- Occupation: I am a
computer programmer for Wall Street.
- Science Education:
I have bachelor's degree in
engineering from Caltech, with emphasis on computer
science. Between high school and college, my education
includes 4 years of physics (including relativity and
quantum mechanics), 3 years of chemistry, and
lots of calculus.
- Economics Education:
I only took a year of economics
in high school and micro economics in college.
However, when I came to New York in 2005,
the first job I took
was dealing with mortgage bonds. During the
interview, they described how the bonds are cut up into
tranches and so forth, and I asked "That's
pretty complicated. Do you hire MBA's
and teach them to program?" and they answered "No,
we hire programmers and teach them finance.". The
company gave us classes taught by former traders to
teach us finance and economics in general.
I have also subscribed to The Economist magazine for most
of my adult life (I was born in 1960) and I have
followed a lot
of other financial news in detail.
For several years
I ran a discussion group in Manhattan called "Fans
of Capitalism".
I developed a very astute understanding of how the law
of supply and demand works by the time I was 12 years
old. When Richard Nixon imposed a wage-price freeze
on the economy that year, I thought (with good reason)
that it was insane.
- Politics:
Registered Republican. My politics are pretty close
to those espoused by National Review
magazine, though
I disagree with them about climate change.
When I was in college I was a Libertarian, and was in
the Libertarian national HQ on election night 1980.
I agree with the observation by Michael Schellenberger
and Vivek Ramaswarmy that, as people abandon traditional
religion, they sometimes elevate secular causes into
pseudo-religions, with "sacred cows" and "heretics". I
disagree with them about many other things, though.
- Interest in Climate Change:
In 2016 I started studying climate change and
came to the conclusion that it was real, but also that
the environmental left was not dealing with it very
well, and decided to become active to try to inject some
sanity into the climate movement in the form of
being reasonably technical saavy (many environmentalists,
including the leadership,
are not only technically ignorant, but also
uninterested in
becoming technically better-informed) and
conservative perspectives.
Since 2016 I have been reading everything I can
get my hands on about climate change, and have
travelled to Washington, DC over a half-dozen times to
lobby congress for climate action.
I have spent a lot of time going into conservative
spaces on social media and debating with climare
skeptics.
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