. This shifts the demand curve for Apple stock out (to the right). The equilibrium price of Apple stock rises. Tim Cook sells his stock at the new higher price. He profits.

More likely Joe Schmoe's pension plan will see Apple's stock go up and buy more shares, thinking there's real market demand for it. But there isn't. This is really just a variation on the classic "pump and dump" scheme.

Worst case scenario: Apple does this three or four more times, can't service its debt, and gets driven into bankruptcy. Then Joe Schmoe's Apple shares in his 401k are worth $0.

My best friend built a neural network based trading system in 1994. He risked his $100,000 inheritance on it. His parents were killed by terrorists in the First Intifada and left him this money.

Central banking intervention into the US bond market to lower bond yields (10-yr bond yields fell from 8% in 1994 to 4% in 1998) for the benefit of bondholders bankrupted him. His neural net didn't predict outside intervention. After he lost it all, he became despondent. He shot himself in the chest with a shotgun.

So, if you were my best friend, I'd tell you this:

We are all Noah. We are all at risk of drowning in a flood of desires. Drowning in a flood of worthless, central-bank-printed, fiat currency. Build an ark, a refuge, to protect yourself from the flood of desires and self-centeredness that are drowning us.

In the Dammapada, the Buddha said, "Desires are never satisfied, not even by a shower of gold. He who knows that the enjoyment of passion is short-lived and that it is also the womb of pain is a wise man."

So forget about making an extra $100,000. We could go into hyperinflation tomorrow, and your extra $100,000 savings would become worthless overnight.

Stop chasing paper and do something worthwhile instead.

> Tom Perkins [...] wrote a letter about it [...] And the Wall Street Journal published it.

Until a few years ago, Perkins was on the board of directors of Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, which owns the WSJ... Probably still a big stock holder.

Perkins retired from the board after the wiretapping scandal. See here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/09/02/jim-bre...

So, no surprise WSJ published this $hit.

Damn straight. Look here: "Apple's [Tim] Cook told [Carl] Icahn that he's still studying Icahn's proposal to buy back $150 billion worth of the company's stock." Source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101151952 (Monday, 11 Nov 2013)

Apple makes about $60B/yr in profit. Ichan wants Cook to borrow $150B to buyback Apple shares. Icahn and Cook would be the main beneficiaries of this plan.

I've seen this many times in non-tech firms. Look at Borders book store. They did several rounds of this over decades to boost their stock price. Each round, enriching the officers and board members, and piling the company up with loads of debt. E.g., November 27, 1996. "Borders Group Inc., the retailer of books and music, said today that it would buy back up to $50 million of its common stock." http://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/27/business/borders-in-stock-...

Eventually, they couldn't service their debts and they went bankrupt. The officers and board members couldn't care less. They got rich. Their employees and customers got screwed. Their creditors took everything including the pension fund. Some commentary here: http://www.datalounge.com/cgi-bin/iowa/ajax.html?t=11235835#...

The moral of the story: Corporate raiders and vulture capitalists could care less about anybody but themselves. They'll gladly drive successful businesses into bankruptcy to make a lousy buck. Along the way, they make the employees suffer. And they reduce competition in the market place and hurt consumers. And we make it easy for them as a society by pretending this is how capitalism is supposed to work. Shame on them; shame on us too.

We just saw that big tech firms collude to hold down employee pay! See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1699529

That means, in effect, there's only one employer in the tech industry. So the labor market in tech is not an example of a perfectly competitive market. It actually follows a monopsony model.

In a monopsonistic labor market, raising wages/benefits doesn't reduce employment, it actually increases employment, increases output and lowers prices...all good things! See my comments here for a fuller explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7185717

Therefore, Obamacare did not hurt the tech labor market. Tim Armstrong is full of $hit. They should take away his degree in economics if he really believes his own bullcrap. He was just covering his own a$$. Maybe what's hurting his employees, stockholders and customers is his own overblown $3,216,534 salary in 2011. Source: http://www.forbes.com/profile/tim-armstrong/

Review of the book Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner. A couple other reviews in the NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/04/books/bach-music-in-the-ca...

...and the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-revie...

The Bach piece that most moves me is the 2nd movement (Largo) of Harpsicord Concerto No. 5 in F-minor (BWV 1056) here played by Glen Gould in 1957 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0zPokdN2wg [video]

What Bach work moves you?

In a competitive labor market, raising the minimum wage results in lower employment, lower output and higher prices.

But we just saw "How Silicon Valley CEOs conspired to drive down tech engineer wages," so we know we don't have a competitive labor market. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7111531

In a monopsonistic labor market, raising the minimum wage results in greater employment, greater output, and lower prices. It results in greater employment because the monopsonist faces and upward sloping supply curve for labor, and uses his market power to keep wages artificially low, beneath the equilibrium wage. If the wage is exogenously raised, the quantity of labor supplied increases. (If you don't believe me, you should draw supply and demand curves, and prove it to yourself.)

In reality, when NJ raised its minimum wage in 1992, what happened was (1) employment increased, and (2) prices increased. This observation fits neither the competitive nor the monopsonist model! These observations were made by David Card and Andrew Krueger.

A resolution for the "Card-Krueger Paradox" was developed by A. Ross Shepherd, Professor Emeritus of the University of Missouri--Kansas City and Published in the Southern Economic Journal on Oct 1, 2000. There's a copy online here (but it lacks the figures): http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Minimum+Wages+and+the+Card--Kr...

His solution boils down to realizing we have an impure monopsonistic market in which the higher minimum wage increases the firm's Long Run Average Cost. So employment goes up, but so do prices.

I think ageism is implicit in modern Western culture. The Fields Medal has ageism built right into it: "a prize awarded to two, three, or four mathematicians not over 40 years of age." Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal

However, skimming down the list of Abel Prize winners, those guys are no spring chickens, and do great work in mathematics well into their senior years.

Traditional crop irrigation methods are notoriously inefficient. Lots of room for improvement. I saw a novel solution on a recent episode of ABC's Shark Tank. The Wikipedia article on water conservation has a section about optimal crop irrigation methods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_conservation