A well-intentioned but poorly executed book for those seeking alternative opinions on investment and finance in the digital...
A deep dive into the world of cryptocurrency from the point of view of a moderately successful coder and investor.
Debut author and longtime programmer Watson’s motivation is to help readers “understand the new world of digital money,” and he offers advice that draws on decades of professional coding experience, insurance-industry consultancy, and personal investments. The author outlines some finance history, including what’s commonly known as the Great Recession of 2008. He makes the point that cryptocurrency was born out of a reaction to banks’ predatory practices. This is not a book for absolute finance beginners, as the author does not provide definitions for terminology that might be unfamiliar to the layperson and assumes that readers will have more than a basic level of knowledge about relevant businesses, apps, and regulations. The book’s lack of a linear structure presents a greater hindrance; much of the information is tangential to the proposed central topic of cryptocurrency. For instance, he spends time characterizing large corporations, such as Apple, Alibaba, and Amazon.com, as becoming “corporate nation states” by virtue of their huge technological power, their loyal customers, and their global reach and influence. There’s also excessive repetition of ideas and even sentences duplicated verbatim. Most problematic, though, is the author’s digression into analysis of 20th-century SF writing, including fictional predictions that he says influenced his investment decisions; he spends a good deal of time on his “Rollerball” theory, which is directly inspired by the 1975 dystopian film of the same name. Many readers will be put off by the fact that all the advice and ideas in this book are purely his opinions and speculations; he employs no outside proofs, evidence, or expertise other than his own. However, readers are probably wise to heed Watson’s advice that “Cryptocurrency investing is an oxymoron. It is straight up gambling.”
A well-intentioned but poorly executed book for those seeking alternative opinions on investment and finance in the digital age.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2021
ISBN: 979-8494050526
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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