December, 2017 | Chris Aldrich

👓 Everyone Should Have the Right To Bear Mathematical Arms | Slate | Edward Frenkel

Read Don’t Let Economists and Politicians Hack Your Math: Of course kids need to learn algebra by Edward Frenkel (Slate)

Imagine a world in which it is possible for an elite group of hackers to install a “backdoor” not on a personal computer but on the entire U.S. economy. Imagine that they can use it to cryptically raise taxes and slash social benefits at will. Such a scenario may sound far-fetched, but replace “backdoor” with the Consumer Price Index (CPI), and you get a pretty accurate picture of how this arcane economics statistic has been used.

Tax brackets, Social Security, Medicare, and various indexed payments, together affecting tens of millions of Americans, are pegged to the CPI as a measure of inflation. The fiscal cliff deal that the White House and Congress reached a month ago was almost derailed by a proposal to change the formula for the CPI, which Matthew Yglesias characterized as “a sneaky plan to cut Social Security and raise taxes by changing how inflation is calculated.” That plan was scrapped at the last minute. But what most people don’t realize is that something similar had already happened in the past. A new book, The Physics of Wall Streetby James Weatherall, tells that story: In 1996, five economists, known as the Boskin Commission, were tasked with saving the government $1 trillion. They observed that if the CPI were lowered by 1.1 percent, then a $1 trillion could indeed be saved over the coming decade. So what did they do? They proposed a way to alter the formula that would lower the CPI by exactly that amount!

It’s the holiday season and I’ve already gotten dozens of letters, emails, and calls for support for a variety of charities. Also in the wake of Patreon’s recent attempt to change their payments structure, I’ve recently seen some people attempting to set up their own payment pages to allow people to support their work or efforts on many fronts, whether they be artistic, creative, or even business-oriented.

To that end, the missing piece on the other side of the equation seems to be the profile page of sorts that identifies me as a supporter of various causes. To remedy that, I’ve created a /Supporting page as the beginning of showing which organizations, institutions, artists, and other entities which I’m actively supporting or have supported in the past.

If you’re looking for something to support yourself, I highly recommend any of the organizations which I list there. I’ve added links to the organizations themselves as well as quick links for how to support them directly.

For the technically inclined, I’ve marked up the organizations with h-cards and include their homepages with u-url and p-name microformats as well as the rel=”payment” and u-payment microformats.

What organizations are you supporting?