GADDAG and Capitalism

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

I decided to revisit ScrabbleCheat (took a break for administrivia), and wrote my first Wikipedia article, on the data structure I'm refitting it with, to celebrate. It's rare that you can write something on Wikipedia that isn't there, so I had to pounce.

Hope I can keep editing it with diagrams and the like, as it's a little lame at the moment. Against my better other judgment, I'm still writing it in Erlang ^_^

Also, while I do believe in capitalism and it's ability to generate wealth, here are a few lame things from the last few days:

• This infographic, What BP could have bought with all the money they lost, is striking. I'm not so shocked that they lost all that money, but that they had it in the first place. One company was worth all that cumulative wealth, what are the others who haven't had cataclysmic disasters worth? And what are they doing with it?

• Then there's this: "The 400 richest families in America, who saw their wealth increase by some $400 billion during the Bush years, have now accumulated $1.27 trillion in wealth." Their tax rate is also the lowest on record. But hey! They generated wealth, didn't they? Look at the economy now!

• Some graphs visualizing the awful. Guys, something isn't working.

Forgive the poor sound quality, but this Louis CK bit comes to mind: