Tony K's Blog

Some thoughts about war strategy in Clash of Clans Clan wars pit an equal number of players from two teams against each other over 24 hours. Each player may attack twice--once on two different players. For an attack, a player may be awarded 0, 1, 2, or 3 stars. 0. When the player neither beats the town hall nor achieves 50% damage. 1. When the attacker either beats the town hall or achieves 50% damage. 2. When the attacker destroys the town hall and achieves over 50% damage, but not total annihilation. 3. Total destruction of the defender. A team gets points only for the max stars achieved against each defender. So if one player gets two stars and the next attacker gets 1 star on the same player, the team is awarded 2 stars. For descriptive purposes, when I talk about player 1 it is the most powerful person on a team. Higher numbers are progressively weaker players. Strategy During War Given this structure, it is possible for only the top half of the players to attack ...

Ranked Choice (RC) vs Instant Runoff (IRV) vs Approval RC and IRV are technically different. RC is a way of expressing preference, IRV is a method of tabulating votes from RC ballots. This is an important distinction. IRV, which seems pretty good can solve one problem (e.g. Gore v Bush) but introduce others. Technically IRV is nonmonotonic. That is, a shift of public opinion toward a candidate can cause that candidate to lose, and a shift of public opinion away from a candidate can cause that candidate to win. A different and probably superior method is one called Condorcet. It eliminates most of the IRV issues but introduces a few other, but less likely, issues. IRV is to Condorcet as single elimination is to round robin. Superior to both of them is Approval voting, in which you select all candidates that would be acceptable to you. It’s simple to tabulate and does not have the issues of either IRV or Condorcet. There’s a  website that has wonderful graphics of how the...

I'm hopefully about four years away from retirement. I have a good salary and, looking out to 2023, I think I'm in good shape overall. There will be three main sources of funding for the retirement years. 1. Wife's and my 401ks and IRAs 2. A lump sum retirement contribution from my employer 3. Social Security 1 and 2 are about equal right now, 3 is a fixed future monthly payment. The stock market has been hot since the crash of 2008. The Dow is now around 25,000. How much higher will it go? Is it going to crash? Would it be wise to transfer some funds from stocks into cash or bonds? My first thought was Yes, of course! But, I did a little digging on this and one piece of advice was that people approaching retirement should have a couple years worth of cash in their accounts so they don't have to sell stocks in a down market. That makes a lot of sense, I have seen literature that shows how a stock market decline immediately following retirement can demolish ret...

What trump is doing. Two things: He is fanning the flames of division, essentially betting that if his base, approximately half of the electorate has enough fear and motivation, they will vote him in. He is not trying to cross any divide or reach across the aisle. He is attempting to rule by getting a slim plurality to hate and fear the other half. He is succeeding. He is treating the US as a “majority rules” system, which we are to some extent, but that is not the fundamental principle of America. We are grounded by a constitution founded on the rule of law. Our greatest hope is that some portion of those that support trump today realize what he is doing and how it is undermining our nation. I read an article recently that questioned how people could be loyal to trump, when he shows no loyalty towards them. Interesting perspective. It made me think though back to some of the management training or reading I have done over the years. Specifically the PIC-NIC f...

Sea-level has undeniably been rising for the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last ice age. In the 130 years from 1870 to 2000, global sea level rose by about 200 mm. That’s 8 inches. This works out to about 1.5 mm/yr. Between 1950 (when the anthropogenic signature begins) and 2000, sea level rose about 75 mm (3 inches). That’s a pretty decent historical record.   A simple linear extrapolation of this trend gets you to 125 mm by 2100. That is an additional 5 inches or so. I’m not saying that is a good estimate of what will happen, but it’s probably a good starting point. In my view, it is probably towards the low end of what we would expect to see in the next 80 years. In a bay with 6-foot swings in tide twice daily, 5 inches is not going to change anything. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/sea-level/ According to satellite data since 1993, the rate is about double the historical rate. If that trend were to continue, sea level will be another 10 inches abov...

I recently wrote a post as a thought experiment —Hypothesis Trump is moral and ethical. In a nutshell, that hypothesis is disproven. Some people read my headline and assumed that I am pro-Trump. I am not. I have never believed that Trump is a good person. His actions in the White House have demonstrated that enriching himself and his family is a high priority of his administration. At the same time, I know I live in an echo chamber that accentuates the negatives about Trump, and seldom presents different possibilities. In my view, the possibility existed that most of Trump's accomplishments had been relatively harmless signals to his constituency. Many people believe that Trump has caused a lot of damage tot he country (including reputational), despite lack of significant progress, and I get that. I think that until now, most of the damage has been easily reversible. I selected this issue as the litmus test, because there was pretty widespread belief among economists and l...

Background: The tax bill recently passed by Congress will have two results: benefits will go down for the majority of Americans and taxes will go up for the majority of Americans. Donald Trump and his family are in a position in which they will overwhelmingly benefit. They do not need most of the benefits, and DT's inheritance taxes alone will decrease by $4 billion . His family will also benefit enormously from the change in the pass-through rate. I am assuming that he pays taxes in the US at all, which based on the one tax return he made public is the case. It is fair to assume that the Trump family will benefit by more than $5 billion personally overt he next 10 years or so. Hypothesis: Donald Trump, as president of the United States is in a position to approve or veto a bill that will benefit him more than 99.99% of his constituents. Human beings all have a self-serving bias, and ethically and morally aware adults realize this. As a result, if Donald Trump is ethically and mo...