liuturtle

Although both places are mountainous, great tress stand everywhere in Binghamton while you can not even see a weed on the hills here. Imagine the combination of bald mountains, shabby houses and the scene of people living at a garbage dump wearing tattered clothes . This is what you can see very frequently on the train from LA to San Bernandino.

I was shown how to find the saddle path of a Ramsey model indirectly with Matlab. It is really brilliant to do it like that. Nevertheless, I’m still thinking whether it is possible to solve a differential equation system under the constraint of the transversality condition. If we manage to specify that condition in the program, and combine it with the ODEs, then C(0) can be pinned down and things will be much easier.

Susan Boyle is extraordinarily talented and her performance is stunning. It’s very good to see somebody who is not professional, leading a simple life, having a normal job, surprise everybody with his/her talent unknown and incredible to others. Susan cut no figure before April 11th, but now she is a new idol. This is quite motivating.

It’s also a shame of the music industry that only looks for people who look good before cameras regardless of their competence to sing.

This quarter begins with complete confusions on how to file taxes and how to apply for an ITIN. According to the system calculating tax return, I neither owe anything nor can get a cent from the government. However, I still have to file taxes because this is an evidence of “compliance with American tax laws”. These meaningless forms have already taken me many hours and will still kill my time.

To do something more meaningful, I stimulated the US economy last Sunday again by buying an ipod nano as a response to consecutive shootings, hoping my efforts in increasing aggregate demand may lower unemployment rate and thereby, lower the number of potential gunmen. To be honest, the federal government has been doing good jobs (at least compared to most of other countries) for many years and I cannot see any reason why some guys claim people must be armed so that they can overthrow a tyranny, even though US Constitution does grant the right to US citizens. CIVILIANS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO HOLD WEAPONS.

We are supposed to learn various growth models in this quarter’s Macroeconomics. Barro stated in his textbook, “if we can learn about government policy options that have even small effects on long-term growth rates, we can contribute much more to improvements in standards of living than has been provided by the entire history of macroeconomic analysis of countercyclical policy and fine tuning”. It is 100% correct except for omitting how human beings compare today and the past. It is quite possible that an unlucky guy who has already lost his/her job during this crisis can still live much better than a man one hundred years ago who went to work everyday. This is due to the alleged long term economic growth. Nevertheless, people barely feel happy when the economy is on the bottom, as they can only remember the days of one or two years ago when the economy is on the peak rather than the days of their grandfathers’. Otherwise, some of the gunmen might not be so depressed that begin to kill innocent people.

Before I came to US, an assistant professor of Peking University (he got his Ph.D degree in UCLA) told me that monetary economics and countercyclical policies are cores of macroeconomics. He seems to be correct (though a lot of techniques and models used to analyze economic growth can be also applied on business cycles).

Thank you for everything you have and will give me. IWALU. 

For the past seven or eight years, there were only few people from UCR winding up with a job at a university I’ve ever heard of. This is a little bit disappointing. I don’t expect that I can get a tenure track position at Purdue (one from China is now an associate professor there) at the very beginning, but neither do I want to be stuck in a teaching college five years later.

I don’t know whether the actions the fed is taking are financing government deficit directly. If they are, maybe the fed is going too far. It may significantly damage the fed’s images of independence and pursuit of price stability that Paul Volker built in 1980s with such a huge cost.

I have nothing to do but to prepare exams. I just finished all midterms and final exams will wait me for only 3 weeks. The good news is that two of the 3 finals are said to be non-cumulative such that I don’t have to go over too many materials.

Before I took the midterms, I planed to have a relaxing weekend this week, maybe a trip to Irvine or somewhere else. I even did not have time to figure out my specific itinerary before I realized the trip was totally impossible – my homework for Micro and Econometrics will due next Tuesday.

This is the life here. I just cannot understand why there are 3 quarters in an academic year and each is only 10 weeks long. Professors tend to use the 10-week’s quarter as it is a semester. In the last quarter, I even had two midterms for a course. I used to do all homework independently but now I have to discuss a lot of questions with my classmates even before I have a rough idea. Sometimes, I find the pressure is overwhelming.

Hope I can do something in my own pace.