Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Month: January 2023

Using Democracy 4 to teach politics and economics

I’ve been selling educational site licenses for the Democracy series of games pretty much since I started making them, after people who taught politics started to contact me. I’ve always been very proud of the fact that a long list of educational establishments around the world have been using the game to teach so many people. It feels like a sort of vindication of the game’s design that teaching professionals think its accurate and reliable enough, that they will use it in education.

I have to admit, that I don’t really put that much effort into promoting the game as an educational tool. I have made a few attempts to do so in the past, but I found it quite frustrating to make any progress. It reminds me a lot of the sort of bureaucracy that I have experienced in trying to build a solar farm. The amount of paperwork, accreditation, form-filling and documentation required to sell educational software is enough to put me off.

Its ironic that teaching establishments, which should ideally be very future-focused (after all, you are teaching people at the start of what could be very long lives), are in fact incredibly slow when it comes to adopting new things. The minute you add a ton of bureaucracy or process to a system, you make adopting new technology or ideas more trouble than it is worth, especially if there is no pressure on the people responsible to update their teaching methods.

When I studied at the London School of Economics, it was a very dry, and very boring process. The cutting edge technology at the time was for students to place their own mini tape recorders or dictaphones at the foot of a stage where an extremely bored tenured professor would drone on about IS/LM curves until we all fell asleep. Lectures were not put online, for the very simple reason that there was no online yet.

I find economics, and Politics to be fascinating topics, but the way they were taught in the early 1990s was far from exciting or interesting. The topics were presented mostly as maths, and mostly as equations drawn literally in chalk on a board. There was no excitement, no attempt to make the subject matter appealling, interesting or memorable.

This is something that modern teachers like Scott Galloway are doing a lot to change. Its perfectly possible to make subjects exciting, interesting, even hilarious. I would LOVE to trade in my education back then, for learning science and business from scott galloway’s youtube videos, or veritasium and similar science channels. Youtube is the new lecture theater, and its way, way better.

Democracy 4 takes all this a stage further, because not only does the game present the topics of politics and economics in a much more accessible way than a textbook, its interactive. Its one thing to read a dry textbook description of hyperinflation, or sovereign debt crisis throughout history, but its another thing (and I suspect far more memorable), to experience them as disastrous events in a computer game you are playing, as they upset and derail all your plans for your country!

In general, its far better to learn things in a multi-sensory and personal way, than to have facts book-splained to you in a dry and academic environment. Interactive learning is orders-of-magnitude better than just expecting people to read dry descriptions and memorize theories and principles purely because they might come up in an exam, and that might have some impact on some future job interview that you might reluctantly apply for…

I didn’t set out to make edutainment, and I would definitely not describe Democracy 4 as an educational game. Its a game about a topic that is often taught in schools, and its as accurate as I can make it, while still being fun. I absolutely believe that this is the best way to about creating software that can be used in schools. Make something interesting and entertaining and fun, and then also make it accurate where it matters, and that way students will WANT to engage with it, and will take a real interest.

One of the most boring topics in economics is interest rates. What makes it worse is that a HUGE swathe of macroeconomic theory is about interest rates. I studied it for year and still found it boring. However, when you wrap the topic up in a video game where government debt interest becomes a variable that the player has to keep an eye on, in order to ‘win’, the topic suddenly becomes much more interesting.

I suspect we are heading towards a future where physics lessons are more like playing kerbal space program, where art classes are like using VR sculpting tools, where astronomy is taught using universe sandbox and where yes, economics is taught with Democracy 4. The only barriers to making education like this, is getting past the ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome that has historically kept ‘games’ out of schools. Both teachers and parents still seem resistant to the idea that games can teach, and probably fear looking like they are slacking their ‘serious’ responsibilities by introducing something marketed as a game into a classroom.

I suspect I do not have the time, or the patience to work my way around the school-boards and educational departments all over the world to persuade them to buy Democracy 4 site licenses, although I would love it to be more widespread. If you are a teacher, or work in education in any capacity, I urge you to give it some thought. Ideally I’d do some deal with a country’s department of education to make it usable in every school, but my mind just recoils in horror at the number of meetings that would require :D.

My 2 month review of a Tesla model Y performance in the UK

I picked up my car about 2 months ago, so I’ve put some actual miles into it now, and can assess what I think of it. Previously I owned a Tesla model S 85D, which I had for about 7 years. That was an ‘autopilot v1’ car, so not as advanced technically. It also had radar (apparently) and ultrasonic parking sensors. Eventually, the software for the main screen started to glitch and bug me, so I upgraded it to a new screen, at my expense. I think it was £2k? it was definitely an upgrade worth doing. Anyway, I got sick of the length of that car, and wanted the latest autopilot tech and better range, so sold my model S privately and bought the model Y performance. I had to wait a year! but it arrived at the end of November.

My very first impressions of the car were pretty good. It felt CHUNKY, in a way that is hard to describe. The Y has laminated double-pane windows, so its quieter inside than my old S, and you can definitely hear the difference. The whole car feels really solid. I don’t think mine has a front or rear cast body, but it does feel like its much more professionally assembled than the old US-made model S (made in Fremont California is 2015).

Something I was kinda dreading was the switch from a 2-screen model S, where the main screen tilts towards you, to the super-spartan and flat-angle screen of the 3/Y. In fact… I got used to it within days. Its actually very very easy to use, and I don’t miss the screen behind the steering wheel one bit. The interior design of the 3/Y is a bit ‘love it or hate it’ but I definitely love it. Looking at all the buttons in other cars just amuses me now.

I opted for red, performance, with full-self driving, which is also known as the ‘give me the priciest options because I’m mad’ choice. What do I think of the value for money? Well… no regrets on the red paint, it looks super awesome, especially when its sunny :D. The performance… is a bit of an overkill luxury. Frankly the sensible choice would have been long range. The performance model is stupidly, stupidly fast (0-60 in 3.5s), and absolutely pointless unless you are a track-racing fan. I am fully aware that I did this purely because I hate buyers remorse, and if I bought a new car and it felt under-powered I’d be sad about it :D.

The full-self-driving stuff is even more of a leap of faith. Right now, it doesn’t get me much, except the car recognizes traffic lights, and stops at them, and then pings to remind you they just turned green. This works perfectly for me. The other stuff is ‘coming soon’, which is Tesla speak for ‘at least 2 years’, but I intend to keep the car at least 5 years so I do actually expect to see the benefits in time.

I will say that the general autopilot performance on this car is WAY better than my model S. I drove about 55 miles recently on a trip back from London where I only steered once, briefly to change from a motorway to an A road. The rest was all 100% computer controlled, in the dark, with high winds and heavy rain. My model S couldn’t have done it that well.

There is one small thing I love about it: the charge-point door will self-close after you unplug (its powered) which is super convenient.

In lots of major ways, its an upgrade on my old Tesla. The range is way better, the energy usage is way lower, it charges tons faster, and it feels like the sound system is just much higher quality. I would hate to go back to my old model S now I have this car. I also have greater access to the supercharger network, because this car has a CCS connector, and newer superchargers only support this newer standard. There are now superchargers absolutely anywhere that I’d want to drive, at the same time that I need them less due to the longer range.

To be honest, my conclusion is that I kinda over-specced the car, but I don’t regret it. The autopilot stuff will likely grow into its valuation. The lack of parking sensors will likely be replaced by better tesla vision stuff soon. I can definitely see me still owning this car in 5 years and being very happy. Actually the ONLY scenario I can imagine where I get rid of the car, is if Tesla offer a smaller car with similar range and performance (or a bit less). I live down a single track lane, and UK parking spots in car parks can be pretty tight with the S or the Y. Offer a Tesla model 2 performance which is a few cm narrower, and maybe 30cm shorter, and I’d be very tempted, especially if it was even more efficient.

I actually got the Y instead of the 3 because I like hatchbacks and hate old fashioned boots/trunks. If the model 3 had been a hatchback I’d likely have got one of those instead, as we don’t have a dog or kids and don’t really need an SUV at all.

TL;DR: The model Y performance is amazing, but the performance bit is likely overkill.

Bad news for consumerism: Everything’s good enough.

I am well aware of the history of the term ‘640k is enough for everyone’, so hold your horses in your excitement to post it as a ‘gotcha’ response. I would like to lay out a case for a big slowdown in consumer spending, and put it to you, the reader, that although often we are wrong when we predict such things, this is not always the case. We have not all rushed out and bought 3D TVs, as predicted. We did not all buy VR headsets. I have still only seen a single folding phone in the wild…

I’m in the economically enviable position of having some spare cash which, in previous years I would probably have put towards buying some new thing that I coveted. Maybe a new TV, or phone, or gaming PC or laptop, or whatever. However, I am definitely noticing that this is slowing down, at least for me. Maybe this is an age thing? but maybe not…

I’ve had a bunch of mobile phones over the years, right back to the first actually practical ones, which were given to me at work when I was in IT. They were big, they were dumbphones (no apps or games or internet access), they were heavy, they sucked.

The first phone I had which was a smartphone was a revelation. Then, the next one was much thinner, much lighter, and much more powerful. The last one I bought was a samsung S8. Its amazing. It has bluetooth/wifi it has a fingerprint reader, it has GPS, it has a nice big screen that does face recognition, takes amazing pictures, and videos, can post-process them, and can play games. I use it to control my car, my drone, my lights, my TV, to talk to my solar panels and home battery, to surf the net, and to pay for everything. It charges wirelessly. I record my weight on it, and my steps. I take it everywhere.

I’ve had it years now, and there is basically no reason I can think of to get a new one. At least not yet. I’m not just ‘skipping a generation’, I think I’m at the end. It would be *nice* if the phone battery lasted longer, or if it was a bit thinner or lighter, but its not exactly a hardship now. It charges wirelessly in my car anyway, and its hardly heavy or bulky. It fits easily in a pocket, but its not too small to lose track of. Its thin, but not so thin I can break it.

To get me to buy a new phone, you need to REALLY go nuts on the few things that would improve it. Make the battery last 10x as long, and make it 1/5th the thickness (but same strength) and yeah…MAYBE I would pay the money to buy a brand new phone. I don’t anticipate this being possible in the next 5 years though.

My TV is a 43″ TV. I cant go bigger, because it fits in a small alcove. We sit far enough away from it that a 4K resolution would be pointless. The streaming apps *are* a tad slow on it, but can I really be bothered to set up a new TV, and recycle the old one, and tell alexa about the new one… just for a minor speedup in streaming UI? Not really. If a new TV was FREE, and had a slicker, faster UI, then *maybe* I’d bother. But my current TV does the job well enough.

Its not just these two things.

We bought a toaster years ago that seems indestructible and will probably last as long as me. My gaming PC has ridiculous power, and plays 60FPS Battlefield 2042 even on a 5120 res monitor. This laptop is fairly new, and amazing, and frankly…I am not sure if there is any improvement that is worth paying for. If you gave me a voucher for consumer electronics that I had to spend RIGHT NOW, I honestly struggle to think of anything I’d upgrade. Home theater system is fine and will last forever, alexa works fine…err…don’t bother with bluray player any more. No radios, everything is streamed. Nothing needs upgrading. Nothing.

Now obviously this is not the end of consumerism because a) I’m clearly well-off enough to have bought all this, and many people are not and b) I don’t know what crazy tech may come out soon, but I am definitely noticing a change…

chatgpt is amazing. midjourney is amazing, but these two amazing discoveries don’t require me to buy ANYTHING. The most exciting tech breakthroughs right now seem to be software, not hardware. When I see headlines about CES (Consumer electronics show), it just seems laughable. They are running out of ideas now. I really don’t need a phone that I can fold. I don’t need a 3D TV, I cant be bothered to wear a VR headset to be entertained.

The trouble is, our entire societal model of economics seems to be focused on selling new shiny gadgets to the wealthiest 25%. Thats how the system works. Bored wealthy people buy expensive cool cars which in 10 years time end up in the hands of ordinary people. The trouble is, we have run out of ways to get those wealthy people to trade in their current stuff. Its good enough. People now want ‘experiences’ not a slightly thinner, slightly faster phone.

And yet… there is a ton of work for society to do. So many people do not own a refrigerator, let alone a drone or a VR headset. We need to be addressing that huge swathe of people without the basics of western consumerist culture, not working harder and harder to make VR and the metaverse a thing. To be blunt: we need cheap fridges, not AR goggles.

In theory you can fix this with a lot of high taxes and high welfare, taxing those AR goggles like crazy to fund purchases of ‘my first fridge’. In practice, I think we do need to do that, but ALSO we need a shift in thinking in modern technology companies. For the last 30 years or more, it seems that the assumption in ‘tech’ is that the goal is always to produce some new, amazing cool thing that wows the CEO and impresses everyone in the boardroom. The problem is, everyone in the boardroom is rich.

The future may not be ‘look at these AR goggles, they are phenomenal’, but in fact be ‘look at this ordinary fridge. It was made for $30’. Thats what we NEED, but its not what we are getting. Companies are more excited about new features and functionality, but never about low cost. Tech companies want the specs on new tech to always be higher bigger, better. Hardly anybody talks about affordability, or how cheap something is to run.

I don’t know how the politics of the future will work out. We may end up with UBI and a crazy high tax rate on a super-wealthy 0.1% of the population. Who knows? What I do hope for is a future where technologists and industrialists care more about what the bottom 25% cannot yet afford, rather than what the top 0.1% might buy if you can make something 1% faster.

What about you? do you have a big long wishlist of stuff you wish you could afford on amazon? or are you quite happily reading this on a 3 year old phone or 4 year old laptop?

Solar farm battery storage business case calculations

I’m currently in the throes of building a 1.2MW solar farm somewhere in England. Its an adventure, to put it mildly :D. So far the planning process and bureaucracy has taken just under 2 years. In that time a lot has changed.

Originally the plan was for a 1.2mwp solar farm, and a battery of either 256kwh or 512kwh. The current situation is that I’m evaluating a 583kwh battery (they can basically pack a bunch more cells in there now), but the economics have got a bit trickier and it may not actually be viable. This does not mean the project itself is not viable, the farm likely still is profitable (I hope!).

First things first, I’ll explain why any of this would make any sense. You cannot just rent a field, fill it with solar panels (assuming the farmer lets you, and planning permission is granted), and make a pile of money. Its not that simple. (And trust me: none of that is simple). The main problem you face is the grid connection. Basically solar farms go in fields, so we are already limited to relatively rural locations. This means that the land is large enough, and also its not going to upset too many people. Our site is surrounded by fields and hills and generally…nothing, so there were zero objections. This is all good news..

…but it also means you are on the edges of the power grid. If you are REALLY lucky, you find a site that has a field to rent, thats rural, but also just-so-happens to be a site where a major grid connection cable runs right through it. This is super ideal, and no, there no sites left like this any more in the UK because all the canny early developers have already snapped them up :(

So…we end up with a perfect field, planning permission, and a happy landowner, but we are basically connected to the rest of the grid by what amounts to a thin USB cable (not really). This is the point at which you ask the grid to upgrade that line and send you the bill, they do, then you laugh at how they accidentally added a few zeroes to the bill, and then you start to cry. Basically upgrading a power line is a nightmare. They cant just add heavier cable and be done. That cable may then sag too much in summer, or be too heavy, so you need new pylons, and then the ground under the pylons is too weak so you need foundations and omg expenseahontas.

In practice, that means that the local DNO (power company) has told us ‘you can generate 900kw at any moment from here but no more’, and thats AFTER we pay for a major grid upgrade. This sounds nuts, but when you think about it, if a power cable was only ever built to supply 2 farm houses, its not ever expecting a power flow of more than about 40kw total maximum. Then suddenly we arrive on the scene with 3,000 solar panels and want to push 20x as much power through those cables…

What does this have to do with batteries?

You might have noticed the difference between our 1,200kw solar farm and the 900kw limit on export. Well spotted. Its quite glaring isn’t it? Actually, this is exactly what most people do, and if you have solar panels at home, you do it too. Its called inverter under sizing.

The inverter is the box that converts DC to AC, and is the device that determines the maximum power that can come from your solar panels. In many cases, its rated BELOW the maximum output of your panels. This must seem insane…because surely that means at peak sunshine some of your power is just wasted right? YES. This is exactly what happens, and its normally because the bigger inverters are very expensive, and the PEAK output of your solar panels only triggers quite rarely, maybe for just 1 or 2 weeks in summer around midday. This means that the extra spend on the ‘bigger’ inverter might not be worth it.

Example: You have a choice of a 2kw inverter or 2.5kw inverter. The difference is $1,000. You have 2.5kwp of solar panels. Which do you choose? Well its actually hellishly complex. You need to model the output of your panels for every hour for every day in a typical year, and then ‘clip off’ the top portion where output would have been above 2kw. You then need to value that power at whatever you get paid to sell it, or what it would have cost you to buy it. You do that for the lifetime of the inverter, then work out if its a good deal.

I’m currently basically doing a similar thing, except the limitation for me is export limits, not inverter sizing. Our site will have 10 inverters anyway, and the bigger you get, the more granular you can be with how many you have. (For those curious, yes, thats like 300 panels per inverter, but each inverter supports a bunch of strings).

What does this have to do with batteries?

Well batteries let you cheat the system! They can do it in home installs, with what they call DC-coupled batteries, and you can do it at the grid/utility scale with batteries the size of shipping containers. (I’m evaluating a 20ft long one). Before I get into this, I need to list the different ways the battery might make sense in our solar farm. The battery would generate revenue basically 3 ways:

Frequency support services:

This is where the national grid basically pays you to act as a sort of ‘cache’ or ‘buffer’ for the grid. If they suddenly have slightly too much power, then dump it on you, then grab it back a bit later (maybe even a few seconds or minutes). They do this to keep the electricity grid at 50hz, to prevent every transformer in the country going bananas and maybe even failing. This is a constant battle, fought every second of every day. Here is a chart of the last 36 hours of it:

You can make money from these services, just by having a battery connected to the grid, and being registered to rent out your battery to act as a local buffer.

Time-based arbitrage stuff

You might think the price of electricity is fixed for your current contract term. Ha. Yes, at the consumer level it is, but behind the scenes, the wholesale price of electricity fluctuates like crazy, not only each month, or each day, but each 15 minutes. And it fluctuates a LOT. You can decide to ‘keep’ some of that solar power you generated at midday and sell it later. In fact in theory this can be hugely profitable, based on the current volatility. Again, here is a price chart the last 36 hours:

In that chart, the price gyrated between negative £70 (They pay YOU to use power) to positive £200 for a MWH. In theory, if you could buffer the whole farms output, and only sell it at the peaks, you would make decent money

Peak-Shaving

This is a system where you take that extra power that you are not allowed to export, you buffer it in the battery, and trickle it out later. This transforms the usual bell curve of solar output into a different shape:

We fill the battery with the ‘red’ energy, then trickle it out later to extend the peak output duration of the site. This energy would otherwise be totally lost, and we would not earn a penny for it!

Ok, so these are three ways storage can make money alongside your solar farm. What the problem? The problem is two-fold. Firstly, there has been a HUGE increase in the amount of grid-connected storage in the UK, which means lots of batteries bidding for the same grid services regarding frequency and price arbitrage. That means that naturally, the profits from these mechanisms have dropped. There are a lot of VERY big companies doing this now, and tons more on the way. Plus, there are other technologies that you compete against. The main one would be hydro (basically a gravity-water battery), but also there are experimental things like gravitricity, and companies working with flywheels and other tech. Its VERY volatile.

Secondly, the price of the battery has gone fucking nuts. In 2 years, the price has gone up 50%. Thats crazy. This may partly be due to the EV revolution, which is scooping up all those lithium ion batteries I was hoping to pack my shipping container with. It might also be related to components shortages for power electronics (lots of chips in a stationary battery), and general inflation for stuff like shipping and labour to install a concrete base and so on…

So right now, with the first two potential battery income streams kinda poor, we have to think whether the basic and most obvious one (peak shaving) is actually worth it. It looks right now that a 583kwh battery cost is about a quarter the total cost of the entire project.

That MIGHT mean its just not worth doing. Sure, being curtailed at peak output for a few weeks each summer may suck, but the big question is how much? I don’t have access to the data yet, and do not have software that accurately measures it, nor is it likely worth the hassle of buying any. I am digging further.

The maths I need is pretty simple, IF you have the modeled data: Given the output each day, for 25 years, what amount of KWH is curtailed on the site given a 900kw power limitation. I then need to guess the market price for this and compare it to the battery install and maintenance cost for 25 years. (I know, its optimistic to expect the electronics to last 25 years, but hey).

Hopefully it DOES make a convincing case, because if not, I basically have to scrap the idea of a battery, or at least wait and see if prices fall. I can still install the solar farm in the meantime.

Why the discovery of behavioral economics means you need to uninstall tiktok.

I studied pure economics at the London School Of Economics. At least, thats what I tell people when I am trying to sound clever. Technically its a true statement. What I tend to leave out, is that I pretty much lost interest in the topic after year one, and was mostly coasting in years 2 and 3. I went to the pub a LOT, I drunk a LOT of vodka and whiskey. I played the guitar a lot, I listened to a lot of heavy metal. This was all unexpected, because I was super-good at economics A-level, and was destined to be good at degree level. The problem? I suddenly realised I found economics beyond a certain level boring, and too maths-focused.

Annoyingly, the solution to my interest-failure would soon be at hand, because 2 clever people eventually discovered an entirely new field of economics called behavioral economics, which, to my mind, was 1000% more interesting, and absolutely was the sort of thing I would be interested in, had it been an option. But no, the LSE still taught ‘classical’ economics, which focuses on interest rates. Other things matter, but you would be amazed how much of classical macroeconomics is focused on interest rates. I studied it for 3 years. I still don’t know whether rates should go up or down. This stuff is complex as fuck.

Why are you reading this?

The significant thing here is how those clever people suddenly were motivated to invent behavioral economics. I’ll give you the short version, and tie it in to the title soon. Are you excited?

Classical economics models rational behavior. In classical economics, every ‘agent’ in the system has perfect information and is perfectly rational. All data is available, and all decisions make sense. If offered 2 products, an agent will evaluate all of the properties of each of these products, giving this decision their 100% attention. They then make an absolutely perfect choice, based on the cost/benefit analysis of each choice. There is no regret in classical economics, no buyers remorse.

Classical economists were not idiots. They were extremely clever people, and they knew that is not entirely how people work, and that we all make the odd silly decision, but at the macro level, across large populations, its pretty clear that rationality wins out. The best product, taking into account the best offer in terms of features/price will always win. In the long run, rationality rules.

These economists were at a dinner party (presumably where they would while away an evening arguing about interest rates), and the host was cooking the main course, while the guests enjoyed some small nibbles. The guests were enjoying the nibbles, and suddenly one of them concluded, with the agreement of all present, that they should ‘put these nibbles away so we stop eating them’, presumably because they were concerned they might spoil their appetite for the main course.

So far, so middle class dinner party.

But hold on. One of these clever economists suddenly pointed out that this was irrational. At the moment, everyone present has a choice: Eat a nibble, or wait for the main course. This was a simple choice between instant satisfaction or a potentially better option if they wait. They were all adults, they could all make that decision. But WAIT. Everyone agreed that in fact, they would be better off if this choice was removed. They would actually be better off with LESS choice.

On the surface of it, this is not exactly earth shattering, but actually, its a revelation. In the word of classical economics, more choice is ALWAYS good. The idea that en-masse, intelligent adults with full knowledge of the available choices, would be better off if they removed some choice, is a complete refutation of everything that classical economics tells us about the world. It was the beginning of an entirely new science of behavioral economics, which would make its inventors widely read, respected and famous, and change economics forever. It would lead to studies of the special nature of ‘free’ as a magical price, and a staggering amount of research and publication. Behavioral economics is awesome.

Ok, but so what?

What this massive upheaval of literally hundreds of years of analysis shows us, is that human beings are incredibly irrational. We are extremely good at backwards-justification, where we pretend our choices make sense, but if you actually look at how we make decisions its an absolute car-crash. We are massively irrational, and so far from the happiness-maximizing creatures that classical economists imagined. Even given really, really simple choices such as ‘eat these nibbles now… or more of the main course in 15 minutes’, our brains completely and utterly collapse with the stress. Only PHYSICALLY removing the nibbles from our immediate vicinity enables us to make what we think is the ‘correct’ choice.

Social media is the nibbles.

You probably spotted that early. I’m not Agatha Christie here, but I hope the point rings true. Deep down, we are all aware that the amount of time we spend doom-scrolling on twitter is not maximizing our happiness. We know that having twitter and tiktok on our phones is just leading us to waste endless time getting into arguments, or just mindlessly scrolling for a tiny tiny serotonin hit…

About two years ago I uninstalled twitter from my phone. I also don’t have a facebook or reddit app on there. I’ve never used tiktok or instagram. A few years before that I quit an online community that just sucked me into arguments and flamewars. I was aware for a good time that these things were ‘bad’ for my mental health, but they were the tray of nibbles in front of me, so I kept nibbling.

I still have a twitter account, but the fact that I have to go to a laptop or desktop PC to use it means I’m wasting less time there. This is, for me at least, a good thing. I know a bunch of people who tweet at least 50 times a day, always political, always angry, always distressed. This is *not good*.

The best economists in the world went decades without realizing just how irrational we are, and just how out-of-touch their model of human behavior was. We are THAT delusional about our ability to make choices in our healthy interest. Its incredibly hard to take this lesson to heart and actually do something about it, but once you do it, its pretty amazing.

You should delete all the social media apps from your phone.