===================
 Heywood and Hayek
===================

I have finally finished reading the Heywood's "Politics" textbook. It
covers a variety of topics and presents different points of view on
those, as a textbook should. The fifth edition seems to be edited
worse towards the end (particularly its markup), as some books are: in
such cases I imagine that fewer of their editors or reviewers reach
the end, or they simply get tired. But the book itself is good, and
seems generally useful to people interested in the topic.

Then I have also finished Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", which I used
to push back in the queue for a long time. It is more interesting and
nuanced than I expected, less radical than Mises's "Bureaucracy"
(i.e., Hayek deems a measure of government regulation as useful), and
presents good arguments against a planned economy, but at times seems
a little unfair, stretching and overstating the arguments, blaming too
much on planned economy alone, with even monopolies blamed on economy
direction and aspects of collectivism, partially like a "no you"
response to the usual criticism of capitalism. It is relatively short,
contains interesting observations and some historical content, and
generally seemed worthwhile to read, even though there is no serious
argumentation for a planned economy these days.

There are many books I would like to read eventually, only a fraction
of which I will be able to read, but unsure which one to pick
next. Possibly it will be something on history or economics: the
topics relevant to the current major issues, but with which I am
largely unfamiliar. And particularly the topics with which I wish the
average familiarity was higher, possibly helping to fix and improve
the situation around here eventually: studying those by yourself
already pushes the average familiarity up a little bit, even without
taking into account possible future conversations on those.

The new computer works fine, Xorg (and amdgpu driver) did not crash
since I disabled Xfce's compositor almost a month ago with
"xfconf-query -c xfwm4 -p /general/use_compositing -s false". Last
weekend I have met a squirrel in a park. Everything else proceeds as
usual.


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:Date: 2026-10-29