Mark Thoma's Other Blog

Coasting a Bit Today

I've stayed at worse places:

How'd That Happen?

It's just dawning on me that I'm in Beijing.

Please Keep Your Externalities to Yourself

On the flight today, I had my ear plugs in, the sound canceling earphones on, music playing relatively loudly, and I could still hear the guy sitting two rows behind me talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. And talking. Inanely, boringly, and loudly. Very loudly. I really didn't think he could keep it up for the full 12 hours of the flight, but he proved me wrong. I almost lost it at one point.

Door to door, including the three hour flight delay in SF, was around 19 hours. But I guess it beats walking.

Measuring Differences

Resetting my clock today, it occurred to me that most measures such as distance, weight, volume, etc. vary by country or region, but one measure, time, doesn't. The 24 hour clock is present everywhere I can think of. There are variations, e.g. Daylight Savings differs across both countries and regions in the U.S., and the words differ, but no the clock. Why?

Global coordination of the clock must be far more important the global coordination of other measures.

The Disheartening Email Echo

Every so often, I make a good faith attempt to catch up on my email. I take several hours, usually on a weekend, to process the backlog and answer all those hard questions I've been putting aside until later. I feel bad that I can't answer all the email I get, and I try, but I get way behind pretty fast and it takes a few hours of concerted effort to get it through it all. Even then, it's not possible to respond to everyone (which bothers me a lot, but I just can't keep up anymore). But once it's done, it feels really good. Yahoo!!! I got through every unread email!!!

However, it doesn't last very long. Apparently, the people at the other end are better at this than I am and they somehow answer right away. The responses quickly fill up the unread email box and a new, large backlog  of unread email quickly accumulates. So discouraging...

Clowns Wear Ties

I'm the only clown at the conference wearing a tie (it's gone at the first break...).

Weird to be the one overdressed rather than the other way around.

And So Are You...

I should count to ten, slowly, before responding on Twitter -- or not respond at all:

BOARDRISKMAN @MarkThoma Why don't you and all your tax buddies write a "Biden" (F) check to the U.S Treasury! about 1 hours ago via HootSuite in reply to MarkThoma

MarkThoma @BOARDRISKMAN Why don't you and all of your government spending hating buddies opt out of Social Security and Medicare? about 1 hours ago via web in reply to BOARDRISKMAN