Do you have a home NAS but only want to access it when you’re on your home Wi-Fi network? If you’re like me, you prefer to store your work files on your NAS to keep your laptop clutter-free. I’ll show you an easy way to configure your Jupyter Notebooks to automatically switch between your cloud directory (when you’re at home) and a local directory (when you’re away). Here’s a step-by-step guide: Step 1: Generate a Jupyter Notebook Configuration File This command creates a Python file that Jupyter Notebook loads upon …
Running in 2021
Ever since my car accident in 2018, my running hasn’t been the same. No matter how much I push myself, I can’t seem to get back into the swing of things of my younger days. It has been a struggle to adjust to the changes in my performance as I grow older. In late 2019, not listening to a twinge in my knee and hamstring, I pushed myself on the track and hurt myself badly enough to take me out of running completely for a couple of months. At the …
Refining Our Understanding of Genre through the Juxtaposition of Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and ‘A Jury of Her Peers’
I wrote this paper in the summer of 2010 for a class I took with the late, great Bruce Raskob. One of the most influential professors I’ve had the fortune of learning from; someone who instilled the idea that a large vocabulary is not the goal, but “employing one’s diction in the service of clarity and precision” is. This essay was written before I had learned that lesson. Susan Glaspell originally wrote Trifles, her well-known one-act play, to be performed to an audience in Massachusetts in 1916. The work presents …
An Update of What I’ve Been Up To
It has been quite a while since I updated this blog with actual words that weren’t just academic work I was trying to either archive or flaunt a little. In case you’ve been wondering, I’ve been working sporadically on various creative projects. One of them being a logo design for a local cupcake producer called Cloud Cupcakes run by a very creative baker! Take a peek at it here. I don’t specialize in logos or identity design, but I enjoy taking on challenging projects like this when I get the …
Delving into an Externalist Theory: Process Reliabilism
Abstract With the aim of exploring the epistemic issue of animals seeming to come to know things, this paper includes a careful analysis of internalist justification and externalist warrant. An examination of the benefits and the issues of the externalist theory of process reliabilism leads this paper to conclude that while possessing some fundamental issues, the theory remains in a better position to explicate both sentient (human) and non-sentient (animal) knowledge. Knowledge in the Wilderness Can animals be said to know things? If the goal is a somewhat unified theory …
Kasa: Understanding Trends in Foreign Exchange Rates
Kenneth Kasa’s article titled “Understanding Trends in Foreign Exchange Rates” tries to argue against the claim that the field of economics fundamentally cannot predict trends in foreign exchange rates. Countering Meese & Rogoff’s work on the subject, Kasa attempts to make the case that inflation and productivity growth can inform long-term trends in foreign exchange rates. The focus of the article shifts to the history of the Bretton Woods system, a post World War 2 attempt by the Western powers to rebuild the global financial system. Kasa explains that one …
Investing Your Money
Here are some lessons on investing I’ve picked up over the last couple of years. Investing isn’t supposed to be difficult. You really don’t need an advisor selling you funds that they themselves get a commission from (or represent the company that pays their salary). Avoid High Fees The best advice you can get is for investing is you should be avoiding high fees. Find a bank that doesn’t charge you monthly fees. There are many, but I recommend Tangerine. It’s owned by Scotiabank and you can use their ATM …
On Eating the Children
Recently, US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a prominent vocal supporter of The Green New Deal, had a town hall interrupted by a climate change denier. This sparked another wave of social media tongue-in-cheek climate change denialism with the hashtag “#EatTheChildren.” The argument is that the offered proposals tackling climate change are so radical that eating our kids isn’t that far of a stretch. While the science is no longer deniable, why can’t we move past disagreeing to actually doing something? Economists can lend us some insight: we are amidst a coordination …
BC’s Vacancy & Speculation Tax: Marauding Surplus for Revenue
In the summer of 2016, British Columbia’s Liberal government led by Christie Clark was facing enormous pressure from the general public to provide solutions to the real estate crisis that had been steadily deteriorating rental vacancy rates and creating general unaffordability for young middle class Vancouverites aiming to enter the real estate market. Initially resisting calls to implement forms of policy solutions, commissioning studies found that foreign investment had drastic effects on our housing market. Quickly doing an about-face on the issue, the Liberals announced a Housing Affordability Package that …
Cournot Oligopoly with N Firms
I recently took ECON 325 with Basyl Golovedstkyy (SFU) for my summer semester. It’s a fairly comprehensive course focusing on Industrial Organization modelling how firms can behave when they have market power but aren’t completely in a monopolistic setting. One of the problems I had an issue on personally on the final exam was this model of a Cournot oligopoly with a variable amount (n) of firms. Being so frustrated with myself, I decided to go over it again slowly now that my semester is over because I know that …