I've blundered into an American-Colonies history-mystery. Today I visited the American Bookbinders Museum. They have old-timey equipment on display such as one might use to bind books by hand. And o...
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Book Report: The Big Rig
It's about about USA long-haul truck drivers working darned hard for darned little pay. This book gets into the historical and sociological (Is that a word?) reasons for the "little pay" part. Some ...
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Book Report: Empire of Cotton
It's a history of the cotton business. Cotton was one of the first global businesses. Cotton's not so perishable; you can grow it in one place; spin+weave it somewhere else; sell the resulting cloth ...
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Book Report: The (Mis)Behavior of Markets
I kept hearing recommendations for this book. But I'm not really a finance guy, just a recreational math guy. I'd already heard this book's gist: financiers keep getting into trouble because their fo...
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Book Report: Everything is Bullshit
The Priceonomics blog wrote a book with a rude name. It's pretty interesting; a lot of it was stuff that I'd already read. (I wasn't subscribed to the blog, but other folks kept forwarding links&hell...
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Book Report: Priceless
Yesterday, I dodged Black Friday, but didn't quite make it through Buy Nothing Day. I bought a streetcar ride and then a train ride down the peninsula. How much were those worth? I don't know. I k...
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Book Report: Making Globalization Work
This book is worth reading. That's unfortunate; it has about 30 pages of interesting material scattered amongst 300 pages of verbiage. It's a book about Globalization--mostly about opening up marke...
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Book Report: Introduction to the Practice of Statistics
Today, I'm playtesting the Hogwarts Game. This game is going to be kind of unusual in that Game Control is providing transportation. They warned us not to pack our stepladders, copy machines, cooler...
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Book Report: The Great Wave (Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History)
Sometimes prices go up. This has happened before and will happen again. This hurts poor people more than it hurts the rich: poor people already spend most of their money. When prices go up, they can...
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Book Report: Hidden Order
It's a economics book aimed at non-economists. It introduces terms and sets up some interesting thought experiments. E.g., what is a good way to divvy up chores between roommates if those roommates...
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Book Report: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
I was just expecting a pulpy Western. And this book is a pulpy Western. But it's written well, and also has some interesting musings upon the topic of greed. That quote which is famous for not bei...
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Book Report: Naked Economics
Many people recommended Naked Economics, but I should have paid attention to the details of their recommendation. This book is an introduction to economics. If you took "Economics 101" back in colle...
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Book Report: Fortune's Formula
William Poundstone wrote Prisoner's Dilemma, one of my favorite books ever. That book convinced me to look more closely at the prisoner's dilemma, and that in turn changed the way that I think about...
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