Russell Hasan's Blog

The coronavirus crisis has caused an unprecedented level of volatility on Wall Street, accompanied by one day which saw the largest single-day drop on almost 30 years. Why stocks are collapsing is simple: the coronavirus is going to cost every business money, so they will have less profit and pay smaller dividends, so their stock is worth less. Such a correction is actually how the market is supposed to work: prices send signals to tell people what things are really worth, and the stocks are now not worth as much as they were in our recent economic boom. A more interesting question is why is there so much volatility? It has been reported in WSJ, and is obvious if you look at recent charts of the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average, that most of the volatility is either right when the market opens or right before it closes. They say that investors buy and sell based on news. I think the major institutional investors have ways to buy and sell US stocks while the market is...

It was recently in the news that "6 million Android phones are at risk of being hacked." Then if you dig deeper it turns out these are the older devices in poorer countries with versions of the Android OS which Google has stopped supporting. Let me explain what "not supported" means. It means if the OS developer finds a bug or exploit (a vulnerability a hacker can exploit) they are not legally obligated to push a fix or security update. So, yes, an unsupported OS is a hacker's paradise, but that's not news, every tech person already knows that. A lot of people say a lot of things are fake news these days, but that one might really actually deserve to be called fake news. It would be like saying that people have invented this great thing called the wheel and that's worth a headline. Wheels are great, but that's not news.

While everyone is aware now that the Astros stole signs using a camera in center field during their tainted World Championship 2017 season, everybody seems to have forgotten the initial allegations that made reporters begin to dig: New York Yankees players alleging the 'Stros were stealing signs during the 2019 playoffs. Why isn't MLB investigating and handing out punishment for that? Maybe because MLB in its fear of the players' union cut a deal for prosecution immunity if the Astros confessed, which is reason why the culprits, those Astros players, were not and never will be punished by MLB. Were the League to do its job and rake some muck, the Astros players and the union would call their lawyers and sue, and MLB fears messy litigation. Do you job, Rob Mansfred!

Master legal reasoning. Improve your writing and hone how to draft a brief. Understand the intersection of political philosophy and the law, and how that should shape your legal arguments to judged and juries whether you are a seasoned lawyer or pro se. Impress your friends with your grasp of logic. This paper provides a new system of logic, including philosophical principles and logical notation, based on the work in logic done by Aristotle and later by Ayn Rand but also with a nod to modern Analytical philosophy, which is extremely useful to lawyers for analyzing facts to determine whether they satisfy the elements of a claim, as well as organizing arguments to a jury and presenting evidence. A libertarian politics emerges from the system of logic as a byproduct of the logical analysis of the intersection of law, politics, and philosophy. Required reading for lawyers and citizens who want to understand the law and how and why it impacts them. Learn more at  https://www.amazon....

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Here is a new theory of investing, inspired ny the libertarian belief that all government intervention in economics fails: try to guess where the market would have been, and then invest on that. In theory, eventually every government runs out of Other People's Money: the Fed can't drop rates below zero, there is a limit to how much money can be printed before inflation renders the currency worthless, they can only tax so much before a revolt. When the government fails, in theory your investment will make money. In an economic boom fueled by artificial manipulations, invest in a recession, or vice versa. Two objections can be raised: the government won't run out of money before you do betting against it, and your guess can only be mere conjecture with no proof in real financial data (because the "real" data comes from the Fed-manipulated economy). Both true. But for growth investors seeking a competitive edge against the efficient market, this a path--a risky path ...

If climate change is real and is not a hoax (and that is a very big "if") then there is a distinctly libertarian solution. Imagine this world: all of the world's oceans and seas, and every cubic acre of air space in the sky, which right now are unowned, are put into lots and sold at auction. Then the sky and the sea are not public, instead they are privately owned. Each sky owner could post a drone sentry in his lot of air to monitor it. Now what would this mean for the pollutor who wants to dump poison into the air? The process would not be to lobby politicians and get a permit from the EPA. Instead, if a pollutor emits pollution into a privately owned lot of sky without permission, that is a violation of the rights of the owner. The pollutor must buy the right to pollute. And if the owner firmly decides "no", then that is the end of pollution in that air space, with no cost-benefit analysis weighing death against profits. If a robber wants to rob a home owner,...