Travels, Entertainment, Macroeconomics

I am currently at Melbourne Airport about to board a flight to Adelaide; an actual flight and an actual holiday (of sorts). I had originally booked this several months ago, but then 2020 happened and so the flight was delayed until this point. Melbourne's snap lockdown almost meant that it didn't happen again. Unsurprisingly, I have a pretty full itinerary already and will be taking the opportunity to catch up with friends some of whom I haven't seen in person for many years. There is also a small mountain of RPG books to collect which I purchased a few years ago. Whilst I'll be doing my best not to look at work emails some parts of my life cannot be put on hold; specifically studies and the volunteer teaching. Although on that note I will continue my studies into the Julia programming language. I must confess I haven't been this interested in a programming language for quite a well, preferring to do as much as I can with the bash shell or various *nix tools, and delving into C or Fortran when necessary. The designer's manifesto had high ideals, and which largely seem to be in place, and very important to me it is well-designed for parallel computing.

On the home front, caseopaya has resigned from her current job, a fairly wise decision given their behaviour, has picked up some good leads, and has found herself an apartment to move into for several months whilst here new apartment completes building and we make the necessary actions to get this place sold. We both went around to visit Brendan E. yesterday, a master of popular culture entertainment, and enjoyed "Lovecraft County", which is just the series that is needed for those who like the setting and mythos of said author's work but are horrified by his astoundingly vile racism. For a bit of retrovision, we also watched "Tremors", which apparently has become a bit of a cult-classic. It was as low-budget as I remember it with a cheesy script and some rather wooden acting, but the plot was quite acceptable and the characters charming; rather like "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", it did not eschew the use of "normal people".

I have rather fallen quite deeply into the discipline of macroeconomics of late. Whilst my primary interest is political-economy, and I will continue to advocate the proposition that normative decisions has positive effects in this field, I am somewhat perplexed why most textbooks on the subject overlook what I see as a foundational relationship between money ("exchange value") and goods ("use value") which would explain the fundamental need for a rate of depreciation of money (i.e., inflation), along with various states of economic disequilibria, and have explanatory power of why cryptocurrencies are a bit of a tragedy. I am also slightly horrified by textbooks that relate wages and unemployment using an impossibly unrealistic model of perfect competition when monopsony is a closer model, something I have written about in the past. Anyway, more content on that subject forthcoming. I have some opinions on the subject which become stronger in proportion to my increasingly careful considerations on the matter.