(no subject)

By digging into the question of truth, you discover a whole cemetery of philosophical and mathematical dead bodies. For example,

Ever since Pilate asked, "What is truth?" (John XVIII, 38), the subsequent search for a correct answer has been inhibited by [all kinds of variations of the Liar's paradox.]
...
The moral: an adequate theory must allow our statements involving the notion of truth to be risky: they risk being paradoxical if the empirical facts are extremely (and unexpectedly) unfavorable. There can be no syntactic or semantic "sieve" that will winnow out the "bad" cases while preserving the "good" ones.

Saul Kripke, Outline of a Theory of Truth. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2024634

I give up.

(no subject)

"Monty Python Deductive Reasoning" (Watch on YouTube)

Ding an sich

America is a capitalist democracy; China is communist dictatorship. You wouldn't know the difference by looking at the way their leaders conduct bilateral trade negotiations.

(no subject)

A couple of learning points from the NYT article about Covfefe's taxes.

1. The real estate industry is massively subsidized by the government, both on the producer and the consumer sides.
2. Real estate assets perform quite well over the long run. You probably don't have enough of them in your investment portfolio.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/03/the-case-for-real-estate-as-investment.html

upd: the discussion that Trump is either a real estate genius or a looser doesn't make sense because he is both. The industry is inherently cyclical, highly leveraged and liquidity-sensitive. On average, the market rewards long-term investment in real estate.

TIL

As of January 20, 2017 the president of the US was also President/Director/Member/Trustee/Chairman of 565 LLCs and Corporations, e.g.



There must be a lot of creative accounting that's going on between all these firms.

https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/12DAC79CC95F849085258142002703CA/$FILE/Trump,%20Donald%20J.%20%20final278.pdf