Bay Area Trip

All of my posts to this point have been rather instructive in nature, or so I have planned at least, so this will be the first one that is more a release of thoughts. I am up in the Bay Area right now looking at some schools that I have not been able to see yet. So far I have seen UC Berkeley, Stanford, Santa Clara, Dominican University and tomorrow I will be going to UC Davis.

Here are a few photos from Berkeley,

The first building on Berkeley,

Stanford,

Church at Stanford,

Looking back out of the entrance of Stanford, Palm Drive and The Oval

Inflation

So I am not entirely sure how many people check to see that I am an Economics major in the About Me section, but that is what it turns out I am. So naturally my friend figured it would not be to hard for me to explain a few simple economic phenomena to her the other day, one of which was inflation. She basically asked why it exists and I stumbled around trying to explain it for a while and that made me a little frustrated with myself and I went straight home, pulled out my old Intro to Macroeconomics book and looked it up.

Inflation, according to my book, is a process in which the price level is rising and money is losing its value. Basically the price of things as a whole have gone up and your money is now worth less than its previously was in terms of your ability to purchase these goods. There are several ways for this to happen, the two most common of which are demand-pull inflation and cost-push inflation. Demand-pull inflation is where the demand for a good is suddenly higher and the price of it is then bid up by consumers. Cost-push inflation is where the cost of raw materials may rise and this in turn makes the end good more expensive. When the cost to make the good goes up, surprise surprise, so does the final product. These are the basic ways in which inflation can occur and by no means the only ones, its a rather complicated process it turns out and I feel a little better after refreshing my understanding as to why I could not explain it immediately.

However, how do we control inflation and why do we not try to make inflation zero, are two good questions that I also tried to answer. The answer to the first is that the Federal Reserve Bank is usually charged with controlling inflation by controlling the interest rates. If the Fed lowers the interest rates then people will be more willing to consume; if the Fed raises the interest rates people will be encouraged to save and discouraged from spending as the cost of loans goes up with higher interest rates. Knowing these are the two main ways in which inflation are controlled makes it a little easier to see why our inflation is normally kept to three or four percent instead of zero. If the Fed tries to curb inflation all the way to zero by raising interest rates, it is in effect cutting the spending habits of the people and the economy will slow and this can lead to recession. If the Fed lets interest rates become zero people will be glad to spend and borrow as much as they want and inflation will quickly rise at a pace that is quite harmful to the economy.

As you can see, by allowing some inflation to occur it is actually good for the economy because it promotes consumption, which is the basic building block of our economy. When people see that there is inflation in the economy they should not make the jump in reasoning to assume it is bad and that they can no longer afford things or that the government is not doing its job, but rather ask themselves how much inflation is occurring and whether or not it is a healthy amount.

Shelfari: Catalog Your Library

As with most of my recent posts, this one will explain an online social network, in particular one used for book lovers. After getting this blog up and running and attempting to use it in order to share my interests and the things I believe to be important, I began to get the idea that one of the more important parts of me are the books that I read in my spare time and decided I needed a way to put them up for everyone to see. It was at this point that I started searching for online applications that could perform this task for me. I found three such services, LibraryThing, aNobii, and Shelfari.

The first was LibraryThing, which is incredibly intensive with more than 17 million books registered and access to over 80 libraries including Amazon.com and the Library of Congress. Although it had the best ability to track your books, it was the ugliest of the three websites and not necessarily the most intuitive or well set up. The biggest drawback to this site and that which made me decide not to go with it, is the fact that after logging 200 books for free you have to pay a 25 dollar one time fee for life to register any more. Although 25 dollars is not a lot of money, it is certainly more than either aNobii or Shelfari, which are both free not matter how many books you catalog over your life.

The next one that I found was aNobii which allows cataloging your books and putting them into several categories. It was also extensive in its search capabilities, looked better than LibraryThing, however, I felt the site was simply to busy and a bit to hectic for my tastes.

Finally, I was led to Shelfari, which was named as one of the 10 most beautiful online social networks and was very user friendlier and not cluttered by any unneccessary links and advertisements on the sidebar. It also allows to put your books onto your shelf, your current reading list, your favorites, and my favorite, the wish list. This lets people quickly see the difference between books you have finished, books you are reading, and books you hope someone might get you so that you may read them in the future.

Pandora

Pandora is an online radio station that is completely innovative in the way that it goes about selecting music. You begin by typing the song or artist you want to hear and then it does an analysis of the song based on what Pandora calls the Music Genome Project. By figuring out the attributes that make the song what it is, Pandora is able to select music that is similar to the original song of you chose. Whatever the song is that begins playing next, you get to judge by giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. In this manner you are able to “talk” with Pandora and let the website know exactly which songs you do and do not like to further refine the radio station to your personal preference.

Pandora allows you to create up to 100 of these free radio stations, each with its own theme or style of music genre. All of this is supported through some advertising on the side of the screen which does not affect you, the listener, at all and makes it so that it is both free and uninterrupted by any kind of commercial. You can also share the stations that you make with a friend by typing in their email address that they listed with Pandora. With all the hours we spend surfing the web now it is nice to be able to listen to the music you like and continue to hear new songs you did not even know previously, but almost always like because of the song analysis. You can click on the Pandora link on the right hand side of my blog to visit their site.

The End of Poverty

I am currently reading a book by Jeffery Sachs, adviser to the United Nations and lead Developmental Economics Professor for Columbia, titled The End of Poverty. In this book he outlines the Millennium Development Goals aimed to eradicate extreme world poverty, which is classified as those living on less than one dollar a day.

He points out that nearly 1.1 billion people currently live at this level and 2.7 billion people currently live in what is considered moderate poverty, or less than two dollars a day. By these standards it is interesting to note that no one in the United States is even considered moderately poor. Looking at these numbers the next thing to notice that nearly 40 percent of humanity is currently living in poverty.

The Millennium Development Goals aim to halve the number of poor people living on a global stage. They are also aimed at a number of other topics including Hunger, Education, Gender Equality, Child Mortality, Maternal Health, AIDS, Environmental Sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development. To read more about the Millennium Development Goals you can look over this website or to understand Jeffery Sachs plan you can his book, The End of Poverty, yourself.

FireFox

Recently I made the switch from Internet Explorer to Mozilla FireFox for my web browser. Admittedly I only changed because we use it at work and I was told I had to start using it, but since changing over I think it would be impossible to go back. There are so many awesome add-ons that are available through FireFox that you can use to customize it, that Internet Explorer just seems dull and out of touch with how interacting with the internet should be.

I am currently using a few of these add-ons that I think are pretty cool; they are search word, Foxy Tunes, and Me.dium. Search word lets you assign a letter in your address bar to a search engine that you commonly use. By doing this you can go to where you normally type in, lets say wikipedia.com, and instead simply type, w “wikipedia search”. Essentially it saves you the step of typing in the search engine address and replacing that step with an assigned letter. I currently have g for google, w for wikipedia, and d for websters dictionary.

Foxy Tunes is an add-on that allows you to control whatever music player you use through your actual internet page. This saves you the trouble of flipping back and forth from iTunes to your internet page by letting you hit play, pause, skip, or adjusting the volume all at the bottom of your internet page where it normally says done. It will also connect you to a web page that displays information about the song that is playing including the lyrics.

Me.dium is a bit more out there as far as the use of it goes. Basically, Me.dium allows you to see what websites people are looking at and if your friends are on it with you, the ability to chat like AIM. I think watching the demo video and looking at their site are probably the best way to figure out exactly what it is, but I think it looks like it could have some really cool uses for making the web a less lonely.

Online Brokers: TradeKing is King

After researching the many different available online brokers I have reached the decision to open an account with TradeKing. Although TradeKing may not be the best choice for everyone, I do think that it will be the best choice for me and the majority of other people wondering what online broker to go with. In choosing an online broker I tried to find the cheapest one with the most features and ease of use. TradeKing has all the available features of any of the more expensive ones out now allowing you to buy/sell stocks, funds, ETF’s, and also allows you to reinvest your dividends which I believe will be a key part to a lot of my portfolio strategy.

The other brokers that I looked at were E*Trade, Ameritrade, and Scottrade. Of these, Ameritrade appeared to be the most comprehensive and I believe it is the largest online broker in the United States, however, it does cost more than TradeKing or Scottrade. Scottrade has no fees that I could find and looked like a good choice until I realized you could not buy/sell ETF’s or reinvest dividends. E*Trade just had a mix of fees and higher prices and I really did not look at it for that long. If you are unsure about what broker to use I would recommend looking at Scottrade because it does look like good value if you are not planning to use all the tools that TradeKing comes with.

Google Reader Explained

Since I just learned what Google reader was I thought that it would be helpful to post a link that explains it so anyone else who is curious can see what it does. Basically it allows you to read all your favorite blogs by having them sent to you instead of you going to them. This link shows a quick video that explains it very well.

Google reader also lets you select blogs you like in order to share. These shared blogs are then put on a website where anyone that knows the site address can look them up and read the blogs you found particularly interesting… hence the link interesting blogs on the right hand side of my page.

First Blog

This is my first blog and I am pretty much just trying to see what this is all about and what I can do with it.