Economics: supply and demand

I have been listening to Economics, a lecture series by Professor Timothy Taylor. I am learning quite a few new ideas from it. Going to write them down here on my blog so I have someplace to review them later if/when I need to.

• When price goes up, units supplied goes up. When price goes down, units supplied goes down, too. Because when the price is more, suppliers can make more money from sale.
• When price goes up, units demanded goes down. Likewise, when price goes down units demanded goes up.
• When price is too low or too high, market moves the price to a state where units supplied is equal to units demanded. This state is known as equilibrium. Market always moves toward equilibrium.
• Attempts to arbitrarily move price away from equilibrium — such as setting a price ceiling or price floor will very likely fail. That’s just how market works.
• Elasticity of demand (or supply) specifies how much demand (or supply) can change when price changes by a specified amount.
• If demand for a certain product is elastic, it means changing the price will affect how much it is demanded in the market. Demand (or supply) for some products are elastic in any given market, or inelastic. What’s elastic in one market may not be elastic in a different market, or in the same market at a different time. When fixing prices, a firm should consider if the demand is elastic or not.

Things that surprise(d) me

Certain things surprised me when I found them out for the first time.

• I used to enjoy being miserable. Only wanting to not be miserable was sufficient to start being happy.
• It takes effort to relax. By default we’re stressed both physically and mentally. (It takes awareness, to be precise. But for many, awareness requires effort.)
• Often, not yielding to peer pressure and following your instinct is the right thing to do. But it takes courage to follow your instincts especially your belief contradicts popular beliefs.
• Accepting misery is a path to joy.
• Even after so much change, I still haven’t accepted myself just as what I am.
• I have become, or I am doing, everything I used to hate in the past. Yet, it’s not all that bad.

From a Mike Robbins talk

I listened to a talk by Mike Robbins. Two points that I found interesting from the talk:

• One of the most selfish things you can do is to be miserable. You’ll make everyone who cares about you unhappy, just by being unhappy yourself.
• The answer is always a ‘No’ if you don’t ask.

JavaDoc for methods

If you find it hard to write JavaDoc for your method, it’s a sign that you should rethink what your method does. Most likely your method is doing way too many things and you should break it into multiple methods.

Life as a video game

Distance between “real life” and video games is shrinking. When I was a kid, my father worked 6 days a week, got a cash envelope every month which was later used to buy food and stuff for the family. You had to move physical things around to make things happen in the physical world.

Ever since I left college, I have never once gotten a cash envelope. When it’s pay day, a number on my internet banking site goes up... like getting a health pack in a video game. Every time I buy something, like being hit by monsters, that number goes down a bit. You often try to get things done with little loss to that number.

Most important goal of the game is to make sure that that number stays positive as you get things you want to get. And then there are all sorts of things you can do to artificially increase that number — for example you can get a loan which you’d pay back over years. There are also “danger zones” which suck your health points super rapidly (scams!) which you take great care to avoid.

It’s crazy how life changes right in front of our eyes and we barely notice it, if ever!