Thoughts at Random

The main idea: graph total military personnel and per-personnel expense, and arrange your forces perpendicular to where your adversary graphs.  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 03.05.2023, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  1.1 Here’s a dirt-simple and entirely conjectural (but hopefully fecund) model of military force planning: collect, for a series of countries of interest, the total size (in personnel) of all military branches (active duty, reserve and paramilitary), as well as the total military budget (ideally on a PPP basis). 1.2 Now calculate the total spending per personnel, and you’ll have decomposed military strength into two poorly-correlated factors, quality (a proxy for which is the per-personnel expense) and quantity (a proxy for which is total personnel). Graph this on a log basis. As an example, I use Wikipedia numbers to chart th...

The main idea: money can be placed in three tiers depending on whether it has or lacks neutrality and a responsive supply. 0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 14.01.2025, though it is a much expanded first part of my first post from September 2021. The current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  0.1 This post is a fluff piece, containing analysis and commentary but no proposed solution to some issue. I try to keep this sort of stuff to a minimum as commentary for commentary’s sake is not the point of this blog.  1.1 The economy under the division of labour is a massive and massively complex system with immense degrees of freedom. Only money, an emergent computer of comparable capability, is equal to the task of daily optimising resources such as to fulfill demand to the greatest degree possible. Money alone can run such calculations at any reasonable speed. 1.2 Thes...

The main idea: the volume of play involved in a fair lottery is indicative of either too much or too little money in circulation.  0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 09.10.2023, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  1.1 If you want to leave money creation to the market, you need to establish some sort of feedback loop whereas people don’t just create money ad infinitum, but grope (in their totality) toward some efficient volume. 1.2 I think I have solved this issue to a satisfactory degree, but for a long time I had been thinking of an alternative design which I could never finalise in theory. Although this has now been overtaken by the coupled currencies design, still worth laying out the main intuition.  1.3 Imagine you offer a lottery of fair odds to all comers, whereas you can invest any amount denominated in the currency being managed and eit...

The main idea: updating the otherwise fine practice of population exchanges beyond the need for pointy sticks to drive people out of houses in the middle of winter. 0. Posts on this blog are ranked in decreasing order of likeability to myself. This entry was originally posted on 16.01.2023, and the current version may have been updated several times from its original form.  1 The setup 1.1 Back before some dudes gathered on a battleship to sign some T&Cs and history ended, population exchanges were what you did if you wanted to win the peace. 1.2 I have it on good authority that history will resume its business-as-usual march soon enough, so we’d better be prepared to keep them down once we’ve kicked them down. And in case we’re the ones to be kicked, its nice not to see your womenfolk driven out in the snow.  1.3 It took Europe a couple centuries to figure out that national passions carry over generations, and we’re now in the process of understanding that the same is la...