Like, why would you even write that? It's such an obviously wrong comparison.
Mixed with your other posts here about Denmark. You seem to have some weird agenda
Also, I'm amazed at your linking to stats showing that the US is doing worse than Denmark in +75% of measures in a list of 70 and then highlighting 3 to show that Denmark is somehow doing worse?
And suspiciously, you don't even comment on the measures in the stats that are relevant. There's actual (interesting!) data on the "fear of crime" in there.
Somehow Danes are more afraid than Americans of walking alone in the night, yet they're less afraid than Americans of being mugged and assaulted?
> Crime in the US is heavily skewed by the high concentration of violent crime in certain parts of several cities.
I'm not sure "we shove all the poor people into ghettos to deal with all the problems of the bad end of the bell curve while everyone else pretends they don't exist" is the recommendation of America you think it is.
It's quite worrying realizing that the people in fields I can view have similar tendencies. I've known business owners/managers who were either truly incompetent or nearly insane. They were running companies with hundreds of employees! One in particular was a family owned business and the son who took over had some serious mental health issues. The managers and other family members tried to cover up the worst parts, but details still slipped through.
This is part of why competitive systems work well to produce effective outputs. (They work very poorly to produce *fair* ones, but that's a separate problem.) The ways in which people fail are myriad and non-obvious to them and at some point reason doesn't beat metrics.
One of the complaints about Mann's hockey stick graph was that the long flat part was based on proxies, the short steep part was based on thermometers, and the graph didn't show what the temperature calculated from the proxies was over the modern period. Supposedly — I'm probably going from something by someone attacking Mann, so very likely a biased source — if you extended the proxy graph it didn't show, or didn't show as much of, the blade, which meant that there might have been similarly steep rises in the past that the proxy method wasn't sensitive enough to pick up.
The really bad part of this analysis by some people was to basically append a high frequency/high resolution dataset (temperature record) onto a low frequency/low resolution dataset (tree rings) and then make the observation that "things sure are changing much faster recently".
I remember some environmental conservation class I took in college saying they had around 26 different ways to measure temperature in the past including tree rings and ice cores, and all showed the same trends.
A quick googling didn't give me any results to confirm that number but indicated temperature can be derived from pollens/fossils/sediments/ancient corals through their chemical compositions or determining what type of plants dominated at the time which should be a proxy for temperatures.
My understanding is that there are ice cores, I think from both Greenland and Antarctica but I'm not sure, that show more rapid warming than we have experienced. That isn't evidence of trends but it does suggest that rapid warming can come from causes other than humans, which undercuts the argument that what is happening now has to be human caused. Of course, that isn't data on the global average but on what happened at particular places — but the same is true, I believe, of the tree ring data.
This is true, sometimes rapid temperature change on the timescale of decades. But the mechanisms they theorize caused those previous events (volcanic eruptions, sudden dumps of freshwater into the ocean causing shifts in currents, asteroid impacts) arent occurring now. Of course maybe there is just some other unseen mechanism we're having difficulty nailing down, but if there were some other obvious cause you'd think we would spot signs of it.
As Alien Hunter says, Proceedings doesn't do *intentional* humor. And the bit about bringing back the privateers is something that comes up every couple of years and has to be addressed every couple of years.
Ok, if you guys say so. The premise seemed so absurd to me that I checked the date, and when I saw it was April I assumed it had to be a joke. But I guess people really just have ideas that bad sometimes.
They're very, very different. Privateers are pirates. They attack merchant ships and steal their cargo for profit. Mercenaries that the US hires are generally usually used to guard people or infrastructure.
Mostly what Darawak says - the mercenaries are just security guards hired to operate in a war zone. More generally, mercenaries are *hired*. Someone pays them to do a thing, and that thing may or may not be legal. Security-guarding is usually legal. Privateers, aren't hired, aren't paid. They're just pointed at someone and told, "anything you can take from those people by pointing guns at them and demanding their stuff, our courts will say that's totally your stuff fair and square and it totally wasn't armed robbery or even murder that you did that".
International law since 1856 has very specifically said that no, even in time of war and with official permission, that's armed robbery on the high seas, thus piracy. And I think the treaty that established that was broad enough to rule out variants where you put the privateers on salary rather than leaving them to secure their own pay; if they're not part of a naval command structure, they're pirates.
I agree but most of this movement happened during his first campaign, not his second campaign. In 2016 there was not a lot of daylight between Bernie and Hillary on guns or immigration in terms the policies they proposed. But Bernie had some comments and Congressional votes from the 90s and 00s that he would struggle to explain in debates.
I left a big comment on this today in the original march links thread. Both on the serious problems with the campaign and on guns/police/israel. Actually forgot to discuss immigration but the general idea is the same.
Tracey attributes a little too much to culture war topics and not enough to how shit the campaign and staff were. Although the lower tier staff were not at fault, just a reflection of the problems with high tier staff.
Of course Bernie did fuck up big time in some culture war areas.
I do find it kinda hilarious that the countries that are the most terrified of some kind of Muslim takeoever are small European countries that are 99.99999999% white. A macro instance of the observation that people in less diverse areas are more racist than those who interact with other races more
If you're going to exaggerate for effect, you should make sure that the right number isn't trivially easy to look up. 86.9% of the Danish population has Danish ancestry, and about 5% of the remainder is from Muslim-majority countries. Denmark is not some sort of homogenous place full of fishing villages, it's a very wealthy nation that makes it attractive to immigrants just like the rest of Western Europe.
Poor people are responsible for a disproportionate share crimes. Anytime an immigrant group moves into a place where they aren't very wealthy and they aren't well accepted... crime will increase.
Sometimes, that poor underclass is immigrants, but it isn't the immigrant status that makes the crime... it's the poverty.
But then if you don't want the increase in crime, you have two options.
One is to deal with the poverty. But that usually implies some kind of transfer payment, which would attract large numbers of immigrants who are in poverty, which would make the transfer payments uneconomical.
The other would be to stop accepting immigrants who are in poverty.
If you don't want the second one, you have to find a way to do the first one that isn't equivalent to a transfer payment. For example, it has to be a lot easier to start a small business so that anybody who shows up with only the shirt on their back can make an immediate success of themselves. Theoretically possible but easier said than done, and until you do it you're stuck at option two.
In this particular case (Denmark), when we compare crime rates of immigrants from Muslim countries to crime rates of immigrants from East Asia, we find that the former are one order of magnitude higher even after controlling for income/wealth.
But I fear we are quickly drifting into CW territory...
Might it just be true that crime is relatively low among ethnic Danes in Denmark, and that crime amongst Danish Muslims is higher just because it hews more to the international mean?
I'm not sure why you acknowledge that I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect, then post the accurate number as if its a massive own. The point that should be obvious from context is that the number is low in comparison to other places, and that anti immigration sentiment doesn't map with the actual levels of immigration
I’m not sure what “other places” you’re comparing it with. In the sentence that started this, the contrast was with the US, which Wikipedia says has about 1% Muslims; presumably, “people from Muslim-majority countries” (which sounds more relevant to any “takeover”) is only a fraction of that. So, assuming Laurence’s numbers are right, Denmark actually has several times as many whatever-Muslim-adjacent-category than the US has.
If percentages matter to the question, then exaggerating them by ~ nine orders of magnitude seems wrong. If the percentages don’t matter to the question, then exaggerating them by ~ nine orders of magnitude seems irrelevant.
So what are the “other places” that have several times more than 5% Muslims that you’re comparing Denmark to, so that an exaggeration for rhetorical effect might be justified? Saudi Arabia?
I'm not sure why you think it's okay to exaggerate numbers for rhetorical effect at all, but especially when the *specific thing being argued* is exactly what the numbers are.
The number is not low in comparison to other places. Nearly all of that 5% immigrated in the past 40 years, and half of them went to Copenhagen. So that city changed in one lifetime from being ethnically monolithic, to 10% Muslim.
European countries that are 99.99% white - but their populations work in countries that failed at multiculturalism, and don't want those particular problems on their home turf.
FWIW, the most racist people I met are my countrymen living abroad.
Scott: "Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this."
Possibly everyone, but definitely lawyers.
Some law professors are not being great on what the law actually is, conflating it with what they think the law should be. Lawyer-commenters often get more airtime if they lack compunction about drifting outside their field of expertise.
Some lawyers are also not of especially sound disposition and thus end up with odd analyses which is can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug as far as attention received.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of high quality lawyer commentary out there on social media, just that "being a lawyer," and "speaking correctly on the law" is not a single circle on your Venn diagram.
Are these lawyers you describe as "not being great on what the law actually is" American legal pragmatists? I have heard that, in America, judges can rule to get whatever outcome they want in the case at hand, come up with some bogus post-hoc justification, and call it "legal pragmatism". I know little about this, but it is consistent with the history of US Supreme Court rulings.
An exercise for intersectional law-and-information-theory geeks: See what fraction of the information needed to specify the positions of every judge on the Supreme Court on every ruling in the past 20 years is accounted for by categorizing each judge according to the political party of the president who appointed that judge (and, by implication, an upper bound on the fraction that could be accounted for by the case and the law).
Paragraph 1 is not true; judges get reversed for violating established precedent (and sometimes for other reasons.) There's no secret "legal pragmatism" button, and a Westlaw search of California cases turns up one case from 1941 for an exact match of "legal pragmatism." Whatever you've heard isn't true.
Paragraph 2 has an answer, which is that if you bet on politics on every case, you will get destroyed at https://fantasyscotus.net/ or any other prediction market.
Politics may explain some votes on some cases, but the idea that lots of the votes are partisan political hackery is just mistaken. I have done your suggested analysis on two years of recent Supreme Court cases, and I think my critique of legal analysts above is a cause as to why people think this. If you want to figure out how people will vote, you need to know that John Roberts is much more deferential to legislation than Neil Gorsuch.
fantasyscotus.net is very interesting, but the fact that you'll get destroyed if you bet on politics doesn't answer my question. I asked what fraction of the total information is accounted for by politics. Everyone on fantasyscotus knows which justices lean which way; therefore, using merely that information should give you a spot near the bottom, REGARDLESS of how much of rulings is pure politics. Of course you can get a better score using politics plus something else, than by using only politics.
If half of the information in how judges vote is determined by some information easily accessible to everyone, such as political affiliation, we would expect the median player to be about 0.75 accurate, which seems to be close to the data. (I can't say that with confidence, because the leaderboard isn't sorted by predictive accuracy, but by total score, which is useless (e.g., JustinRattey was 87.5% accurate, yet is ranked #51 out of 142). )
Legal pragmatism isn't a doctrine judges can cite in order to do whatever they want, it's a description of observed behavior. It works basically like this.
The legislature passes a law that says that if you intentionally kill someone you're guilty of homicide and go to prison.
The trolley problem comes before the court. The court doesn't want to convict the guy who chose to save the five people instead of the one, so they say that "intentionally kill" doesn't apply here, because the defendant didn't intend for the one person to die, it was just an unavoidable consequence of saving the other five.
Now this is precedent. If the exact same thing happens again, the courts are supposed to defer to the precedent and do the same thing again.
Next the same thing happens again, except that instead of saving five people, the person caused the trolley to kill someone in order to make a million dollars. The defendant says they didn't intend to kill that person, it was just an unavoidable consequence of making the million dollars. Guess which precedent the court is not going to follow. They're going "distinguish" the case, i.e. say that it's different this time and the other precedent doesn't apply, and come up with some justification to throw that guy in jail.
Since no two cases are ever exactly the same, the judge can always distinguish them if they want to, which means they can always reach the result they want.
In practice what happens is that judges do actually follow precedents that are vaguely relevant in any case where both of the parties are equally sympathetic (or equally unsympathetic). But when the court really wants one side to win, they can make it happen.
> In practice what happens is that judges do actually follow precedents that are vaguely relevant in any case where both of the parties are equally sympathetic (or equally unsympathetic). But when the court really wants one side to win, they can make it happen.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps avoid Goodhart's Law as applied to legal texts by using some combination of "satisfies the letter of the law" and "isn't just obviously gaming the letter of the law".
Software engineers don't, and I have no idea why. They have plenty of wrong, loud opinions on everything _other_ than their domain, but within the domain knowledge that seems unorthodox to the public (e.g. that electronic voting is a shitshow and should not be a thing, especially not in the way countries attempt it right now) is more or less the consensus position.
That's because we don't just know how the sausage is made, but we invented the idea of sausage and know damn well we did it at 0300 after a night of drinking Mountain Dew and smoking weed. Trust me, the ones who were getting any at that hour were only engineers long enough to get into management.
The economic harm of hurricanes being primarily due to hurricanes that made landfall in the US is one of those things that sounds rather odd in isolation, but isn't really that surprising:
1. Of course it's only hurricanes that make landfall that cause economic harm because, you know, we do not have floating cities.
2. Only a few coasts are at much risk of hurricane (well, tropical storm, they don't call them hurricanes everywhere) landfall. It's basically southeast coasts in the Northern Hemisphere and northwest coasts in the Southern Hemisphere. Much of the rich world is not in those areas, besides the SE United States. So... you cause the most economic harm when you hit built up rich areas, the available places to hit are not mostly built up and rich, the US is the exception, thus hurricanes that make landfall in the US are most of the economic harm.
Dogiv already said this, but it doesn't include non-weather disasters. It's pretty weird that he basically misquotes his own paper, but figure 2 in the paper is pretty clear that they're excluding Earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanoes/landslides/drought
Agreed. They specify in the paper that they're excluding droughts because they're long term. Which is fair, if you're interested in acute weather events. But it makes claims about hurricanes as a fraction of damage a bit weird in isolation.
I think what is most interesting to me about this is that I did not understand that hurricanes cause economic damage at vastly higher rates than other types of natural disasters, because it isn't just that 60% of economic damage from hurricanes comes from landfall on US coasts, but 60% of economic damage from all disasters worldwide. Unless I'm misunderstanding something.
When I think about floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornados, non-hurricane storms, etc. I would expect them, worldwide, to make up far more than 40% of economic damage from disasters alone, not to mention hurricanes making landfall in countries other than the United States. But maybe this is just a function of the United States being so wealthy?
"maybe this is just a function of the United States being so wealthy?" Mostly this. A major typhoon hitting Bangladesh does less economic destruction than a tropical storm hitting Boca Raton.
That doesn't seem like the best way to measure impact though, I feel like you need to adjust economic damage by ease of recovery to have a meaningful metric.
This is similar to the immigration-related factoid that goes "by immigrating to the US a Haitian increases his productivity by 20x". Here "productivity" means "the amount he gets paid for his work", so the exact same work is much more "productive" in the US than Haiti, simply because the US is a richer country and the prices of everything are higher.
Anything with dollar amounts associated that happens in the US will have higher dollar amounts than the same thing happening in Haiti/Bangladesh/whatever, because everything in the US costs more than the same thing in a poor country. So a disaster in Bangladesh might cause just as much devastation and human suffering, and require just as much economic output to remediate, but it will cause less "economic damage" as economists measure it.
I have worked for two global reinsurers in the last 14 years and I can confirm that South East US Hurricane risk is a huge portion of global reinsurance risk. Don't know if the 60% number is correct but I do know that it is easily the largest single peril in global natural catastrophe markets.
As other have pointed out this is largely because the SE US is one of the few rich heavily populated regions that regularly is hit by hurricanes (I am using hurricanes as interchangeable with tropical cyclones in general). Europe has wind storms but they are not as devastating as hurricanes. Earthquakes hit other places but major ones are not as frequent as hurricanes.
Global reinsurers shifted from historical data to estimate damages to rather sketchy climate models after the rather bad 2005 season. This ended up raising rates in FL by over 30%. An investigation into this mess won the Pulitzer Prize:
For the decade of 2000-2010 the FL disaster costs came in right around historical average because the rest of the decade was quiet. In fact the US had 0 Cat3+ landfalls for 11 years after this, the longest major hurricane landfall drought on record.
But yes, hurricanes are by far the biggest threat down here in FL.
Another random historical fact about hurricanes: the deadliest hurricane in the US between WW2 and 2005 was Hurricane Camille, in 1965; almost half the deaths were in central Virginia (between Lynchburg and Charlottesville) due to severe and very unexpected flooding.
I lived near there at one time. One of my friends who lived through it described it as "I went to bed and it was starting to rain; when I got up in the morning, the house at the end of the lane near the creek was gone down to the foundations."
The quote is worded badly so it sounds like a much stronger claim: “historically, about 60% of all economic damage from disasters worldwide comes from landfalling hurricanes in the United States”. As stated, that would include earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, too.
What the link actually says is that for the period 1980-2008, 57% of all weather-related global economic loss was due to North American storms, and your explanation makes perfect sense.
I’m wondering if part of this is how insurance works in the US? So far as I’m aware, in some ways we basically subsidize people to live in flood plains and tornado alleys. But insurance for these things isn’t handled especially consistently or efficiently. I’m not sure which would be more costly, insurance paying someone to rebuild in a flood plain, or that person simply losing everything and the subsequent economic burden of that instability. This must be especially hard to quantify on a global scale.
In theory, subsidized flood insurance encourages people to build in low-lying areas. In practice, a lot of the people who build there don't buy the insurance even at heavily subsidized rates (or so I've read). So it's quite possible that damages would be just as high without the subsidy.
I suppose the actual damages would have to be weighed against the economic loss of people leaving the area entirely, which might be considerable. Or it might be nowhere near the cost of replacing the homes and infrastructure every decade or two. I’m not sure how you could calculate that, given that most recoveries probably involve varying proportions of funds from different sources (insurance, subsidies, corporate investment, personal savings, etc.) It would differ so much across regions and timeframes that even if we had all the data it might be hard to make a meaningful assessment.
I thought part of the problem is that the flood insurance doesn't just pay out money, it pays out money on the condition of rebuilding in the same place. Is this correct?
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
The linked report yesterday is the most common form of hurricane (I hesitate to use the word propaganda) misinformation. Misleading is probably the most neutral word because better datasets are readily available and there isn't any need to count things in new ways unless you looking at small storms, "fish storms" that don't make landfall, or other information that is more nuanced than "are hurricanes getting worse".
Why examine just 4 decades of * major * hurricanes? Is there not more information available? Why use a proxy such as a tide gauge or satellites when landfall data is available?
One thing that isn't missed is a major hurricane landfall in the US and it has been warming over 100 years.
Major hurricanes are a sparse and erratic dataset. Starting in the 1970's sure looks like cherry picking when the longer datasets are available. See the graphs here.
It is quite possible the dynamics of hurricanes are also on a 60 year cycle related to ocean currents but only time will tell.
I only have a problem with the conclusions drawn by these type of studies by the usual suspects, not their existence. These conclusions are typically marketed to environmental journalists (or they draw them themselves). Longer datasets show a much more complex story. If there is a climate signal in hurricanes it is rather small at this time and will take more time to draw out from the noisy data.
There are definitely crazy colonels out there, and generals and admirals as well. Usually they can't cause too much damage; sometimes a shooting war will leave them unsupervised long enough to cause a minor catastrophe. The really major operations get enough scrutiny that lone crazies are usually kept in check.
And, glad to be of service providing a reality check on this one. Sometimes the best way to debunk a myth is to post it online and wait for the "Someone is WRONG on the internet!" effect to kick in. The SSC/DSL/ACX community is a pretty good place for that, and I'm glad you're willing to take the heat for occasionally linking to something wrong so that it can be properly corrected.
The "let's bring back privateering" one is a perennial mistake that needs a perennial debunking, and this was our turn :-)
It's true of colonels, it's true of doctors, it's true of people who hold PhDs from elite institutions, it's true of basically any elite group you can find.
Colonels are selected for some combination of baseline competence and savvy/internal politics/jockeying. This leaves plenty of room for a few wingnuts to make it into the crowd.
I'm most interested about whether it's true in academic expertise based fields.
Like, the crazy doctors who promote alternative medicine - they're usually still good doctors, in the sense that if you go to them for pneumonia or something they will treat it correctly. So I'm willing to give them a pass on the grounds that they're good at their actual job - treating disease - and bad at something that isn't their job - coming up with theories about disease.
If someone is an expert epidemiologist, coming up with theories *is* their job. So I would expect somewhat stronger selection pressure for being good at it. Still not sure how that's going.
The Colonel will probably do an okay job if you put him at the head of a regiment (or an Air Force squadron, or whatever).
Not all Colonels are academic military theorists - they're mostly personnel middle managers who have to go through a military theory course and hand in a paper to punch a card before getting promoted. Think medical students doing really crappy studies to get their name in a paper so they can get a choice residency, or get hired by a nice hospital.
My cardiologist showed me a research paper which he was one of the multiple authors of. I certainly wouldn't have published it, and Scott could have torn it to bits.
This. The vast majority of people in the military are specialists in their day job, and not actually that good at broader military theory. Enlisted men are the worst at this in my experience, but even officers often see the same thing.
However, I don't think this is the case here. The Colonel in question is a frequent Proceedings contributor and associated with CSIS. That, I cannot explain.
The most famous insane military theorist is Mike Sparks, who for some reason really likes the M113 and went around trying to convince everyone to call it the Gavin (it is not called the Gavin).
My understanding is that law professors are notoriously bad at interpreting high profile court cases; I don't have a reference at hand, but I recall it being a point made at groklaw.net several times in her commentary.
On the original Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare, my impression is that the vast majority of law professors who commented claimed it was an absurd case that didn't have a chance. It actually lost 5 to 4.
In my field, (statistics) there are folks who have pretty heterodox views about how we should conceptualize data and information. For example, I can't tell if this is ridiculous or trivial or brilliant:
But regardless, I'm sure the authors could competently do an ANOVA or derive the asymptotic properties of some estimator.
I don't think the selection pressure for epidemiologists (or statisticians or academics in general) is on "coming up with theories". For academics, it's "publish papers and get grants". The latter may filter some of the cranks, but if you get tenure, you can write whatever book you want on your own time.
Also, there's the option to have heterodox views within your field about things that aren't the subject of your research. In this case, there's virtually no cost to your career or standing. This would be like an anesthesiologist who believed Freudian theory.
A particular topic I'm interested in is aging research. Having some background in biotech - I routinely encounter very well-researched arguments for wear and tear theories of aging, then very well-researched arguments for theories programmed aging, and I end up in a state of complete epistemic helplessness, because someone is obviously wrong here but it's so niche that you can't quite tell the crackpots from the experts.
The wider biotech community just throws their hands up, decides "I dunno lol" and proceeds to work on something that has 1000x less ROI instead.
A friend of mine is a doctor and had an unforeseen issue at work: one of the doctors convinced a considerable number of nurses and other staff to join a cult. Not quite a Waco-type cult, but a sort of New Agey self help seminar-based cult with an MLM element.
The doctor in question was making some kind of money from this, but not in a way that triggered disciplinary action. My friend and the administrators were at a loss for how to deal with this. The cult was very careful not to run afoul of HR but their hospital became a very weird place to work. I’m not sure it ever resolved or if the nurses just eventually lost interest.
Why should sanity and merit always be perfectly correlated? I mean, selecting for success in a narrow field (academic, military, business, whatever) seems likely to not be perfectly correlated with non-craziness, especially if sanity is defined relative to the mean!
Merit in leadership and organizational skill, project management, motivating others, possibly tactics, as well as some level of just being a personal example of excellence in discipline, self-sacrifice, physical fitness, all of the usual military values, but it has nothing to do with being a strategic genius or any kind of great thinker at all.
You'd think that level of experience and trust in actually hammering out policy ideas might weed out wackos, but people can be very smart and still very wrong about specific things.
So we're going from an example of one to "they're common"?
As I said in the post I made a few minutes ago, if there is one thing I could fix in language, it would be the crazy ease with which most people make these elisions.
Probably thinking of that dude who was arrested at the capital with zip ties, though he was a Lieutenant Colonel.
As impressive as this guy's resume is anyway, he was a Marine infantry officer, which says next to nothing about his level of expertise in naval warfare.
Good point about the Night of Terror at the end. If there is anything I am learning from listening to The Data Detective is that you need to step back and look at the big picture (including trend-lines).
Michael Sullivan points out that it's mainly southeast coasts in the northern hemisphere and northeast coasts in the southern hemisphere that get them, and then when you look at the contingent facts about the shapes of the currently existing continents on that map, you can see that the Caribbean islands, southeastern United States, Philippines, and Taiwan are really the main targets. Given the relative poverty (and thus low financial cost of disasters) of the Philippines and the Caribbean islands, the only thing that needs explaining is why Taiwan hasn't accounted for much more of the damages.
Incidentally, tornadoes are also highly concentrated in the United States, and probably account for a large fraction of the non-hurricane, weather-related disaster damages. Something like 75% of all tornadoes occur in the United States, because North America is the only continent with a large flat region stretching all the way from a warm body of water (the Gulf of Mexico) to the Arctic, so that you can get a warm moist air mass interacting with a cool dry one. Most of the rest of the world, in the current continental configuration, has either mountains or moderately temperate bodies of water in between.
I often wonder just how different global climate was in times of Pangaea, or what weather phenomena existed in the Mediterranean basin during the periods when it was dry. If North America is unique right now, how differently would the world have thought of hurricanes and tornadoes under a different continental configuration? Are there other sorts of weather patterns that would have been common under other configurations that we don't even remark on now?
So: was this phenomenon common in past geologic eras? A quick Google search suggests we don't have a good answer (what would the geologic evidence of a fire whirl look like?). On the other hand, we do know that gigantic wildfires were very common in the Carboniferous period (360-300 Mya) because they left behind a lot of (ahem) charcoal. See https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-finds-its-place-earth-history So it's not unreasonable to guess that fire whirls were a common natural phenomenon during the Carboniferous and we're only seeing them now because of climate change+poor forest management.
I'm pretty sure that everything works like colonels and doctors. I see them everywhere I'm familiar with, and see no reason that they wouldn't pop up in fields where I don't have the expertise to detect them. This guy in particular is associated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a top-rank think tank, so I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up and has a bee in his bonnet on this particular issue. (Actually, think tank people are at least somewhat suspect. CNAS published a report a few years ago that failed basic math, and it's still getting wide coverage. I may have vented at it a bit. https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Range-of-a-Carrier-Wing)
To expand some on USNI: Most of the stuff they publish is very trustworthy. My procedure for finding a book on a naval topic I'm not familiar with is to go to the wiki page and look for a book that they published in the citations. It works really well, and the dud books I've gotten from them are of the "this is worse than other USNI books I already had on the subject" rather than "this is wrong". Seriously, naval history in the English-speaking world would not be nearly as healthy as it is without them. Likewise, their news service is very good. Proceedings does a specific job, but that job is to carry out debate, not inform outsiders.
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm a USNI member. No, I'm not getting paid by them, although if they want to do so, they know where to find me.
You said "...I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up..." and John said "This is a stupid idea that keeps coming back every year or two because somebody read too many Napoleonic sea-adventure stories..."
I do not understand the "too much" and "too many." Where do these dangerous heresies come from?
The best series are Horatio Hornblower by C.S. Forester, and the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. Personally, I find Hornblower to be too depressed to be good reading, but that's just me, and most people seem to like it. I completely endorse O'Brian.
There's also Walter Jon Williams' "Privateer" series for the pure version. And most of Errol Flynn's nautical heroes danced on the fuzz pirate/privateer border. Hornblower and Aubrey and most of the rest were mostly regular navy officers, though Hornblower interacted with privateers and Aubrey was one for a book or two.
Privateers make great story material, because they're warship captains who have much more autonomy than naval officers, or alternately dashing romantic pirates who don't come with a load of "hey aren't these really murderous villains?" baggage. And if the author is on their side, they can legitimately win great fortune and glory where the proper naval officers just win a promotion to a boring desk job. So they show up quite frequently in romantic fiction of the era. And particularly for libertarian-leaning Americans, it's really appealing to imagine that this is part of the recipe for American maritime supremacy in the 21st century. It just has the slight problem of not being practical.
"Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this." I can tell you one thing, that you probably already knew, but is so prevalent that it hurts: economists.
Krugman, unfortunately, stopped being an economist some time after the financial crisis and turned into a mediocre political commentator. His popular work from the 1990s is both excellent and seems to be from a totally different person.
He doesn't actually limit himself to pure economics, as he predicted in 1998 that : "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
In the same article, he predicted that the number of IT jobs would decrease in that time period and also that inflation would rise and be above 3% in 1999 already.
None of those three things happened.
He predicted that the Trump administration would cause a "global recession, with no end in sight." Unless he believes that Trump engineered COVID, that was a dud.
He argued in 2002 that the solution to the recession of the time was a housing bubble: "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."
Presumably an organisation like Harvard has less strict auditing than a public company such as Enron or Carillion.
If your accountants get creative in a way that misleads shareholders into thinking your company is doing better than it really is, financial regulators will throw the book at you.
Like with jurisprudence, you can't formalise every accounting edge case nor can you explicitly react fast enough to new technologies. Accountants are going to have to use their judgement decide how fast the brand new iphones you've started handing out to employees will depreciate. and the auditors will have to judge whether their judgement is reasonable.
It's not really Iphones, it's big implementations that cost millions and millions. For example, if you decide to implement SAP, that's a HUGE cost. Almost always, this is set-up as a capital project so it does not affect this year's income statement. SAP is going to be with you for a long time, why report the implementation costs as a single period expense when it will be supporting you for years?
However, there are other incidental expenses that can also get charged to the capital project:
-External Consultants to help set-up SAP. Obviously not period expenses.
-What about our in-house IT department? Let's move all their salaries to the project, too.
-If we bring all of our employees in for 2 weeks to train them? Yep, those salaries are no longer period expenses, let's move that into the project, too.
-Then start-up costs! SAP sucks: we can't run any of our production lines for a week! All of that downtime cost gets moved into the project, too.
There is a lot of stuff that can you move into projects, theoretically, and then that cost does NOT flow into into your EBITDA, which is how many bonuses and incentives are decided and how many companies are judged. It looks like the company's operations are actually quite healthy, and this might be misleading if you are only looking at the income statement and not the Cash Flow statement (which will report WARNING WARNING NEGATIVE FREE CASH FLOW MONEY IS HEMMORAGHING).
There's additional adjustment to certain expenses into whether they are SG&A or COGS. SG&A going up too quickly is generally frowned upon, and there is sometimes an effort to shift costs into COGS. Or, you know, vice versa if COGS is looking bad. For instance, I am an accountant to a manufacturing facility, so I am a COGS, but certain functions of mine have been shifted to corporate functions, and those functions are listed as SG&A, so our factories look like they are running leaner than they actually are...just left-hand, right-hand.
Like that SAP system? Supports the whole company, but let's list it as COGS so we don't inflate the SG&A budget too much.
Theoretically there are policies to address most of this, but there are always gray areas that can be flexed a bit.
WRT Harvard, I don't think that's necessarily the case. Like, there's a lot of games accountants CAN play, but there's only so much we can do. The increase in "Instruction and Academic Support" services sounds a lot like buying more tech, since the period is between 2004 and 2019. Blackboard ain't free.
Plus there is a huge increase in facility quality, which is something you need to do maintain your reputation as a world-class facility (at least in Harvard's view).
Maybe theoretically they can utilize technology to REDUCE institutional headcount, but it seems like it has increased.
To me it looks like an institution that treats its revenue stream as a given and grows expenses to match its revenue and maintain its prestige. There's probably a lot of what they consider "cost control," like hiring "Non-Faculty Instructors," but throwing more money at instructions and implementing a bunch of tech solutions with the same faculty headcount, and BTW throw in some extra admin bloat, is indicative of a bloated culture rather than a cost conscious or value driven culture.
Re: admin bloat. To some extent the more you implement "technology," the MORE you're going to get admin bloat. If you CAN track more stuff, the immediate reaction is that, yes, we should track all this extra stuff! But we need to hire more staff to do it. This is pretty natural UNLESS you have a plan ahead of time to become more efficient.
@Scott: unrelated to the current post, but hopefully-useful info for next Mantic Monday: Tyler Cowen has a Bloomberg article about a new prediction market, Kalshi, which has FTC approval.
Just a few more things about public sector and non-profit accounting. It can be confusing for a few reasons. One, although financial statements have to adhere to GAAP, they have different rules than private sector because the budgets themselves have to be reported purely on a cash basis, not accrual, so to make the financial statements somewhat useful as something that can be used to compare to a budget, the financial statements use something called modified accrual accounting, which is not quite cash or accrual and has extremely inscrutable rules that I never quite learned right even when I was studying this stuff. Even as an accountant, reading them might not make much sense unless you take the time to learn the bases they're using.
Two, the budgets and financial statements for anything legislatively appropriated has to actually be somewhat accurate and not misleading. They can't misclassify expenses to trick people. The big caveat, of course, is that the military has a history of not producing auditable financial statements thanks to the pre-GFEBS impracticality of keeping accurate records in war zones when you're making multimillion dollar cash payments to friendly warlords while getting shot at, plus the sheer urgency with which money is spent and the broad leeway given to field commanders to spend certain amounts pretty much however they see fit. Regular government departments and agencies can't get away with this kind of thing.
Non-profits are not really subject to those reporting rules, though. The one form they are all required to submit annually and can't get too creative with is the IRS Form 990, which is the non-profit tax return. Obviously, they don't pay taxes, but this is the form they use to prove their expenses and revenues actually qualify them for tax-exempt status. The only exception to the filling requirement is churches, but all other non-profits have to both file and make the filed form publicly available, so you can always see how any non-profit is spending its money.
Something else to keep in mind with budgets is they are not financial statements. A budget is a plan for how to spend money. How much you actually spend and on what may differ from the budget, which is the purpose of financial statements in public sector organizations. They're not accountable to shareholders, but they are accountable to the legislatures giving them money to spend on specific things to show that is what they actually spent it on. In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it. Donations that are not earmarked, however, only need to be spent promoting whatever your mission is, and of course not to the financial benefit of any specific individual employee or stakeholder. You can pay very well if your donors don't object, but nobody can get a percentage of donations or pay contingent on financials, for instance, which is the opposite of "non-profit."
Funnily enough, if you never saw it, the whole loophole for churches was a huge plot point in The Wire, where drug lords were laundering money by donating to local churches that then gave them and their families sham jobs doing nothing but earning huge paychecks as consultants and also paid off politicians (which, of course, churches are not actually allowed to do, but it's hard to stop them if they don't have to report financials and can't be audited).
Taking short-term expenses on a cash basis and long-term expenses on an accrual basis is wild, although I suppose it makes sense for governments that have to balance their cash budgets every year.
Yep. All governments except the federal government being disallowed from running deficits and thus needing to balance the books every fiscal year kills them in years with revenue shortfalls. Practically speaking, so many of their expenses are legally obligated (you can't just not pay for stuff you received, including labor) that they tend to just end up deferring maintenance on capital assets like roads and bridges and traffic control systems. It's how we end up in the tremendous failing infrastructure mess we find ourselves in. These aren't "legal" obligations, so they never show up on the books and make the financials look a lot more healthy than they realistically are unless we're honestly just going to let cities crumble to dirt at some point. Municipal governments have basically been kicking the can down the road for decades figuring the federal government would eventually bail them out, which is likely going to end up being true as something like "the entire national transportation system" is pretty much just as too big to fail as the banking system.
This is, by the way, a big part specifically of why California has had such fiscal issues over the decades, and this is totally non-partisan because it spans many decades and both political parties and voters themselves are all equally responsible. Prop 13 effectively neutered the property tax, so they rely very heavily on income tax, which is of course highly income-elastic, and it's a progressive tax and incomes at the top are even more elastic, even negative in some really bad years if your income is mostly shares in your own company. So whenever there is a recession, the California government gets hit really hard, but they can't run a deficit, and even more of their expenses are legally obligated than most states because of the proposition system that allows voters to create their own earmarked taxes that can't be used in the general fund. So what do they do? They just let cities and the public schools fall apart. The ideal answer obviously is keep a hefty rainy day fund when times are good, but that is a very hard sell to voters who would much rather see a tax cut or more spending when the revenues are high.
TBH there's a part of me that wonders if "let cities crumble to dirt at some point: might not be a terrible idea, if we lived in a world where we could coordinate to do it one city at a time. It would at least give us a chance to fully modernize their infrastructure all at once with fewer delays and cost overruns. It'll never happen that way, but I find it interesting to think about.
"In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it."
When I was an undergrad, my advisor told me (and I have no citations, sorry) that over the centuries schools like Harvard have developed ways around this, too. The example he gave was, sometimes a donor will endow a scholarship, with stipulations that mean it rarely gets awarded (and/or laws change so enforcing them becomes illegal, so no one can use the money). Then you invest the money in such a way that the earnings are not restricted and can be spent however you want. This frees up other money elsewhere, and in any case within a few decades the restricted principle becomes too small to matter due to inflation and overall economic growth.
"I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,""
And which group of people has more success promoting class-first leftist ideas? The class-first leftists who are found in obscure journals and activist groups and that nobody knows about, or the "class-first leftists" on Twitter and Fox News?
Both "class first leftists" and the weird academics are class-first leftists, and there's no reason to question their credibility on their leftism or their commitment to class first.
"Local police departments in Brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen."
Well, when police went on strike in Espírito Santo (a Brazilian state) a few years ago, chaos ensued. More chaos than the usual in Brazil, I mean. You know, much more chaos than the usual. In Brazil. http://metrocosm.com/homicides-brazil-vs-world/ So I don't where that generalization about no big terrible things happening is coming from. I, however, admit police forces in Brazil do go on strike frequently, and the country still exists, so there's that.
"There’s a problem in medicine where people think doctors are trustworthy experts. While this is often true, there are about a million doctors, and some tiny fraction of them are insane."
Hardly a problem limited to doctors (or retired naval officers).
What fraction of "news" consists of "local lunatic says <thing> about <group>, hence proving that all of city/state/nation/race/gender/occupational-class/age-range are every bit as bad as you thought they were"?
More generally, if there is one concrete thing that LW can do to improve society, it would be to figure out a way in which people make claims about what "some" people have said that are both useful and in some sense true.
If I say that "Victorian doctors claimed masturbation would make you blind", what am I actually saying? That 95% of doctors agreed with this claim? Or that I could find two books, written by generally agreed to be nutcases, that made this claim?
And yet most of our contemporary discourse and thinking, historical or otherwise, uses this language that's so vague as to be meaningless.
One example is the factoid that "rule of thumb" came from the legal rule that man couldn't beat his wife with a stick thicker than his thumb. That based on dictum by one 18th century judge for which he was extensively mocked at the time.
Re: Higher threat response in conservatives. I watched an interview with Derren Brown ( famous British magician and hypnotist ) where he talked about learning of this study and how he decided to test it out and see if he could use it to make an act for one of his shows.
He found that with no other trickery, if he asked people to spend a few minutes imagining images of decay like maggots then those people would give more right wing views afterwards, and if they imagined being invunerable like a super hero then they would give more left wing views. I think he had then answer a questionaire before and after.
I'm not sure this could be considered evidence but I found it interesting and it seems to back up conservatives having higher threat response. The interview is done by Russell Brand on his youtube channel if anyone wanted to watch.
In re higher threat response in conservatives: There's been a lot of research (or maybe a modest amount of research which gets repeated a lot in the media) to find out about deep personality differences between liberals and conservatives.
Should deep personality differences be a strong hypothesis? Or is it just that people want to believe the other side is very different?
As I recall, the public version of these research results don't include information about the size of the overlap. This is also something that annoys me about reports on "the difference" between men and women. The only thing I'm sure of (I haven't seen any research on the subject) is that there are a lot of people who want for there to be a difference.
>My thought when reading that article was “this sounds crazy…but wait! It’s written by a colonel and published by the US Naval Institute! That sounds just wacky enough to make a good link!” Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
The Media. Something you hear often from "famous" people is something like: "You never realize how wrong the media is until you're the subject of a story". This can be outright falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.
A lot of people think something "must be true" because it's published in the NY Times or the Washington Post but that is a terribly unreliable mental shortcut and something more and more people seem to reevaluate each year.
Unfortunately, this is something Scott now has some personal experience with. I'd be interested to hear how Scott's "trust" of stories published by majors papers has changed.
Re: Sanders. I think people are placing too much focus on what Sanders and his campaign actually did and underplaying perceptions. Perceptions do not need to be accurate to drive votes.
Sanders did not buy into #DefundThePolice but AOC did, and AOC endorsed Sanders. I would also guess that most people who support #DefundThePolice also endorse Sanders if they endorsed any candidate. For a lot of voters that's enoguh to put Sanders into the DefundThePolice tribe.
I think this would hold true if you used even weaker links. Sanders is the "most left wing candidate", #DefundThePolice is a "most left" issue. Thus it affects perception of Sanders.
It's a general truism among pollsters that most poeple just don't pay much attention to politics. Tracking how much Sanders (or any candidate) says about a topic in speeches, interviews etc, isn't going to be an accurate representation of how ordinary people perceive them.
The problems with the campaign were primarily organizational and process. Terrible messaging was part of that issue. I wrote a large double comment about this in the march links thread today with a little inside info cited. I think Tracey really doesn't understand the majority of went wrong with the campaign. Kinda surprised to see someone link him as any sort of Sanders authority. I don't have Tracey Derangement System like many but on this particular issue he is off base.
Oh, oh, I can play that game too: rooms full of white guys who think they're experts on the experience of being a minority because they've talked about it a bunch with other white guys!
... sorry, you're saying most of those rooms are sensible and right most of the time, and it's only the small handful of outlandish outliers who gain popular attention for being wrong?
> .. sorry, you're saying most of those rooms are sensible and right most of the time
No, I'm not, precisely because they're so phenomenally blind to their collective biases on this issue that it undermines the whole notion of it being a community devoted to overcoming bias and common cognitive failure-modes. A community generally interested in reasoning most effectively wouldn't ignore its most obvious blind spot.
Apply the damn outside view. A group that contains few or no members of class X thinks it confidently understands the problems of class X and dismisses the members of class X who tell them "um well actually we have some experience with this and..." and decides that if class X would just apply the approach it likes, all their problems would be solved.
History - or indeed the rat community's experience with its own external critics - should tell us that this is an incredibly common failure mode with respect to outgroups.
>The study does find this field is complicated and hard to measure, but so is every field,
This is one of the things that has always made me suspicious about the actual extent of the 'replication crisis'. As someone who has done psychophysics and neuroscience research, I feel I can say that it can be very hard to do correctly, and you often need years of practice and mentorship in a specific narrow technique in order to administer it correctly and get clean data.
And of course, if you do a bad job and collect a ton of noise and random artifacts, then the most likely result of your data analysis is 'no result'.
When I think about how much effort it took to properly implement a backwards-masking task or make sure an eye tracker is working properly or remove all signs of electrical interference from an MEG machine, I shudder to think about someone trying to replicate my results who hasn't spent years learning those techniques and is just picking them up off the shelf to 'see if those results replicate'.
Double-shudder if they themselves are believers in the 'replication crisis' and have a subconscious or explicit motive to want to get no results... getting no results is what happens by default if you're not incredibly careful and just don't do a very good job running the experiment.
The upper-class Trump supporter is pretty much like most other trump supporters. They rely on politics primarily for entertainment purposes because they believe it has little-to-no impact on their lives. They are too blasé about it to have any idea how dangerous that monster is to our democracy, but forming opinions gets the juices flowing like betting on the horses or trading equities. (Or even just rooting for your football team, or baseball team for the more pastoral types.) "Ah, he's just trump being trump," is all they need to hear if anything on MSNBC happens to momentarily trouble them. To this day I don't believe the vast majority of trump voters have a clue about how much damage he did and got away with, or the fact that the democracy we know would have died if he had been reelected.
I say "the democracy we know" because I am well aware that many out there would dearly love to change it. Unfortunately for them the changes they want to see cannot be made except through amending the Constitution. Unfortunately for the rest of us they've decided it's more amusing to own the libs by lying, cheating and stealing, and laughing off a daily barrage of outrageous behavior.
Think what you will about this classless ragtag coalition that, for now, holds a small majority. We won't sit back and abide all this lying, cheating and stealing shit because some of you think this bastard is entertaining! What's more worrying is what all the truly Machiavellian types have learned from all this entertainment. The next attack on our democracy is likely to be much more sophisticated.
I'll venture to say that about half of Trump's supporters fit the upper-class (clueless) category; whether actually upper class or not they believe they have the luxury of treating politics as if it doesn't affect them. Most of the other half are attuned socially to support whoever yells the loudest in a bar. (All the better if he likes to shove aside inferior world leaders while fawning jealously over dictators.) And maybe half of the bar-bully lovers are the basket of true Deplorables. And I leave a point or two for some of the outlying Machiavellian puppetmasters swimming around in the media, the senate, etc -- making up 100 percent.
"Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, which is also correlated with rising SSTs (e.g., see blue curve in Fig. 4 or Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number of storms would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic."
This is on their "Global Warming and Hurricanes" page.
The bias from pre-satellite era data not picking up hurricanes out at sea is significant.
We basically only have 50ish years of hurricane data, and for reasons we still don't understand, the 1960s-1980s were a particularly quiet era for hurricanes. Start drawing your line from that era, you'll see an upward trend - but if you go back to the late 19th and early 20th century you see a number of extremely active hurricane seasons. Indeed, 2005 isn't even the all-time leader for ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) in a season - the winner is 1933, and that's probably an underestimate as it was from the pre-satellite era. 1893 and 1926 are #3 and #4, respectively, and again, are probably underestimates (especially 1893).
it is interesting that the military experts who offered the critique on the privateering idea did not address the success of Somali pirates. Who are probably much less advanced than any US based pirated would be, and yet it took a long-ish time and non trivial effort to control them.
The Somali pirates operated within a few hundred miles of the Somali coast, so they didn't need overseas bases and could quickly retreat to friendly ports. And they were never more than a nuisance, never threatened to drive any shipping companies into bankruptcy, never mind collapsing major economies through disruption of trade, so there was much less urgency in dealing with them.
If the US ever wants to operate privateers within a few hundred miles of the US coast, I'm certain it will be able to do so effectively enough to close those waters to enemy shipping.
Specific circumstances are always, well, specific. Yes, Somali pirates operated close to their base, but they also operated on the tightest possible budget. And disrupting trade was never their goal - quite the opposite, if they ever had a consistent articulated goal.
The pirates of the Caribbean also had a safe heaven on the Bahamas, but operated very far from it, and did in fact disrupt trade. Of course that was at a time when sending a military fleet across the pond was a major problem.
During WWII the British ran a small fleet of deniable raiders - without much in the way of a safe heaven anywhere, and attacking hard military targets. They were the beginnings of what we now call Special Operations and they had a degree of success.
All of that is different in specific ways from running a merc fleet of raiders against Chinese trade. But it doesn't mean that the idea can be dismissed outright.
First, throw out any examples from before 1900, when the modern methods of trade protection were invented.
Second, Somalia was fought with very different ROE than any global war would see. The big issue there was telling the fishing fleet apart from the pirates, and the navies generally errored on the side of assuming that they were looking at a fishing boat. This is unlikely to hold if the US unleashes privateers, which will also have a lot less legitimate lookalike traffic to hide in.
>During WWII the British ran a small fleet of deniable raiders - without much in the way of a safe heaven anywhere, and attacking hard military targets. They were the beginnings of what we now call Special Operations and they had a degree of success.
I am extremely confused. If you're talking about the commandos, they definitely weren't deniable and their safe haven was Britain. Also, "fleet" isn't the right word.
You pointed out several specific differences. As I said, there are always specific differences, no two wars are the same. While defenses evolved, so did the methods of offense. All new technologies are used by both sides. We're looking at the idea.
In general, there is little principal difference between running a special operations-based war and running a fleet of non-state raiders. The former has been quite successful for the US recently. Take the same approach but carried out by (late) Blackwater instead of SOCOM and you have your privateers. Except the government doesn't have to pay health insurance.
For an example of a deniable British raid see Operation Postmaster. The fighters on board Maid Honor posed as Swedes.
A "safe heaven" in case of Somali is of a "pop in and out" kind. An argument was made that the US privateers would not have one like that. I pointed out that both Caribbean and British raiders didn't have one either. Their bases were far and could not be used for help during an operation.
I picked 1900 very deliberately, as that was when Jackie Fisher developed his new system for trade protection. Before that, there was really no way to track and counter individual raiders, because information couldn't move faster than ships. After telegraph and radio, that changed, which was a huge win for the defense, particularly against weak opponents who had previously survived because there was no practical way to concentrate heavier forces against them. No similar benefit to the attacker, or at least a much lower benefit. Note that this system worked so well in two world wars that we don't think about its success much.
>In general, there is little principal difference between running a special operations-based war and running a fleet of non-state raiders.
Uhhh.... no. This is just not true. SF almost always has secure bases that a non-state raider wouldn't.
>For an example of a deniable British raid see Operation Postmaster. The fighters on board Maid Honor posed as Swedes.
That's not what "deniable" means. Deniable means that the government can say with a reasonably straight face that they weren't involved/responsible. Everyone knew that the British pulled Postmaster off, they just didn't know ahead of time. I think the word you're looking for is "covert", and Postmaster was the only operation of its kind I'm aware of in neutral territory.
And I think you fundamentally misunderstand the problem. The Caribbean pirates are irrelevant because of when they were operating, and the British raiders weren't trying to stay at large closeish to enemy bases in the face of modern surveillance equipment. They were doing a thing and getting out before a response could be launched. Which is exactly the opposite of what a privateer could do, given the distances involved and the existence of airplanes.
As modern communications can be used to target defense, they can (and were by Somalians) used to target offense. In asymmetric warfare offense usually is ahead at using modern tech to its advantage. Referring to Jackie Fisher is fighting the last war instead of the next one.
The nature of asymmetric warfare is in finding novel ways of offense. You're pointing to old ways and showing how they would not work. Of course they would not work, they're old. Defenses have caught up. That's never the point. The situation is not unlike the arguments that went on pre-Postmaster at the British Admiralty. They also did not believe it was possible.
"SF almost always has secure bases that a non-state raider wouldn't" - why? Provided sufficient deniability on one hand, a level of friendliness to US cause on the other, and some kind of incentive on the third... Providing bases is work that needs to be done, but not an impossibility.
> Crime in the US is heavily skewed by the high concentration of violent crime in certain parts of several cities.
... It's the exact same thing in European countries?
Like, why would you even write that? It's such an obviously wrong comparison.
Mixed with your other posts here about Denmark. You seem to have some weird agenda
Also, I'm amazed at your linking to stats showing that the US is doing worse than Denmark in +75% of measures in a list of 70 and then highlighting 3 to show that Denmark is somehow doing worse?
And suspiciously, you don't even comment on the measures in the stats that are relevant. There's actual (interesting!) data on the "fear of crime" in there.
Somehow Danes are more afraid than Americans of walking alone in the night, yet they're less afraid than Americans of being mugged and assaulted?
> Crime in the US is heavily skewed by the high concentration of violent crime in certain parts of several cities.
I'm not sure "we shove all the poor people into ghettos to deal with all the problems of the bad end of the bell curve while everyone else pretends they don't exist" is the recommendation of America you think it is.
The problem with the poverty argument is that there are significant poor rural areas, but rural areas have lower crime rates.
Just assume your own field is representative, and tremble in fear.
It's quite worrying realizing that the people in fields I can view have similar tendencies. I've known business owners/managers who were either truly incompetent or nearly insane. They were running companies with hundreds of employees! One in particular was a family owned business and the son who took over had some serious mental health issues. The managers and other family members tried to cover up the worst parts, but details still slipped through.
This is part of why competitive systems work well to produce effective outputs. (They work very poorly to produce *fair* ones, but that's a separate problem.) The ways in which people fail are myriad and non-obvious to them and at some point reason doesn't beat metrics.
I thought they used ice cores?
One of the complaints about Mann's hockey stick graph was that the long flat part was based on proxies, the short steep part was based on thermometers, and the graph didn't show what the temperature calculated from the proxies was over the modern period. Supposedly — I'm probably going from something by someone attacking Mann, so very likely a biased source — if you extended the proxy graph it didn't show, or didn't show as much of, the blade, which meant that there might have been similarly steep rises in the past that the proxy method wasn't sensitive enough to pick up.
The really bad part of this analysis by some people was to basically append a high frequency/high resolution dataset (temperature record) onto a low frequency/low resolution dataset (tree rings) and then make the observation that "things sure are changing much faster recently".
I remember some environmental conservation class I took in college saying they had around 26 different ways to measure temperature in the past including tree rings and ice cores, and all showed the same trends.
A quick googling didn't give me any results to confirm that number but indicated temperature can be derived from pollens/fossils/sediments/ancient corals through their chemical compositions or determining what type of plants dominated at the time which should be a proxy for temperatures.
I wonder how many of those need to be calibrated using a small number of common measures? (Just wondering out loud)
My understanding is that there are ice cores, I think from both Greenland and Antarctica but I'm not sure, that show more rapid warming than we have experienced. That isn't evidence of trends but it does suggest that rapid warming can come from causes other than humans, which undercuts the argument that what is happening now has to be human caused. Of course, that isn't data on the global average but on what happened at particular places — but the same is true, I believe, of the tree ring data.
This is true, sometimes rapid temperature change on the timescale of decades. But the mechanisms they theorize caused those previous events (volcanic eruptions, sudden dumps of freshwater into the ocean causing shifts in currents, asteroid impacts) arent occurring now. Of course maybe there is just some other unseen mechanism we're having difficulty nailing down, but if there were some other obvious cause you'd think we would spot signs of it.
When in doubt, [go read wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record) (seriously, it's probably the most underrated resource on the web). It looks like tree rings are only useful for the [past 2000 years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_temperature_record#Tree_rings_and_ice_cores_(from_1,000-2,000_years_before_present)), and are combined with ice cores, coral growth, ocean and lake sediments, cave deposits, fossils, borehole temperatures, and glacier length records to understand that period.
For a longer list of proxies, it appears there's even a [page dedicated to the topic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_(climate)).
Re: the discussion about privateers, was it not obvious to everyone that that was an April Fools joke? It's published in April of 2020.
Proceedings didn't treat it as a joke. In fact, there was serious back and forth about it in the comments section of Proceedings.
Also, after 40 years of reading Proceedings, I have never noticed any significant trace of intended humor in its pages...
As Alien Hunter says, Proceedings doesn't do *intentional* humor. And the bit about bringing back the privateers is something that comes up every couple of years and has to be addressed every couple of years.
Ok, if you guys say so. The premise seemed so absurd to me that I checked the date, and when I saw it was April I assumed it had to be a joke. But I guess people really just have ideas that bad sometimes.
How are the privateers in this case much different than all the land-based mercenary companies the US has employeed in the middle east and elsewhere?
They're very, very different. Privateers are pirates. They attack merchant ships and steal their cargo for profit. Mercenaries that the US hires are generally usually used to guard people or infrastructure.
Mostly what Darawak says - the mercenaries are just security guards hired to operate in a war zone. More generally, mercenaries are *hired*. Someone pays them to do a thing, and that thing may or may not be legal. Security-guarding is usually legal. Privateers, aren't hired, aren't paid. They're just pointed at someone and told, "anything you can take from those people by pointing guns at them and demanding their stuff, our courts will say that's totally your stuff fair and square and it totally wasn't armed robbery or even murder that you did that".
International law since 1856 has very specifically said that no, even in time of war and with official permission, that's armed robbery on the high seas, thus piracy. And I think the treaty that established that was broad enough to rule out variants where you put the privateers on salary rather than leaving them to secure their own pay; if they're not part of a naval command structure, they're pirates.
But note that the U.S. never signed the 1856 agreement, which makes things a little trickier.
Alternatively, the people arguing with it as though it were serious could have been continuing the joke.
Matt Yglesias claims that Sanders moved concretely to the left on immigration and on gun control.
I agree but most of this movement happened during his first campaign, not his second campaign. In 2016 there was not a lot of daylight between Bernie and Hillary on guns or immigration in terms the policies they proposed. But Bernie had some comments and Congressional votes from the 90s and 00s that he would struggle to explain in debates.
Also, the "FUCK Hillary vote" was strong in 2016. Sanders could have been a Manchin style Right wing democrat... and still pulled a ton of people.
I left a big comment on this today in the original march links thread. Both on the serious problems with the campaign and on guns/police/israel. Actually forgot to discuss immigration but the general idea is the same.
Tracey attributes a little too much to culture war topics and not enough to how shit the campaign and staff were. Although the lower tier staff were not at fault, just a reflection of the problems with high tier staff.
Of course Bernie did fuck up big time in some culture war areas.
What's there to be threatened about in Denmark? In the eyes of some there, Muslims, apparently. https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/denmarks-anti-muslim-politician-rasmus-paludan-and-the-free-speech-debate https://www.brookings.edu/research/islam-as-a-floating-signifier-right-wing-populism-and-perceptions-of-muslims-in-denmark/
I do find it kinda hilarious that the countries that are the most terrified of some kind of Muslim takeoever are small European countries that are 99.99999999% white. A macro instance of the observation that people in less diverse areas are more racist than those who interact with other races more
Now you're just making shit up.
Random checks is not "closing the border".
If you're going to exaggerate for effect, you should make sure that the right number isn't trivially easy to look up. 86.9% of the Danish population has Danish ancestry, and about 5% of the remainder is from Muslim-majority countries. Denmark is not some sort of homogenous place full of fishing villages, it's a very wealthy nation that makes it attractive to immigrants just like the rest of Western Europe.
Scratch that, it should be "5% of the total", not the remainder.
And those 5% are responsible for 15% of all crimes. So it may not be so irrational to be worried about Muslims after all.
Poor people are responsible for a disproportionate share crimes. Anytime an immigrant group moves into a place where they aren't very wealthy and they aren't well accepted... crime will increase.
Sometimes, that poor underclass is immigrants, but it isn't the immigrant status that makes the crime... it's the poverty.
But then if you don't want the increase in crime, you have two options.
One is to deal with the poverty. But that usually implies some kind of transfer payment, which would attract large numbers of immigrants who are in poverty, which would make the transfer payments uneconomical.
The other would be to stop accepting immigrants who are in poverty.
If you don't want the second one, you have to find a way to do the first one that isn't equivalent to a transfer payment. For example, it has to be a lot easier to start a small business so that anybody who shows up with only the shirt on their back can make an immediate success of themselves. Theoretically possible but easier said than done, and until you do it you're stuck at option two.
In this particular case (Denmark), when we compare crime rates of immigrants from Muslim countries to crime rates of immigrants from East Asia, we find that the former are one order of magnitude higher even after controlling for income/wealth.
But I fear we are quickly drifting into CW territory...
Might it just be true that crime is relatively low among ethnic Danes in Denmark, and that crime amongst Danish Muslims is higher just because it hews more to the international mean?
As reported by police records?
Convicted people.
Are you suggesting a massive international [*] conspiracy that aims at making Muslims (generally white) look bad and Asians (for example) look good?
[*] Other European countries have similar stats.
I'm not sure why you acknowledge that I'm exaggerating for rhetorical effect, then post the accurate number as if its a massive own. The point that should be obvious from context is that the number is low in comparison to other places, and that anti immigration sentiment doesn't map with the actual levels of immigration
I’m not sure what “other places” you’re comparing it with. In the sentence that started this, the contrast was with the US, which Wikipedia says has about 1% Muslims; presumably, “people from Muslim-majority countries” (which sounds more relevant to any “takeover”) is only a fraction of that. So, assuming Laurence’s numbers are right, Denmark actually has several times as many whatever-Muslim-adjacent-category than the US has.
If percentages matter to the question, then exaggerating them by ~ nine orders of magnitude seems wrong. If the percentages don’t matter to the question, then exaggerating them by ~ nine orders of magnitude seems irrelevant.
So what are the “other places” that have several times more than 5% Muslims that you’re comparing Denmark to, so that an exaggeration for rhetorical effect might be justified? Saudi Arabia?
I'm not sure why you think it's okay to exaggerate numbers for rhetorical effect at all, but especially when the *specific thing being argued* is exactly what the numbers are.
The number is not low in comparison to other places. Nearly all of that 5% immigrated in the past 40 years, and half of them went to Copenhagen. So that city changed in one lifetime from being ethnically monolithic, to 10% Muslim.
The US, for comparison, is 1% Muslim.
European countries that are 99.99% white - but their populations work in countries that failed at multiculturalism, and don't want those particular problems on their home turf.
FWIW, the most racist people I met are my countrymen living abroad.
Assuming you define middle eastern and north African Muslims as not white, what European county is 99.99% white?
Scott: "Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this."
Possibly everyone, but definitely lawyers.
Some law professors are not being great on what the law actually is, conflating it with what they think the law should be. Lawyer-commenters often get more airtime if they lack compunction about drifting outside their field of expertise.
Some lawyers are also not of especially sound disposition and thus end up with odd analyses which is can be viewed as a feature rather than a bug as far as attention received.
That's not to say there isn't a lot of high quality lawyer commentary out there on social media, just that "being a lawyer," and "speaking correctly on the law" is not a single circle on your Venn diagram.
I was just going to say "Gell-Mann Amnesia", tbh.
Are these lawyers you describe as "not being great on what the law actually is" American legal pragmatists? I have heard that, in America, judges can rule to get whatever outcome they want in the case at hand, come up with some bogus post-hoc justification, and call it "legal pragmatism". I know little about this, but it is consistent with the history of US Supreme Court rulings.
An exercise for intersectional law-and-information-theory geeks: See what fraction of the information needed to specify the positions of every judge on the Supreme Court on every ruling in the past 20 years is accounted for by categorizing each judge according to the political party of the president who appointed that judge (and, by implication, an upper bound on the fraction that could be accounted for by the case and the law).
Paragraph 1 is not true; judges get reversed for violating established precedent (and sometimes for other reasons.) There's no secret "legal pragmatism" button, and a Westlaw search of California cases turns up one case from 1941 for an exact match of "legal pragmatism." Whatever you've heard isn't true.
Paragraph 2 has an answer, which is that if you bet on politics on every case, you will get destroyed at https://fantasyscotus.net/ or any other prediction market.
Politics may explain some votes on some cases, but the idea that lots of the votes are partisan political hackery is just mistaken. I have done your suggested analysis on two years of recent Supreme Court cases, and I think my critique of legal analysts above is a cause as to why people think this. If you want to figure out how people will vote, you need to know that John Roberts is much more deferential to legislation than Neil Gorsuch.
fantasyscotus.net is very interesting, but the fact that you'll get destroyed if you bet on politics doesn't answer my question. I asked what fraction of the total information is accounted for by politics. Everyone on fantasyscotus knows which justices lean which way; therefore, using merely that information should give you a spot near the bottom, REGARDLESS of how much of rulings is pure politics. Of course you can get a better score using politics plus something else, than by using only politics.
If half of the information in how judges vote is determined by some information easily accessible to everyone, such as political affiliation, we would expect the median player to be about 0.75 accurate, which seems to be close to the data. (I can't say that with confidence, because the leaderboard isn't sorted by predictive accuracy, but by total score, which is useless (e.g., JustinRattey was 87.5% accurate, yet is ranked #51 out of 142). )
Legal pragmatism isn't a doctrine judges can cite in order to do whatever they want, it's a description of observed behavior. It works basically like this.
The legislature passes a law that says that if you intentionally kill someone you're guilty of homicide and go to prison.
The trolley problem comes before the court. The court doesn't want to convict the guy who chose to save the five people instead of the one, so they say that "intentionally kill" doesn't apply here, because the defendant didn't intend for the one person to die, it was just an unavoidable consequence of saving the other five.
Now this is precedent. If the exact same thing happens again, the courts are supposed to defer to the precedent and do the same thing again.
Next the same thing happens again, except that instead of saving five people, the person caused the trolley to kill someone in order to make a million dollars. The defendant says they didn't intend to kill that person, it was just an unavoidable consequence of making the million dollars. Guess which precedent the court is not going to follow. They're going "distinguish" the case, i.e. say that it's different this time and the other precedent doesn't apply, and come up with some justification to throw that guy in jail.
Since no two cases are ever exactly the same, the judge can always distinguish them if they want to, which means they can always reach the result they want.
In practice what happens is that judges do actually follow precedents that are vaguely relevant in any case where both of the parties are equally sympathetic (or equally unsympathetic). But when the court really wants one side to win, they can make it happen.
> In practice what happens is that judges do actually follow precedents that are vaguely relevant in any case where both of the parties are equally sympathetic (or equally unsympathetic). But when the court really wants one side to win, they can make it happen.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps avoid Goodhart's Law as applied to legal texts by using some combination of "satisfies the letter of the law" and "isn't just obviously gaming the letter of the law".
Scientists fit into this mold, definitely.
Software engineers don't, and I have no idea why. They have plenty of wrong, loud opinions on everything _other_ than their domain, but within the domain knowledge that seems unorthodox to the public (e.g. that electronic voting is a shitshow and should not be a thing, especially not in the way countries attempt it right now) is more or less the consensus position.
That's because we don't just know how the sausage is made, but we invented the idea of sausage and know damn well we did it at 0300 after a night of drinking Mountain Dew and smoking weed. Trust me, the ones who were getting any at that hour were only engineers long enough to get into management.
The story of the Therac-25 is instructive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
The economic harm of hurricanes being primarily due to hurricanes that made landfall in the US is one of those things that sounds rather odd in isolation, but isn't really that surprising:
1. Of course it's only hurricanes that make landfall that cause economic harm because, you know, we do not have floating cities.
2. Only a few coasts are at much risk of hurricane (well, tropical storm, they don't call them hurricanes everywhere) landfall. It's basically southeast coasts in the Northern Hemisphere and northwest coasts in the Southern Hemisphere. Much of the rich world is not in those areas, besides the SE United States. So... you cause the most economic harm when you hit built up rich areas, the available places to hit are not mostly built up and rich, the US is the exception, thus hurricanes that make landfall in the US are most of the economic harm.
The quote says "from disasters" - I was more surprised that non-hurricane disasters didn't put up a better showing.
Just wait for the next big west-coast earthquake.
Dogiv already said this, but it doesn't include non-weather disasters. It's pretty weird that he basically misquotes his own paper, but figure 2 in the paper is pretty clear that they're excluding Earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanoes/landslides/drought
Edit-with-new-comment: Looks like it does include wildfires though, which as a Californian is the thing that sent me looking in the first place.
So wildfires count as weather, but droughts do not?
That's an interesting definition of weather.
Agreed. They specify in the paper that they're excluding droughts because they're long term. Which is fair, if you're interested in acute weather events. But it makes claims about hurricanes as a fraction of damage a bit weird in isolation.
I think what is most interesting to me about this is that I did not understand that hurricanes cause economic damage at vastly higher rates than other types of natural disasters, because it isn't just that 60% of economic damage from hurricanes comes from landfall on US coasts, but 60% of economic damage from all disasters worldwide. Unless I'm misunderstanding something.
When I think about floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, tornados, non-hurricane storms, etc. I would expect them, worldwide, to make up far more than 40% of economic damage from disasters alone, not to mention hurricanes making landfall in countries other than the United States. But maybe this is just a function of the United States being so wealthy?
"maybe this is just a function of the United States being so wealthy?" Mostly this. A major typhoon hitting Bangladesh does less economic destruction than a tropical storm hitting Boca Raton.
That doesn't seem like the best way to measure impact though, I feel like you need to adjust economic damage by ease of recovery to have a meaningful metric.
This is similar to the immigration-related factoid that goes "by immigrating to the US a Haitian increases his productivity by 20x". Here "productivity" means "the amount he gets paid for his work", so the exact same work is much more "productive" in the US than Haiti, simply because the US is a richer country and the prices of everything are higher.
Anything with dollar amounts associated that happens in the US will have higher dollar amounts than the same thing happening in Haiti/Bangladesh/whatever, because everything in the US costs more than the same thing in a poor country. So a disaster in Bangladesh might cause just as much devastation and human suffering, and require just as much economic output to remediate, but it will cause less "economic damage" as economists measure it.
Since the price of a thing depends on what else one can do with that thing, it's not really surprising that prices will be higher in the US.
I have worked for two global reinsurers in the last 14 years and I can confirm that South East US Hurricane risk is a huge portion of global reinsurance risk. Don't know if the 60% number is correct but I do know that it is easily the largest single peril in global natural catastrophe markets.
As other have pointed out this is largely because the SE US is one of the few rich heavily populated regions that regularly is hit by hurricanes (I am using hurricanes as interchangeable with tropical cyclones in general). Europe has wind storms but they are not as devastating as hurricanes. Earthquakes hit other places but major ones are not as frequent as hurricanes.
Global reinsurers shifted from historical data to estimate damages to rather sketchy climate models after the rather bad 2005 season. This ended up raising rates in FL by over 30%. An investigation into this mess won the Pulitzer Prize:
https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/paige-st-john
For the decade of 2000-2010 the FL disaster costs came in right around historical average because the rest of the decade was quiet. In fact the US had 0 Cat3+ landfalls for 11 years after this, the longest major hurricane landfall drought on record.
But yes, hurricanes are by far the biggest threat down here in FL.
I don't know if you've seen this, but "figure 2 in the paper is pretty clear that they're excluding Earthquakes/tsunamis/volcanoes/landslides/drought" https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-march#comment-1415326 (it's from cubecumbered's comment elsewhere in this thread, if the link doesn't go through).
Another random historical fact about hurricanes: the deadliest hurricane in the US between WW2 and 2005 was Hurricane Camille, in 1965; almost half the deaths were in central Virginia (between Lynchburg and Charlottesville) due to severe and very unexpected flooding.
I lived near there at one time. One of my friends who lived through it described it as "I went to bed and it was starting to rain; when I got up in the morning, the house at the end of the lane near the creek was gone down to the foundations."
The quote is worded badly so it sounds like a much stronger claim: “historically, about 60% of all economic damage from disasters worldwide comes from landfalling hurricanes in the United States”. As stated, that would include earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, too.
What the link actually says is that for the period 1980-2008, 57% of all weather-related global economic loss was due to North American storms, and your explanation makes perfect sense.
https://ascelibrary.org/doi/10.1061/%28ASCE%29NH.1527-6996.0000141
I’m wondering if part of this is how insurance works in the US? So far as I’m aware, in some ways we basically subsidize people to live in flood plains and tornado alleys. But insurance for these things isn’t handled especially consistently or efficiently. I’m not sure which would be more costly, insurance paying someone to rebuild in a flood plain, or that person simply losing everything and the subsequent economic burden of that instability. This must be especially hard to quantify on a global scale.
In theory, subsidized flood insurance encourages people to build in low-lying areas. In practice, a lot of the people who build there don't buy the insurance even at heavily subsidized rates (or so I've read). So it's quite possible that damages would be just as high without the subsidy.
I suppose the actual damages would have to be weighed against the economic loss of people leaving the area entirely, which might be considerable. Or it might be nowhere near the cost of replacing the homes and infrastructure every decade or two. I’m not sure how you could calculate that, given that most recoveries probably involve varying proportions of funds from different sources (insurance, subsidies, corporate investment, personal savings, etc.) It would differ so much across regions and timeframes that even if we had all the data it might be hard to make a meaningful assessment.
I thought part of the problem is that the flood insurance doesn't just pay out money, it pays out money on the condition of rebuilding in the same place. Is this correct?
IPCC AR5:
“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
The linked report yesterday is the most common form of hurricane (I hesitate to use the word propaganda) misinformation. Misleading is probably the most neutral word because better datasets are readily available and there isn't any need to count things in new ways unless you looking at small storms, "fish storms" that don't make landfall, or other information that is more nuanced than "are hurricanes getting worse".
Why examine just 4 decades of * major * hurricanes? Is there not more information available? Why use a proxy such as a tide gauge or satellites when landfall data is available?
One thing that isn't missed is a major hurricane landfall in the US and it has been warming over 100 years.
Major hurricanes are a sparse and erratic dataset. Starting in the 1970's sure looks like cherry picking when the longer datasets are available. See the graphs here.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/11/15/no-hurricanes-are-not-bigger-stronger-and-more-dangerous/?sh=5854ff5c4d9e
It is quite possible the dynamics of hurricanes are also on a 60 year cycle related to ocean currents but only time will tell.
I only have a problem with the conclusions drawn by these type of studies by the usual suspects, not their existence. These conclusions are typically marketed to environmental journalists (or they draw them themselves). Longer datasets show a much more complex story. If there is a climate signal in hurricanes it is rather small at this time and will take more time to draw out from the noisy data.
There are definitely crazy colonels out there, and generals and admirals as well. Usually they can't cause too much damage; sometimes a shooting war will leave them unsupervised long enough to cause a minor catastrophe. The really major operations get enough scrutiny that lone crazies are usually kept in check.
And, glad to be of service providing a reality check on this one. Sometimes the best way to debunk a myth is to post it online and wait for the "Someone is WRONG on the internet!" effect to kick in. The SSC/DSL/ACX community is a pretty good place for that, and I'm glad you're willing to take the heat for occasionally linking to something wrong so that it can be properly corrected.
The "let's bring back privateering" one is a perennial mistake that needs a perennial debunking, and this was our turn :-)
What do you mean by DSL?
Data Secrets Lox, a traditional forum set up in the wake of the SSC shutdown. A bunch of the Open Thread posters moved there.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php#c1
And it is still active and interesting.
It's true of colonels, it's true of doctors, it's true of people who hold PhDs from elite institutions, it's true of basically any elite group you can find.
Colonels are selected for some combination of baseline competence and savvy/internal politics/jockeying. This leaves plenty of room for a few wingnuts to make it into the crowd.
I'm most interested about whether it's true in academic expertise based fields.
Like, the crazy doctors who promote alternative medicine - they're usually still good doctors, in the sense that if you go to them for pneumonia or something they will treat it correctly. So I'm willing to give them a pass on the grounds that they're good at their actual job - treating disease - and bad at something that isn't their job - coming up with theories about disease.
If someone is an expert epidemiologist, coming up with theories *is* their job. So I would expect somewhat stronger selection pressure for being good at it. Still not sure how that's going.
The Colonel will probably do an okay job if you put him at the head of a regiment (or an Air Force squadron, or whatever).
Not all Colonels are academic military theorists - they're mostly personnel middle managers who have to go through a military theory course and hand in a paper to punch a card before getting promoted. Think medical students doing really crappy studies to get their name in a paper so they can get a choice residency, or get hired by a nice hospital.
My cardiologist showed me a research paper which he was one of the multiple authors of. I certainly wouldn't have published it, and Scott could have torn it to bits.
This. The vast majority of people in the military are specialists in their day job, and not actually that good at broader military theory. Enlisted men are the worst at this in my experience, but even officers often see the same thing.
However, I don't think this is the case here. The Colonel in question is a frequent Proceedings contributor and associated with CSIS. That, I cannot explain.
The most famous insane military theorist is Mike Sparks, who for some reason really likes the M113 and went around trying to convince everyone to call it the Gavin (it is not called the Gavin).
He was a lieutenant in some reserve formation, and seems to have been pretty invested in his work during his time there.
My understanding is that law professors are notoriously bad at interpreting high profile court cases; I don't have a reference at hand, but I recall it being a point made at groklaw.net several times in her commentary.
On the original Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare, my impression is that the vast majority of law professors who commented claimed it was an absurd case that didn't have a chance. It actually lost 5 to 4.
In my field, (statistics) there are folks who have pretty heterodox views about how we should conceptualize data and information. For example, I can't tell if this is ridiculous or trivial or brilliant:
http://pages.stat.wisc.edu/~wahba/stat860public/pdf4/Energy2/ARSIA-final-sub.pdf
But regardless, I'm sure the authors could competently do an ANOVA or derive the asymptotic properties of some estimator.
I don't think the selection pressure for epidemiologists (or statisticians or academics in general) is on "coming up with theories". For academics, it's "publish papers and get grants". The latter may filter some of the cranks, but if you get tenure, you can write whatever book you want on your own time.
Also, there's the option to have heterodox views within your field about things that aren't the subject of your research. In this case, there's virtually no cost to your career or standing. This would be like an anesthesiologist who believed Freudian theory.
The introduction looks like the time cube guy figured out how to submit to arxiv, what the hell. Does the rest makes sense?
A particular topic I'm interested in is aging research. Having some background in biotech - I routinely encounter very well-researched arguments for wear and tear theories of aging, then very well-researched arguments for theories programmed aging, and I end up in a state of complete epistemic helplessness, because someone is obviously wrong here but it's so niche that you can't quite tell the crackpots from the experts.
The wider biotech community just throws their hands up, decides "I dunno lol" and proceeds to work on something that has 1000x less ROI instead.
A friend of mine is a doctor and had an unforeseen issue at work: one of the doctors convinced a considerable number of nurses and other staff to join a cult. Not quite a Waco-type cult, but a sort of New Agey self help seminar-based cult with an MLM element.
The doctor in question was making some kind of money from this, but not in a way that triggered disciplinary action. My friend and the administrators were at a loss for how to deal with this. The cult was very careful not to run afoul of HR but their hospital became a very weird place to work. I’m not sure it ever resolved or if the nurses just eventually lost interest.
The prevalence of crazy colonels is interesting given how often the military is used as an example of meritocratic promotion systems,
Why should sanity and merit always be perfectly correlated? I mean, selecting for success in a narrow field (academic, military, business, whatever) seems likely to not be perfectly correlated with non-craziness, especially if sanity is defined relative to the mean!
Merit in leadership and organizational skill, project management, motivating others, possibly tactics, as well as some level of just being a personal example of excellence in discipline, self-sacrifice, physical fitness, all of the usual military values, but it has nothing to do with being a strategic genius or any kind of great thinker at all.
More worryingly, this guy's resume looks really good even apart from making rank in the Marine Corps: https://rfpb.defense.gov/Board-Biographies/cancian/
You'd think that level of experience and trust in actually hammering out policy ideas might weed out wackos, but people can be very smart and still very wrong about specific things.
Prevalence?
So we're going from an example of one to "they're common"?
As I said in the post I made a few minutes ago, if there is one thing I could fix in language, it would be the crazy ease with which most people make these elisions.
Probably thinking of that dude who was arrested at the capital with zip ties, though he was a Lieutenant Colonel.
As impressive as this guy's resume is anyway, he was a Marine infantry officer, which says next to nothing about his level of expertise in naval warfare.
If there's not any serious threat from enemy forces, then perhaps meritocracy becomes less necessary.
Seafighter, Arsenal Ships, Sea Basing, Sea Control Ships...
Good point about the Night of Terror at the end. If there is anything I am learning from listening to The Data Detective is that you need to step back and look at the big picture (including trend-lines).
Incidentally, you can find many great visualizations of the tracks of all historically recorded hurricanes/tropical cyclones: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/7079/historic-tropical-cyclone-tracks
Michael Sullivan points out that it's mainly southeast coasts in the northern hemisphere and northeast coasts in the southern hemisphere that get them, and then when you look at the contingent facts about the shapes of the currently existing continents on that map, you can see that the Caribbean islands, southeastern United States, Philippines, and Taiwan are really the main targets. Given the relative poverty (and thus low financial cost of disasters) of the Philippines and the Caribbean islands, the only thing that needs explaining is why Taiwan hasn't accounted for much more of the damages.
Incidentally, tornadoes are also highly concentrated in the United States, and probably account for a large fraction of the non-hurricane, weather-related disaster damages. Something like 75% of all tornadoes occur in the United States, because North America is the only continent with a large flat region stretching all the way from a warm body of water (the Gulf of Mexico) to the Arctic, so that you can get a warm moist air mass interacting with a cool dry one. Most of the rest of the world, in the current continental configuration, has either mountains or moderately temperate bodies of water in between.
https://www.ustornadoes.com/2013/07/25/from-domestic-to-international-tornadoes-around-the-world/
I often wonder just how different global climate was in times of Pangaea, or what weather phenomena existed in the Mediterranean basin during the periods when it was dry. If North America is unique right now, how differently would the world have thought of hurricanes and tornadoes under a different continental configuration? Are there other sorts of weather patterns that would have been common under other configurations that we don't even remark on now?
Taiwan has a population of about 23 million, so I'd expect it to only be a limited proportion of the economic damage just because of that.
Well, the recent wildfires in California have been the first experimental confirmation of natural fire whirls, where a fire burns so strongly that the updraft starts a tornado which then spreads the fire. The only past examples we'd seen were unnatural disasters: burning cities, either from firebombing or earthquakes+wood construction. See e.g. https://theconversation.com/extreme-wildfires-can-create-their-own-dangerous-weather-including-fire-tornadoes-heres-how-144904
So: was this phenomenon common in past geologic eras? A quick Google search suggests we don't have a good answer (what would the geologic evidence of a fire whirl look like?). On the other hand, we do know that gigantic wildfires were very common in the Carboniferous period (360-300 Mya) because they left behind a lot of (ahem) charcoal. See https://www.earthmagazine.org/article/flammable-planet-fire-finds-its-place-earth-history So it's not unreasonable to guess that fire whirls were a common natural phenomenon during the Carboniferous and we're only seeing them now because of climate change+poor forest management.
Really interesting!
I'm sorry but it is not the case that police going on strike in Brazil leads to nothing happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Military_Police_of_Esp%C3%ADrito_Santo_strike#Violence_outbreak
I gave that example and another one in the other thread, but I guessed that Scott didn't see those.
I'm pretty sure that everything works like colonels and doctors. I see them everywhere I'm familiar with, and see no reason that they wouldn't pop up in fields where I don't have the expertise to detect them. This guy in particular is associated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is a top-rank think tank, so I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up and has a bee in his bonnet on this particular issue. (Actually, think tank people are at least somewhat suspect. CNAS published a report a few years ago that failed basic math, and it's still getting wide coverage. I may have vented at it a bit. https://www.navalgazing.net/The-Range-of-a-Carrier-Wing)
To expand some on USNI: Most of the stuff they publish is very trustworthy. My procedure for finding a book on a naval topic I'm not familiar with is to go to the wiki page and look for a book that they published in the citations. It works really well, and the dud books I've gotten from them are of the "this is worse than other USNI books I already had on the subject" rather than "this is wrong". Seriously, naval history in the English-speaking world would not be nearly as healthy as it is without them. Likewise, their news service is very good. Proceedings does a specific job, but that job is to carry out debate, not inform outsiders.
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm a USNI member. No, I'm not getting paid by them, although if they want to do so, they know where to find me.
You said "...I assume he's either Doctor Oz, or read too much Horatio Hornblower growing up..." and John said "This is a stupid idea that keeps coming back every year or two because somebody read too many Napoleonic sea-adventure stories..."
I do not understand the "too much" and "too many." Where do these dangerous heresies come from?
The best series are Horatio Hornblower by C.S. Forester, and the Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian. Personally, I find Hornblower to be too depressed to be good reading, but that's just me, and most people seem to like it. I completely endorse O'Brian.
It's also interesting to read the original stories in the genre, by Captain Marryat, who was actually in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars.
There's also Walter Jon Williams' "Privateer" series for the pure version. And most of Errol Flynn's nautical heroes danced on the fuzz pirate/privateer border. Hornblower and Aubrey and most of the rest were mostly regular navy officers, though Hornblower interacted with privateers and Aubrey was one for a book or two.
Privateers make great story material, because they're warship captains who have much more autonomy than naval officers, or alternately dashing romantic pirates who don't come with a load of "hey aren't these really murderous villains?" baggage. And if the author is on their side, they can legitimately win great fortune and glory where the proper naval officers just win a promotion to a boring desk job. So they show up quite frequently in romantic fiction of the era. And particularly for libertarian-leaning Americans, it's really appealing to imagine that this is part of the recipe for American maritime supremacy in the 21st century. It just has the slight problem of not being practical.
"Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this." I can tell you one thing, that you probably already knew, but is so prevalent that it hurts: economists.
With a honorable mention to Paul Krugman, who seems to be wrong just about every time I encounter his opinion.
Krugman, unfortunately, stopped being an economist some time after the financial crisis and turned into a mediocre political commentator. His popular work from the 1990s is both excellent and seems to be from a totally different person.
Based on actual empirical data relating to his earlier predictions, or based on your opinions about economics?
He doesn't actually limit himself to pure economics, as he predicted in 1998 that : "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”"
In the same article, he predicted that the number of IT jobs would decrease in that time period and also that inflation would rise and be above 3% in 1999 already.
None of those three things happened.
He predicted that the Trump administration would cause a "global recession, with no end in sight." Unless he believes that Trump engineered COVID, that was a dud.
He argued in 2002 that the solution to the recession of the time was a housing bubble: "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble."
He was wrong on his austerity predictions: https://archive.is/nl6xs
He made similar predictions about austerity in Germany and was wrong there too.
He predicted 4% growth due to Obama's stimulus, but it was only 1.5%.
Presumably an organisation like Harvard has less strict auditing than a public company such as Enron or Carillion.
If your accountants get creative in a way that misleads shareholders into thinking your company is doing better than it really is, financial regulators will throw the book at you.
Not that WeWork won't give it a go (https://qz.com/1685919/wework-ipo-community-adjusted-ebitda-and-other-metrics-to-watch-for/) with the caveat that they have to be clear about which numbers are made according to Generally Accepted Accounting Practices and which are cooked.
Like with jurisprudence, you can't formalise every accounting edge case nor can you explicitly react fast enough to new technologies. Accountants are going to have to use their judgement decide how fast the brand new iphones you've started handing out to employees will depreciate. and the auditors will have to judge whether their judgement is reasonable.
It's not really Iphones, it's big implementations that cost millions and millions. For example, if you decide to implement SAP, that's a HUGE cost. Almost always, this is set-up as a capital project so it does not affect this year's income statement. SAP is going to be with you for a long time, why report the implementation costs as a single period expense when it will be supporting you for years?
However, there are other incidental expenses that can also get charged to the capital project:
-External Consultants to help set-up SAP. Obviously not period expenses.
-What about our in-house IT department? Let's move all their salaries to the project, too.
-If we bring all of our employees in for 2 weeks to train them? Yep, those salaries are no longer period expenses, let's move that into the project, too.
-Then start-up costs! SAP sucks: we can't run any of our production lines for a week! All of that downtime cost gets moved into the project, too.
There is a lot of stuff that can you move into projects, theoretically, and then that cost does NOT flow into into your EBITDA, which is how many bonuses and incentives are decided and how many companies are judged. It looks like the company's operations are actually quite healthy, and this might be misleading if you are only looking at the income statement and not the Cash Flow statement (which will report WARNING WARNING NEGATIVE FREE CASH FLOW MONEY IS HEMMORAGHING).
There's additional adjustment to certain expenses into whether they are SG&A or COGS. SG&A going up too quickly is generally frowned upon, and there is sometimes an effort to shift costs into COGS. Or, you know, vice versa if COGS is looking bad. For instance, I am an accountant to a manufacturing facility, so I am a COGS, but certain functions of mine have been shifted to corporate functions, and those functions are listed as SG&A, so our factories look like they are running leaner than they actually are...just left-hand, right-hand.
Like that SAP system? Supports the whole company, but let's list it as COGS so we don't inflate the SG&A budget too much.
Theoretically there are policies to address most of this, but there are always gray areas that can be flexed a bit.
WRT Harvard, I don't think that's necessarily the case. Like, there's a lot of games accountants CAN play, but there's only so much we can do. The increase in "Instruction and Academic Support" services sounds a lot like buying more tech, since the period is between 2004 and 2019. Blackboard ain't free.
Plus there is a huge increase in facility quality, which is something you need to do maintain your reputation as a world-class facility (at least in Harvard's view).
Maybe theoretically they can utilize technology to REDUCE institutional headcount, but it seems like it has increased.
To me it looks like an institution that treats its revenue stream as a given and grows expenses to match its revenue and maintain its prestige. There's probably a lot of what they consider "cost control," like hiring "Non-Faculty Instructors," but throwing more money at instructions and implementing a bunch of tech solutions with the same faculty headcount, and BTW throw in some extra admin bloat, is indicative of a bloated culture rather than a cost conscious or value driven culture.
Re: admin bloat. To some extent the more you implement "technology," the MORE you're going to get admin bloat. If you CAN track more stuff, the immediate reaction is that, yes, we should track all this extra stuff! But we need to hire more staff to do it. This is pretty natural UNLESS you have a plan ahead of time to become more efficient.
> Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
Everything. Literally every profession with more than a dozen practitioners works like that.
@Scott: unrelated to the current post, but hopefully-useful info for next Mantic Monday: Tyler Cowen has a Bloomberg article about a new prediction market, Kalshi, which has FTC approval.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-04/predicting-the-future-of-prediction-markets
https://kalshi.com/
Just a few more things about public sector and non-profit accounting. It can be confusing for a few reasons. One, although financial statements have to adhere to GAAP, they have different rules than private sector because the budgets themselves have to be reported purely on a cash basis, not accrual, so to make the financial statements somewhat useful as something that can be used to compare to a budget, the financial statements use something called modified accrual accounting, which is not quite cash or accrual and has extremely inscrutable rules that I never quite learned right even when I was studying this stuff. Even as an accountant, reading them might not make much sense unless you take the time to learn the bases they're using.
Two, the budgets and financial statements for anything legislatively appropriated has to actually be somewhat accurate and not misleading. They can't misclassify expenses to trick people. The big caveat, of course, is that the military has a history of not producing auditable financial statements thanks to the pre-GFEBS impracticality of keeping accurate records in war zones when you're making multimillion dollar cash payments to friendly warlords while getting shot at, plus the sheer urgency with which money is spent and the broad leeway given to field commanders to spend certain amounts pretty much however they see fit. Regular government departments and agencies can't get away with this kind of thing.
Non-profits are not really subject to those reporting rules, though. The one form they are all required to submit annually and can't get too creative with is the IRS Form 990, which is the non-profit tax return. Obviously, they don't pay taxes, but this is the form they use to prove their expenses and revenues actually qualify them for tax-exempt status. The only exception to the filling requirement is churches, but all other non-profits have to both file and make the filed form publicly available, so you can always see how any non-profit is spending its money.
Something else to keep in mind with budgets is they are not financial statements. A budget is a plan for how to spend money. How much you actually spend and on what may differ from the budget, which is the purpose of financial statements in public sector organizations. They're not accountable to shareholders, but they are accountable to the legislatures giving them money to spend on specific things to show that is what they actually spent it on. In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it. Donations that are not earmarked, however, only need to be spent promoting whatever your mission is, and of course not to the financial benefit of any specific individual employee or stakeholder. You can pay very well if your donors don't object, but nobody can get a percentage of donations or pay contingent on financials, for instance, which is the opposite of "non-profit."
Funnily enough, if you never saw it, the whole loophole for churches was a huge plot point in The Wire, where drug lords were laundering money by donating to local churches that then gave them and their families sham jobs doing nothing but earning huge paychecks as consultants and also paid off politicians (which, of course, churches are not actually allowed to do, but it's hard to stop them if they don't have to report financials and can't be audited).
I did not know about the non-profit accounting methods — fascinating. After looking up "modified accrual accounting" it seems like some crazy stuff, at least if this article is to be believed: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/modified-accrual-accounting.asp
Taking short-term expenses on a cash basis and long-term expenses on an accrual basis is wild, although I suppose it makes sense for governments that have to balance their cash budgets every year.
Yep. All governments except the federal government being disallowed from running deficits and thus needing to balance the books every fiscal year kills them in years with revenue shortfalls. Practically speaking, so many of their expenses are legally obligated (you can't just not pay for stuff you received, including labor) that they tend to just end up deferring maintenance on capital assets like roads and bridges and traffic control systems. It's how we end up in the tremendous failing infrastructure mess we find ourselves in. These aren't "legal" obligations, so they never show up on the books and make the financials look a lot more healthy than they realistically are unless we're honestly just going to let cities crumble to dirt at some point. Municipal governments have basically been kicking the can down the road for decades figuring the federal government would eventually bail them out, which is likely going to end up being true as something like "the entire national transportation system" is pretty much just as too big to fail as the banking system.
This is, by the way, a big part specifically of why California has had such fiscal issues over the decades, and this is totally non-partisan because it spans many decades and both political parties and voters themselves are all equally responsible. Prop 13 effectively neutered the property tax, so they rely very heavily on income tax, which is of course highly income-elastic, and it's a progressive tax and incomes at the top are even more elastic, even negative in some really bad years if your income is mostly shares in your own company. So whenever there is a recession, the California government gets hit really hard, but they can't run a deficit, and even more of their expenses are legally obligated than most states because of the proposition system that allows voters to create their own earmarked taxes that can't be used in the general fund. So what do they do? They just let cities and the public schools fall apart. The ideal answer obviously is keep a hefty rainy day fund when times are good, but that is a very hard sell to voters who would much rather see a tax cut or more spending when the revenues are high.
TBH there's a part of me that wonders if "let cities crumble to dirt at some point: might not be a terrible idea, if we lived in a world where we could coordinate to do it one city at a time. It would at least give us a chance to fully modernize their infrastructure all at once with fewer delays and cost overruns. It'll never happen that way, but I find it interesting to think about.
Does harvard have any debt? Presumably the banks don't want to be mislead into lending money to a financially unhealthy organisation.
Yes, they issue bonds sometimes. Despite having a huge endowment, it can be financially efficient to have a certain amount of debt.
"In Harvard's case, they're not accountable to legislators either. They are only accountable to their donors, but that is still only true with respect to expense categories when the donors earmark donations for specific activities. Very large donors often do this and it's why you see hospital wings and academic buildings with names of rich people, because they specifically gave money with the caveat that you have to use it to build a building with their name on it."
When I was an undergrad, my advisor told me (and I have no citations, sorry) that over the centuries schools like Harvard have developed ways around this, too. The example he gave was, sometimes a donor will endow a scholarship, with stipulations that mean it rarely gets awarded (and/or laws change so enforcing them becomes illegal, so no one can use the money). Then you invest the money in such a way that the earnings are not restricted and can be spent however you want. This frees up other money elsewhere, and in any case within a few decades the restricted principle becomes too small to matter due to inflation and overall economic growth.
"I would also like to suggest a distinction between class-first leftists and "class-first leftists." Class-first leftists spend most of their time talking about class, are usually found in obscure academic journals and activist groups, and often have wonkish opinions about monetary policy and the labor theory of value. "Class-first leftists" spend most of their time talking about identity politics, can be found on Twitter, Fox News, or erstwhile pro-Trump outfits like American Affairs, and have often have wonkish opinions about how Republicans are correct to say that idpol is bad and Russiagate is fake, prefaced with "as a class first leftist,""
And which group of people has more success promoting class-first leftist ideas? The class-first leftists who are found in obscure journals and activist groups and that nobody knows about, or the "class-first leftists" on Twitter and Fox News?
So what distinguishes the second form of "class-first leftist" from a bog-standard economic populist?
I thought the air quotes made it pretty clear but I don't think Tracey and Nagle are promoting much of anything except themselves.
Both "class first leftists" and the weird academics are class-first leftists, and there's no reason to question their credibility on their leftism or their commitment to class first.
One of them is ineffectual, the other promoted the exact opposite of leftism. It's better to be ineffectual than it is to be effective at doing harm.
"Local police departments in Brazil go on strike all the time (I remember 3 different ones while I was in school in Salvador in the early aughts) and no big terrible things happen."
Well, when police went on strike in Espírito Santo (a Brazilian state) a few years ago, chaos ensued. More chaos than the usual in Brazil, I mean. You know, much more chaos than the usual. In Brazil. http://metrocosm.com/homicides-brazil-vs-world/ So I don't where that generalization about no big terrible things happening is coming from. I, however, admit police forces in Brazil do go on strike frequently, and the country still exists, so there's that.
"There’s a problem in medicine where people think doctors are trustworthy experts. While this is often true, there are about a million doctors, and some tiny fraction of them are insane."
Hardly a problem limited to doctors (or retired naval officers).
What fraction of "news" consists of "local lunatic says <thing> about <group>, hence proving that all of city/state/nation/race/gender/occupational-class/age-range are every bit as bad as you thought they were"?
More generally, if there is one concrete thing that LW can do to improve society, it would be to figure out a way in which people make claims about what "some" people have said that are both useful and in some sense true.
If I say that "Victorian doctors claimed masturbation would make you blind", what am I actually saying? That 95% of doctors agreed with this claim? Or that I could find two books, written by generally agreed to be nutcases, that made this claim?
And yet most of our contemporary discourse and thinking, historical or otherwise, uses this language that's so vague as to be meaningless.
One example is the factoid that "rule of thumb" came from the legal rule that man couldn't beat his wife with a stick thicker than his thumb. That based on dictum by one 18th century judge for which he was extensively mocked at the time.
Hence one of Larry Niven's laws
"There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it." or "No cause is so noble that it won't attract fuggheads"
Re: Higher threat response in conservatives. I watched an interview with Derren Brown ( famous British magician and hypnotist ) where he talked about learning of this study and how he decided to test it out and see if he could use it to make an act for one of his shows.
He found that with no other trickery, if he asked people to spend a few minutes imagining images of decay like maggots then those people would give more right wing views afterwards, and if they imagined being invunerable like a super hero then they would give more left wing views. I think he had then answer a questionaire before and after.
I'm not sure this could be considered evidence but I found it interesting and it seems to back up conservatives having higher threat response. The interview is done by Russell Brand on his youtube channel if anyone wanted to watch.
Hasn't coronavirus refuted these always dumb "higher threat response in conservatives" theories?
You mean threat response to funny pictures of pointy virus? Threat of coronavirus or global warming is very different from threat of immigrants...
In re higher threat response in conservatives: There's been a lot of research (or maybe a modest amount of research which gets repeated a lot in the media) to find out about deep personality differences between liberals and conservatives.
Should deep personality differences be a strong hypothesis? Or is it just that people want to believe the other side is very different?
As I recall, the public version of these research results don't include information about the size of the overlap. This is also something that annoys me about reports on "the difference" between men and women. The only thing I'm sure of (I haven't seen any research on the subject) is that there are a lot of people who want for there to be a difference.
>My thought when reading that article was “this sounds crazy…but wait! It’s written by a colonel and published by the US Naval Institute! That sounds just wacky enough to make a good link!” Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
The Media. Something you hear often from "famous" people is something like: "You never realize how wrong the media is until you're the subject of a story". This can be outright falsehoods, misrepresentations, etc.
A lot of people think something "must be true" because it's published in the NY Times or the Washington Post but that is a terribly unreliable mental shortcut and something more and more people seem to reevaluate each year.
Unfortunately, this is something Scott now has some personal experience with. I'd be interested to hear how Scott's "trust" of stories published by majors papers has changed.
Re: Sanders. I think people are placing too much focus on what Sanders and his campaign actually did and underplaying perceptions. Perceptions do not need to be accurate to drive votes.
Sanders did not buy into #DefundThePolice but AOC did, and AOC endorsed Sanders. I would also guess that most people who support #DefundThePolice also endorse Sanders if they endorsed any candidate. For a lot of voters that's enoguh to put Sanders into the DefundThePolice tribe.
I think this would hold true if you used even weaker links. Sanders is the "most left wing candidate", #DefundThePolice is a "most left" issue. Thus it affects perception of Sanders.
It's a general truism among pollsters that most poeple just don't pay much attention to politics. Tracking how much Sanders (or any candidate) says about a topic in speeches, interviews etc, isn't going to be an accurate representation of how ordinary people perceive them.
The problems with the campaign were primarily organizational and process. Terrible messaging was part of that issue. I wrote a large double comment about this in the march links thread today with a little inside info cited. I think Tracey really doesn't understand the majority of went wrong with the campaign. Kinda surprised to see someone link him as any sort of Sanders authority. I don't have Tracey Derangement System like many but on this particular issue he is off base.
>Now I am concerned that colonels work the same way as doctors. I wonder what else is like this.
Social Justice advocates, for a start.
Oh, oh, I can play that game too: rooms full of white guys who think they're experts on the experience of being a minority because they've talked about it a bunch with other white guys!
... sorry, you're saying most of those rooms are sensible and right most of the time, and it's only the small handful of outlandish outliers who gain popular attention for being wrong?
> .. sorry, you're saying most of those rooms are sensible and right most of the time
No, I'm not, precisely because they're so phenomenally blind to their collective biases on this issue that it undermines the whole notion of it being a community devoted to overcoming bias and common cognitive failure-modes. A community generally interested in reasoning most effectively wouldn't ignore its most obvious blind spot.
Apply the damn outside view. A group that contains few or no members of class X thinks it confidently understands the problems of class X and dismisses the members of class X who tell them "um well actually we have some experience with this and..." and decides that if class X would just apply the approach it likes, all their problems would be solved.
History - or indeed the rat community's experience with its own external critics - should tell us that this is an incredibly common failure mode with respect to outgroups.
>The study does find this field is complicated and hard to measure, but so is every field,
This is one of the things that has always made me suspicious about the actual extent of the 'replication crisis'. As someone who has done psychophysics and neuroscience research, I feel I can say that it can be very hard to do correctly, and you often need years of practice and mentorship in a specific narrow technique in order to administer it correctly and get clean data.
And of course, if you do a bad job and collect a ton of noise and random artifacts, then the most likely result of your data analysis is 'no result'.
When I think about how much effort it took to properly implement a backwards-masking task or make sure an eye tracker is working properly or remove all signs of electrical interference from an MEG machine, I shudder to think about someone trying to replicate my results who hasn't spent years learning those techniques and is just picking them up off the shelf to 'see if those results replicate'.
Double-shudder if they themselves are believers in the 'replication crisis' and have a subconscious or explicit motive to want to get no results... getting no results is what happens by default if you're not incredibly careful and just don't do a very good job running the experiment.
The upper-class Trump supporter is pretty much like most other trump supporters. They rely on politics primarily for entertainment purposes because they believe it has little-to-no impact on their lives. They are too blasé about it to have any idea how dangerous that monster is to our democracy, but forming opinions gets the juices flowing like betting on the horses or trading equities. (Or even just rooting for your football team, or baseball team for the more pastoral types.) "Ah, he's just trump being trump," is all they need to hear if anything on MSNBC happens to momentarily trouble them. To this day I don't believe the vast majority of trump voters have a clue about how much damage he did and got away with, or the fact that the democracy we know would have died if he had been reelected.
I say "the democracy we know" because I am well aware that many out there would dearly love to change it. Unfortunately for them the changes they want to see cannot be made except through amending the Constitution. Unfortunately for the rest of us they've decided it's more amusing to own the libs by lying, cheating and stealing, and laughing off a daily barrage of outrageous behavior.
Think what you will about this classless ragtag coalition that, for now, holds a small majority. We won't sit back and abide all this lying, cheating and stealing shit because some of you think this bastard is entertaining! What's more worrying is what all the truly Machiavellian types have learned from all this entertainment. The next attack on our democracy is likely to be much more sophisticated.
I'll venture to say that about half of Trump's supporters fit the upper-class (clueless) category; whether actually upper class or not they believe they have the luxury of treating politics as if it doesn't affect them. Most of the other half are attuned socially to support whoever yells the loudest in a bar. (All the better if he likes to shove aside inferior world leaders while fawning jealously over dictators.) And maybe half of the bar-bully lovers are the basket of true Deplorables. And I leave a point or two for some of the outlying Machiavellian puppetmasters swimming around in the media, the senate, etc -- making up 100 percent.
Per NOAA:
"Existing records of past Atlantic tropical storm or hurricane numbers (1878 to present) in fact do show a pronounced upward trend, which is also correlated with rising SSTs (e.g., see blue curve in Fig. 4 or Vecchi and Knutson 2008). However, the density of reporting ship traffic over the Atlantic was relatively sparse during the early decades of this record, such that if storms from the modern era (post 1965) had hypothetically occurred during those earlier decades, a substantial number of storms would likely not have been directly observed by the ship-based “observing network of opportunity.” We find that, after adjusting for such an estimated number of missing storms, there remains just a small nominally positive upward trend in tropical storm occurrence from 1878-2006. Statistical tests indicate that this trend is not significantly distinguishable from zero (Figure 2). In addition, Landsea et al. (2010) note that the rising trend in Atlantic tropical storm counts is almost entirely due to increases in short-duration (<2 day) storms alone. Such short-lived storms were particularly likely to have been overlooked in the earlier parts of the record, as they would have had less opportunity for chance encounters with ship traffic."
This is on their "Global Warming and Hurricanes" page.
The bias from pre-satellite era data not picking up hurricanes out at sea is significant.
We basically only have 50ish years of hurricane data, and for reasons we still don't understand, the 1960s-1980s were a particularly quiet era for hurricanes. Start drawing your line from that era, you'll see an upward trend - but if you go back to the late 19th and early 20th century you see a number of extremely active hurricane seasons. Indeed, 2005 isn't even the all-time leader for ACE (Accumulated Cyclone Energy) in a season - the winner is 1933, and that's probably an underestimate as it was from the pre-satellite era. 1893 and 1926 are #3 and #4, respectively, and again, are probably underestimates (especially 1893).
it is interesting that the military experts who offered the critique on the privateering idea did not address the success of Somali pirates. Who are probably much less advanced than any US based pirated would be, and yet it took a long-ish time and non trivial effort to control them.
The Somali pirates operated within a few hundred miles of the Somali coast, so they didn't need overseas bases and could quickly retreat to friendly ports. And they were never more than a nuisance, never threatened to drive any shipping companies into bankruptcy, never mind collapsing major economies through disruption of trade, so there was much less urgency in dealing with them.
If the US ever wants to operate privateers within a few hundred miles of the US coast, I'm certain it will be able to do so effectively enough to close those waters to enemy shipping.
Specific circumstances are always, well, specific. Yes, Somali pirates operated close to their base, but they also operated on the tightest possible budget. And disrupting trade was never their goal - quite the opposite, if they ever had a consistent articulated goal.
The pirates of the Caribbean also had a safe heaven on the Bahamas, but operated very far from it, and did in fact disrupt trade. Of course that was at a time when sending a military fleet across the pond was a major problem.
During WWII the British ran a small fleet of deniable raiders - without much in the way of a safe heaven anywhere, and attacking hard military targets. They were the beginnings of what we now call Special Operations and they had a degree of success.
All of that is different in specific ways from running a merc fleet of raiders against Chinese trade. But it doesn't mean that the idea can be dismissed outright.
First, throw out any examples from before 1900, when the modern methods of trade protection were invented.
Second, Somalia was fought with very different ROE than any global war would see. The big issue there was telling the fishing fleet apart from the pirates, and the navies generally errored on the side of assuming that they were looking at a fishing boat. This is unlikely to hold if the US unleashes privateers, which will also have a lot less legitimate lookalike traffic to hide in.
>During WWII the British ran a small fleet of deniable raiders - without much in the way of a safe heaven anywhere, and attacking hard military targets. They were the beginnings of what we now call Special Operations and they had a degree of success.
I am extremely confused. If you're talking about the commandos, they definitely weren't deniable and their safe haven was Britain. Also, "fleet" isn't the right word.
You pointed out several specific differences. As I said, there are always specific differences, no two wars are the same. While defenses evolved, so did the methods of offense. All new technologies are used by both sides. We're looking at the idea.
In general, there is little principal difference between running a special operations-based war and running a fleet of non-state raiders. The former has been quite successful for the US recently. Take the same approach but carried out by (late) Blackwater instead of SOCOM and you have your privateers. Except the government doesn't have to pay health insurance.
For an example of a deniable British raid see Operation Postmaster. The fighters on board Maid Honor posed as Swedes.
A "safe heaven" in case of Somali is of a "pop in and out" kind. An argument was made that the US privateers would not have one like that. I pointed out that both Caribbean and British raiders didn't have one either. Their bases were far and could not be used for help during an operation.
I picked 1900 very deliberately, as that was when Jackie Fisher developed his new system for trade protection. Before that, there was really no way to track and counter individual raiders, because information couldn't move faster than ships. After telegraph and radio, that changed, which was a huge win for the defense, particularly against weak opponents who had previously survived because there was no practical way to concentrate heavier forces against them. No similar benefit to the attacker, or at least a much lower benefit. Note that this system worked so well in two world wars that we don't think about its success much.
Reference: https://www.navalgazing.net/Information-Communication-and-Naval-Warfare-Part-1
>In general, there is little principal difference between running a special operations-based war and running a fleet of non-state raiders.
Uhhh.... no. This is just not true. SF almost always has secure bases that a non-state raider wouldn't.
>For an example of a deniable British raid see Operation Postmaster. The fighters on board Maid Honor posed as Swedes.
That's not what "deniable" means. Deniable means that the government can say with a reasonably straight face that they weren't involved/responsible. Everyone knew that the British pulled Postmaster off, they just didn't know ahead of time. I think the word you're looking for is "covert", and Postmaster was the only operation of its kind I'm aware of in neutral territory.
And I think you fundamentally misunderstand the problem. The Caribbean pirates are irrelevant because of when they were operating, and the British raiders weren't trying to stay at large closeish to enemy bases in the face of modern surveillance equipment. They were doing a thing and getting out before a response could be launched. Which is exactly the opposite of what a privateer could do, given the distances involved and the existence of airplanes.
As modern communications can be used to target defense, they can (and were by Somalians) used to target offense. In asymmetric warfare offense usually is ahead at using modern tech to its advantage. Referring to Jackie Fisher is fighting the last war instead of the next one.
The nature of asymmetric warfare is in finding novel ways of offense. You're pointing to old ways and showing how they would not work. Of course they would not work, they're old. Defenses have caught up. That's never the point. The situation is not unlike the arguments that went on pre-Postmaster at the British Admiralty. They also did not believe it was possible.
"SF almost always has secure bases that a non-state raider wouldn't" - why? Provided sufficient deniability on one hand, a level of friendliness to US cause on the other, and some kind of incentive on the third... Providing bases is work that needs to be done, but not an impossibility.