It doesn't say why this would explain the decrease in the ratio of the median wage to productivity. If the idea is correct, it could have slowed down productivity growth, but why would it slow down median wage growth more than productivity growth? One could speculate e.g. that innovation slowed down, and so productivity can only be increased through increased use of capital (so the gains go to capitalists) or through better organization (so gains go to managers), but the post doesn't really touch on it.
Also, how much drugs did people do before 1970? I'd imagine that if drug use had been widespread in general, or ubiquitous in a prestigious class such as scientists, there would have been more resistance to banning it, just like banning alcohol or tobacco is not being seriously considered due to their popularity.
I've often heard that the more local the jurisdiction, the more power it has over your daily life. Which would make the low turnout in local elections a paradox.
Is it really true though? Federal elections are seeing high turnout lately, and I would be surprised if most people were getting it wrong and focusing their energy on distant federal elections while sitting out important local elections.
I'm not sure I would. It can be pretty hard to see the link between your actions and distant political decisions months after you made a choice, while Federal level politics has become an important way for people to express their culture and identity, so they get a much more immediate payoff for focussing on it.
Most internet expression is optimizing(at least a bit) for attention. Most people I'm going to reach on the social internet are Americans, and nearly all of them know all about the US presidential races even if they don't live in the US. No matter how spicy my takes are on local elections, there is less of a market for that content, and thus less social incentive to even pay attention to it at all.
I wouldn't be surprised. And many local elections are deliberately scheduled to be on days when few are voting so that insiders (such as employees of that local government) will have disproportionate heft.
I don't think it's true that the more local the jurisdiction, the more power it has over your daily life. There are generally much more bounds on what the local government may do than on higher-level governments. All sorts of things from financial regulations to drug approval to trade treaties etc. etc. are decided on the national level. There are no local financial crises that affect the residents' lives as much as a nationwide financial crisis may. There is no risk that a local government executes a self-coup and establishes a dictatorship, or appoint supreme court judges to reinterpret the constitution to its bidding.
Moreover, local politics are generally less ideological. Many of the most ideological decisions: whether to allow abortions, how high to tax the rich, whether to incentivize affirmative action are decided largely on the national level. I guess this is because voters consider them important enough to push their parties to force their preference on the entire country. (Also, e.g. high local taxes would be easier to evade by moving than high national taxes.)
Whether at the local or the national level, it's often hard to predict which candidate is more competent; it's much easier to decide which candidate you agree with on ideological questions. If most ideological questions are decided at a higher level, then on the local level it's mostly competence what matters; since it's hard to decide, people don't have a strong motivation to vote.
Yes, but local abortion bans can't take effect a s long as they are held unconstitutional at the federal level; local taxes tend to be lower than taxes at higher administrative levels and have less redistributive function (I guess because of tax competition; e.g. NYC income tax is lower and less progressive than NY state income tax, which is in turn lower and less progressive than federal income tax); and it appears to me that it's primarily federal anti-discrimination laws and court decisions that determine to what extent employers (whether local governments or private companies) are incentivized to use affirmative action or, to the contrary, what forms of it are prohibited.
I think you are undervaluing the breadth of power a big city mayor has.
On the other hand, if a city passes bad laws, new taxes, whatever - it's a whole lot easier to move between cities in the US than to leave the US entirely. That seems to be a really strong inhibitor on local power, even when they literally have the power to do more.
This *is* the issue in the upcoming NYC mayoral election. A number of very rich people pay the lion’s share of city income taxes. Several of the mayoral candidates are outright hostile to these people, but they can easily leave. They can leave without even changing jobs—just moving to Hoboken or Bronxville is enough to put them out of reach of NYC’s taxes.
Municipal governments are heavily incentivized to minimize the level of services relative to tax revenue. This is generally achieved by zoning laws that keep poor people out of town by limiting dense residential construction. This affects the people who want to live in town, but can't, to a huge degree, while similarly affecting current residents by raising rent and housing prices. You could argue this is more central to the daily lives of more people in a given town (along with those who would like to live in that town but can't) than is abortion or ACA or foreign policy.
I don't think that it's true that more local elections have more power over your life. Just more power relative to your vote. I.e. your vote is several orders of magnitude more influential and the local government is not several orders of magnitude less influential on your life.
For instance there's not really any local ordnance that's would be anywhere near as influential on my life as the ACA or it's overturning.
In the past six years, since moving to Texas, I've missed out in participating in three local elections, because I didn't know they were happening until a few weeks in advance, and then didn't know enough about candidates to bother going to wait in line. In California, I never missed an election, because I always got a brochure in the mail with information, and could always sit down and spend an hour on it and fill out a ballot and mail it in.
People don't vote out of rational self-interest. The rational self-interested move is almost certainly not to vote, since the amount of time it takes you to vote is a much higher cost than the expected payoff in terms of the probability it results in more preferred governance times the improvement preferred governance has on your life.
Instead, people vote because they want to make their society better, and perceive voting as a way to do that. When that motive is taken into account, it explains why people can be more motivated to vote in national elections. National elections may be more consequential for broader society, even if they have less of an impact on the voter in particular.
This also explains why people vote to enact policies that don't necessarily help them personally. If your goal is to improve society, you might vote for something which you think will help the average citizen, even if it involves raising your own taxes in order to help others.
Yang has a lot of new ideas. It could be they are mostly bad, but he seems like the kind of guy who's willing to abandon something that's not working. See-what-sticks governance would be great if politicians were actually willing to terminate ineffective programs, but there's always the risk that they will develop a small group of vocal constituents.
At least Yang wouldn't put his wife in charge of a billion-dollar slush fund that does nothing. Google "Thrive NYC." de Blasio is the worst mayor in modern NY history.
It'd be kind of neat to see a write-up on basically
1. Some stuff the Mayor of NYC can definitely do
2. Some stuff he theoretically can do, but in practice can't because of local politics
3. What he simply can't do (I know that includes the Subway).
I mean, you can look up a formal description of duties, but that doesn't tell you much about whether those powers fall into category #1 or category #2.
1. Appoint and remove commissioners of city agencies - NYPD, FDNY, Education, Sanitation, Parks, DOT (mostly roads), Environmental Protection (which runs the water system and manages a vast network of reservoirs upstate). Appoint a majority of the Planning Commission (which enacts zoning ordinances) and the entirety of the Board of Standards and Appeals (which grants variances). Amend city regulations. Present the annual budget to the city council and propose local legislation, though the council has to approve of both.
2. Control the NYPD, which in practice answers to the police unions, not the commissioner. Other departments may operate similarly to various extents, they just aren't in the news as often. Civil service, gotta love it.
The zoning boards are somewhat constrained in that they have to let the community boards for affected neighborhoods hold hearings on most of their decisions. They don't have to listen to the CBs, but they usually do.
3. Increase taxes unilaterally. Ban large sodas from restaurants, much to Bloomberg's chagrin. As you mentioned, the subway is under the MTA, which is controlled by the governor (who appoints 6 of the 14 board members and can veto the others - 4 chosen by the mayor and 4 by suburban counties).
Any tax increase has to go through Albany, because localities can only impose taxes authorized by the state tax code. A city with more than one million residents can impose an income tax of up to 3.876%, and that's the tax NYC collects. (No other cities in the state are even halfway to a million. The only other cities that can impose income taxes are those with between 180,000 and 215,000 residents. This was meant for Yonkers, which has stayed consistently in that range for decades, but Rochester has shrunk enough that they qualify too. But they won't do it if they want to stay above 180,000.)
If the next mayor wants higher taxes or other modifications to state law, he'll need to go through Cuomo and the legislature. Bloomberg was fairly adept at getting what he wanted, but still couldn't push his soda tax through, while de Blasio seemingly gave up on doing anything at all a couple of months into his first term. Albany has changed dramatically in the last few years - the Senate is now more progressive than the Assembly, while the once-dictatorial Cuomo is on the ropes following multiple scandals and more willing to cut deals than he's ever been. On the other hand, the state has a lot of leverage too: mayoral control of the school system expires next year. It'd be a shame if the renewal got held up in committee and the dysfunctional old system came back. Wouldn't want that to happen, would we.
But do your nation's largest city's mayoral election candidates include: Count Binface; a Brexiteer whose name is literally Peter Gammons*; Jeremy Corbyn's meteorologist brother; not one but two youtubers and a man known only as 'Drillminister'?
The Bookies are predicing that Sadiq Khan will keep London. In NYC, Yang'll fetch odds between 4/9 and 1/3 (representing a probability of 70-75%).
*'Gammon' being a political insult directed towards ruddy-faced right-wing populists
Disappointed but not surprised to find my submission in the runner up pile. C'est la vie, the three we got so far have been of immensely high quality and I can't gainsay nothing.
Blast - I submitted one, but it didn't make the list! But I'm not too broken up about this; there's no way I could have competed with the ones that have been featured so far.
I'm sure this has been covered before, but it seems like something this community, and our host, would know quite a bit about.
The "opiod crisis"
Has anybody else noticed that nownere in the discussion of the "opiod crisis", nowhere and I mean nowhere, is one particular group of people ever mentioned? We are supposed to believe that evil pharma companies used their huge financial muscle and deceptive evil advertizing to force these pills on poor stupid trusting yokels.
Who is not involved here?
DOCTORS
The AMA seems to have done an incredible job of whitewashing the entire discussion so that no MD will ever be held accountable for overprescribing pills. I mean this is a Roger Goodell NFL level Jedi Mind Trick.
Has anybody else noticed this? Anybody pointed this out? Or is it all down the dissapeared memory hole, and Doctors are still supposed to be the heroic self-sacrificing demigods that the AMA pays Hollywood to portray them as?
"The AMA seems to have done an incredible job of whitewashing the entire discussion so that no MD will ever be held accountable for overprescribing pills. I mean this is a Roger Goodell NFL level Jedi Mind Trick."
I thought doctors were getting very reluctant to prescribe opiods for fear of losing their licenses. No?
It's my understanding that in the early 2000s, the guidelines that doctors were supposed to follow had a strong emphasis on doing whatever was necessary to alleviate pain, while downplaying the risks of long-term opioid use. The research showing the dangers existed, but any doctor making what we now know to be correct prescribing decisions was seen as outside the mainstream at best, and a monster who didn't care about their patient's pain at worst.
I think it's fair to say that the drug companies did a good job making opioids look less addictive than they were. It would have been possible for a heroically brilliant doctor to sift through this and figure out the real story, but nobody expects heroic brilliance of doctors, and even expecting competence or the ability to check non-pharma sources is sometimes iffy. Doctors already have been so scared by this experience that they refuse to prescribe opioids even to patients who desperately need them, and I'm not sure scaring them further is really necessary.
I don't prescribe opioids myself and can't comment from a place of knowledge.
Your post on pseudoacction was ecellent and well reasoned as always. What struck me overwhelmingly were the endless list of incompetent and arrogant MDs you described.
How is this possible? These seem like mistakes that would get one fired from a Jiffy Lube, or an Outback Steakhouse. Any auto mechanic who was so cavalier and arrogant about fixing cars would immediately get people killed and be ruined or prosecuted for his incompetence.
I guess the AMA is just the most successful Union out there, akin to police unions that cover up criminal behavior and negligence because protecting their members is the ONLY PRIORITY.
It is fortunate that opiods are astonishingly easy to get on the street now, dealers seem to be awash in them, still $$ but 1,000-10,000 pill quantities are out there begging for customers.
I suppose that the opioid-happy M.D. could say that what he was doing was accepted medical practice at the time.
This went back to an offhand remark in an otherwise unremarkable study that suggested that addiction following opioid prescription was less common (and more easily managed) in cases of chronic pain than previously suspected. (I can't find a reference to the actual study.)
Doctors are substantially paid for doing things rather than fixing problems. In-general, the goal is that the things which are done should have a direct impact on fixing problems. But that isn't required for reimbursement.
As an example, back surgery (very generally) results in 1/3 of patients seeing improvements, 1/3 of patients staying the same, and 1/3 of patients getting worse. Yet back surgery is still performed.
Imagine that only the 1/3 of cases where improvements were seen were reimbursed! At the same time, roughly nobody would be willing to perform that kind of procedure under those conditions.
Medicine has to face that it's at-best all probabilistic. There are very few complex scenarios in which you can be certain that a specific patient is going to have a net positive outcome. Insisting on absolute guarantees (rather than probabilistic results) would effectively end medicine.
Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. I still get a subjective sense that the role of doctors has been massively redacted, along the lines of nobody in the NFL ever mentioning the word "concussion".
But I admit this is subjective, and we are supposed to gather here to be rational!
Unrelated, but thanks to Scott for linking to the piece on "MMAcevedo". I thought it was excellent and subtle. Unfortunately nobody I know reads -- I txt them a question about work and they send me a video of them talking to answer it -- so I've been unable to share it. I'll hit the comments section to see what was said there...
Has it ever been established how much the epidemic was fuelled by good faith overprescription of legit patients vs. how much was crooked pill-mill doctors prescribing to people who obviously wanted to abuse drugs? I think the press tended to focus on the former because the victims are more sympathetic. Every article would have some version of "Joe Workingclass wrenched his back doing good working stuff and was prescribed Oxycontin. Six months later . . ." But I don't know if that was the usual case.
As an aside, the phenomenon of pill-mill doctors is still weird to me. Like, you have an M.D., there are ways for you to make six figure income without risking prison. The doc on Justified goes that route because Boyd Crowder threatens to kill his mother, but I'd be curious what the non-fictional stories are like.
Dreamland is one of the best books I've read this century, and thoroughly discusses the 4-6 separate events/trends that formed this perfect storm.
Doctors is one of them. As it happened, this crisis coincided with US doctors starting to consider pain an important condition to treat in itself, and worry less about addiction. It turned out to be an unfortunate overreaction...
Big Pharma is something approximating a monolithic, internally aligned entity (or a small batch thereof), whereas the group constituting "all doctors" is not. Except insofar as many of them might be part of the same union or something (no idea if this is even a thing), each doctor acts as an individual afaik.
Treating "doctors" as a single entity and blaming it for something just doesn't make sense. You assign blame to an entity that has monolithic intent or else blame itself has no useful meaning. Why? Because the point of blame is for aiming your intervention. What is your intervention supposed to be if "doctors" is the where the problem is?
"We are supposed to believe that evil pharma companies used their huge financial muscle and deceptive evil advertising to force these pills on poor stupid trusting yokels."
Also, we are supposed to believe the "poor stupid trusting yokels" are too poor, stupid, trusting, and yokel-ish to have any moral agency whatsoever.
At this point, I think most of the "yokel" community has seen firsthand what happens if you get in the habit of taking opioids beyond the level necessary to alleviate immediate physical pain. And I'm pretty sure that taking opioids *at* the level needed to alleviate immediate physical pain, doesn't result in one becoming a mindless drug-zombie. But it feels good, and so there's a tradeoff and a decision to be made. Possibly a rational decision under some circumstances. But it's not just the Careless Doctor and the Evil Drug Company making the decision.
Now that the opioid crisis is in the news, people are cautious about it. But before it was in the news, what reason would patients have to doubt their doctors?
A cousin / co-worker / college roommate addicted to them. Granted that first round of people were screwed and it took a while for it to become common knowledge that so-and-so was addicted to oxy but eventually people knew or should have known that something was going on even without the media.
Not everybody knows somebody with an opioid addiction. I don't! Or maybe I do, but they're hiding it well, which amounts to the same thing for the purpose of me figuring out that it's a problem.
If it was provable, I would bet money that you do know at least one, and that they are "high functioning" and you would never know. At least until their supply got cut off, probably by moralizing dogooders with good intentions.
Carl Hart's Drug Use for Grown-Ups argues that recreational drugs (including hard drugs) are harmless-to-beneficial for the vast majority of people who use them.
If you don’t know anyone all these years later, but there were surely people that had surgeries over that time, what does that say about your local risk?
I do not believe that the opioid crisis was caused by people trusting their doctors. Certainly there are *some* cases where a careless doctor prescribed far more vicodin or whatever than was necessary for pain management and said "take exactly this much even if the pain has gone away", but I'm pretty sure that's a rounding error in the scope of this crisis. Opioids even semi-competently prescribed for actual pain management, and used as prescribed, pose a low addiction risk. Most of the problem is people noticing that they make you feel good whether they were in pain or not, and ignoring the doctor who said "no you shouldn't do that".
Which, in some cases, may have been rational given the paucity of other options for ever feeling good about any part of their life. But it isn't a Careless Doctor / Evil Drug Company issue.
Anyone who hasn't worked for a few months at a heavy labor job that left them in pain every night, to go back and do it again the next morning, the classic "16 tons and what do you get" style job, doesn't get claim to have an informed opinion about the flyover bluecollar "opiod crisis".
The opiod crisis happened because a lot of people got a lot of jobs like that and suffered workplace overload or prompt damage injuries that needed painkillers, and then when the thing they needed to keep working started getting regulated out of their reach, they panicked and started searching for anyone anything anywhere that would keep them out of agony's grasp.
My proposed solution to the "opiod crisis"? Give them the fucking drugs. And legalize THC, it works better for chronic pain.
Well, maybe you mean the AMA has done well protecting doctors in the court of public opinion, but in actual federal courts, they haven't gotten off entirely scot free. The FBI put together a task force specifically to go after doctors and other medical professionals who were running pill mills:
Yes. The national security apparatus, which just happened to get up to its elbows in a dirty war involving heavy use of corrupt local proxies in the global center of illegal opiate production shortly before the opioid crisis kicked off.
But I'm sure that was just a coincidence and it's all because of the doctors and big pharma. Please also pay no attention to where that apparatus was focused when the last big drug epidemic happened, there is definitely no pattern here.
I'm baffled at this. My understanding of the issue is that doctors have been blamed for opioid epidemic, not ignored, and that the problems with prescription opioids and the street fentanyl crisis are linked in the public mind. I don't think anyone has proved a causal relationship between the two. Prescription opioids are necessary for some pain management. The scandals prove that the system is capable of self-correction. The street fentanyl epidemic is a political fail. Of course pols are happy to blame everything on doctors.
What's the status of the 50-50 debate in prediction calibration? Is there a community consensus at this point? I have a resolution in mind, but am curious about what's been arrived at.
I think the consensus is that 50-50 predictions are sensible, testing your calibration on them is just kind of meaningless because the result is entirely determined by whether you use a prediction or the negation of that prediction when you score it.
That guarantees that you get perfect calibration (over a large enough number of predictions).
For each prediction either it is true or the negation is true. If you flip a coin before you choose which one to write down you guarantee that you have a 50-50 chance of being right.
I think the fact that this case is degenerate does not suggest something is weird about 50-50 predictions, but rather that something is wrong with this definition of "calibration".
Indeed for any x between 0 and 100, we can get "perfect calibration" on x% predictions just by assigning x% to x events that are actually ~100% to happen, and (100-x) events that are ~0% to happen.
(Ignoring practical difficulties of actually administering this..) A different measure of how well calibrated a prediction is, could be how much money others make or lose betting against you. If Scott's 50-50 predictions were instead presented as a fairly tight two sided market such as 47 bid 53 offer, and ASX readers on average lose money betting against Scott's market, then I would say Scott's market is well calibrated.
If you're doing a subclass of prediction then you can test this by having two consistent sides. For instance, if you're predicting election results, you can say did they go more often to the left-wing or the right-wing. But that doesn't generalise to other types of prediction
I thought that Zvi and some others had listed their scores on latest rounds of prediction instead of calibration, but I can't find it off the top of my head, so I'll instead give you some of my academic context on this.
A scoring rule measures the inaccuracy of a set of predictions. The two most common scoring rules are the one that says the inaccuracy of a probability is the square of the difference between the probability and the truth value (so that probability 1/2 gives a penalty of 0.25 either way, while probability .9 gives a penalty of .81 if false and .01 if true) or the one that says the inaccuracy of a probability is the negative logarithm (to whatever base you want - that's just a scalar factor, but I'll use base 2 for ease of calculation) of the difference between the probability and the opposite of the truth value (so that probability 1/2 gives a penalty of 1 either way, while probability .75 gives a penalty of 2 if false and .415 if true).
The quadratic scoring rule emphasizes getting the right side of various middling probabilities, while the logarithmic one emphasizes not being extreme in the wrong direction.
Some philosophical/statistical papers on the contrast between calibration and scoring are here:
and a paper describing ways to go about figuring out a role for a particular scoring rule to play is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVAPG
If you don't have institutional credentials to get access to academic papers, there is a Facebook community called "The Philosophical Underclass" that can help get access, or you could e-mail me (my address can be found via google) and I can send you things, for research purposes only of course.
Ok, cool. The latter (negative log of the prior probability of the eventual outcome) is roughly what I had in mind, the difference accounted for by the fact that the specification you give penalizes refinement of the probability space even when conserving predictions.
I'm also interested in arguing that the quality of a prediction should be assessed by computing its entropy:
I wonder if one could think of a scoring system as a game design problem in which the design maximises the score of players who not only guess correctly, but assess a high value to the probability of their correct guesses. So it should incentivise saying 99% when that is how certain you are. Let's say every guess results in an implicit bet on the outcome, you win if you are right and lose if you are wrong.
Now if you offer odds based on the probabilities you declare, then if you say 50%, you win or lose $X depending on how it comes out. If you declare 90%, you win $Y or lose $9Y. Obviously this is not only risky, but non-profitable. So we sweeten the deal by tilting the odds in your direction. Say we tilt them by 10%. You win $1.1X or lose X; you win $1.1Y or lose $9Y. Still doesn't seem good enough. You have to be able to bet more on the 90% chance. Maybe a square root function:
50:50 -> bet is $1, $1.1 if you win, -$1 if you lose
90:10 -> bet is $3, $3.3 if you win, -$27 if you lose
99:1 -> bet is $10, $11 if you win, -$990 if you lose
The biggest issue is that making a wrong bet with high certainty would wreck your score, but maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, that's the nucleus of an idea, maybe somebody can improve on it.
Yes, this is exactly the idea of the scoring rule system - you say how the amount someone loses if the claim turns out to be true or false depends on the probability that they report. A "proper" scoring rule (like the square of your difference from the truth, or the negative logarithm of your difference from the opposite of the truth) is one where the expected value of reporting your actual probability is higher than the expected value of reporting any other probability. The different proper scoring rules will have different properties if someone has non-linear risk aversion or something.
Tyler Cower, Derek Lowe, and others have claimed that (our evidence supports that) vaccination offers superior protection than natural infection. But I can't find any actual evidence for this: Tyler doesn't give any, and Derek cites this article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01180-x), which doesn’t provide support for that claim at all. It's just a letter to the editor, the conclusion of which is “Overall, we are optimistic, given the number of platforms being investigated and the huge ongoing efforts, that a vaccine (or vaccines) against COVID-19 with immune responses and protection superior to that achieved through natural infection is an achievable goal.”
In fact, my impression was that the evidence pointed in the other direction: there are *very* few confirmed cases of reinfection after natural infection, and few but still many more confirmed cases of infection after vaccination. It's hard to confirm reinfections after natural infection, but even going to suspected cases doesn't get us to a very big number (using even that number, the percentage of people who’ve been reinfected is minuscule): https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-tracker/
This study looked at the protection from natural infection and it looks at least as good as that from vaccination “Incidence rate of reinfection versus month of follow-up did not show any evidence of waning of immunity for over seven months of follow-up...Efficacy of natural infection against reinfection was estimated at 95.2% (95% CI: 94.1-96.0%)”: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249731v2
Anyhow, the level of protection that comes from natural infection is a pretty important question, and I don't like disagreeing with Cowen and Lowe. Does anyone know of evidence that supports their position?
The lack of evidence either way is surprising given the number of previously infected people still getting vaccines. Another failing of humanities messaging response to covid. Number? 6? 7? Major failings imo.
Can any vaccines (other than a live-attenuated virus) cause T-cell immunity like a real infection can?
OTOH, I think than mRNA vaccines can create a lot more antigens than a real infection does or something. It's one of the reasons why they were researching the technology pre-covid.
There's a bit of complexity in terms of exactly how much evidence you need to be convinced a reinfection was real, but the headline number from the study authors is ~85% protection from reinfection over the first five months.
I'm pretty sure there are more known cases of reinfection than infection after vaccination - the problem is that if you want to be absolutely 100% sure someone was reinfected rather than having a resurgence of dormant virus, then you need to genetically sequence viral samples from both infections and show that they're different. That often doesn't happen, especially if the first infection was in the first wave when most people weren't being tested.
Great, thanks everyone. My interpretation of the SIREN study is that natural infection offers at least roughly the same level of protection as vaccination. Does that seem right? (They say 83% lower is the minimum, and in the wild mRNA vaccine efficacy is estimated to be in the 80s I believe.) Similarly, the Lancet article estimates an 80.5% reduction via natural infection. So it seems like natural infection doesn't offer vastly superior protection at least. But does anyone have a theory for why the reinfection tracker numbers are so low? Sure, it's hard to confirm reinfection. But even their estimated reinfection numbers are minuscule (34K), relative to the total number of people who've had covid.
I'd suggest that you take the median of the ratings you have for each book, rather than the average. Medians are more robust against partisanship and extreme opinions (not that I expect too much partisanship about these book reviews, but you never know...).
In some ways, yes - in other ways, no. To take the obvious example, if 50% + 1 rate a given book 10 and the rest rate it 1 (ultimate partisanship), the median is much worse than the mean (or at least, I'd much prefer that a book with 50% + 1 rating it 9 and the rest 10 get to the final).
It *is* robust against outlier opinions, but do we *want* to be robust against those?
GM isn't impacted less by extremes. GM compared to AM is a penalty for variance. That makes low outliers matter more and high outliers matter less (in the extreme case where zero scores are allowed, GM is literally a liberum veto). It's useful for exponential processes, and for cases where a distribution is long-tailed in only one direction.
The reason for GM over AM in benchmarking is to make it agnostic to the units of each sub-benchmark. For example, if you change a sub-benchmark from minutes to seconds, the scores in that sub-benchmark will multiply by 60. That sub-benchmark will now have an outsized impact in the AM. But under GM, total score is multiplied by a constant factor of 60^(1/N), and relative rankings are preserved.
As the sibling commenter pointed out, GM is actually less robust to outliers than AM, as a single value of 0 makes GM=0.
The ratings can only go from 1 to 5. You can't have a very extreme opinion, even listing 1 or 5 on everything won't change the average much if there are sufficient votes.
I'd propose taking a weighted average where strong positive votes are give a much heavier weight than other votes. Maybe an exponential-looking curve. I think this maximizes utility to the audience. Reason being, strong positive votes are likely to provide value to some constituency of the readership, while strong negative votes may be wrong or offensive but are unlikely to cause actual harm, and even in the most realistically bad circumstances readers are free to stop reading them at any point.
What are you doing to prepare for the inevitable US-China war over Taiwan in the next decade? This is just kind of an open-ended question, whether you're preparing financially, career-wise, or more traditional 'prepping'. Regardless of whether an actual apocalyptic nuclear scenario happens- even a sub-nuclear war between the world's two largest economies would seem to harbor a global second Great Depression. To my understanding, even if the US did not react at all to an invasion of Taiwan (unlikely), there would be a run on the dollar & Treasuries- all that financial dominance is heavily intertwined with military dominance. The US being displaced as the world's economic & military superpower would have some pretty tremendous consequences for everyone, regardless of where you live or what you do.
Also, with the US having 30k+ troops in South Korea, it would be tough for the war not to escalate. No reason for China to not strike them if they lose a few ships or a few cities get bombed! Even worse, I would assume that Russia would use the chaos to engage in mischief in Eastern Europe, North Korea could get frisky with South Korea, and it's not tough to see how India & Pakistan could somehow get dragged into a shooting war from there.
If you don't think war will happen in the next decade- why, exactly? Conquering Taiwan appears to be China's number one priority, they view the US as a declining power, and they have little to no actual warfighting experience so it's easy for them to be overconfident. History is littered with nations who thought 'oh we can fight a short little war over here', and that it metastasizes into something much larger. The USSR back in the day at least knew exactly what extended war was like and were not eager to start WW3. In general as a Westerner I am fairly pessimistic about what the next few decades will bring
To answer my own question- I live & own property in a rural state reasonably far away from being a cruise missile target, I have a number of guns, I save a large chunk of my income and my business is geared towards generating cashflow for saving now- I'm not reinvesting to grow the business any more than I have to. And I own Bitcoin. What else can I really do? But US-China tensions in the 2020s are the difference between me forgoing cash now to grow my business, versus just hoarding everything
If you really believe an all out war between US and China is likely, I'm pretty sure the right kind of saving is not "bitcoin and fancy financial investment" but rather good old "gold under your mattress".
Anyway I don't expect a US-China war over Taiwan as I expect the US to do a lot of stern talking in the weeks before Chinese invasion, take a couple of not-too-threatening sanctions in the aftermath and get back to business as usual (with slightly more humiliation) in the following months to years.
(Also the Covid crisis and the difference in the response between China and the US makes me think the overconfident country is not China...)
If you're buying precious metals as SHTF prep, I would suggest silver. The lower price per ounce means you can buy more impressiveness per dollar. ("That looks pretty valuable. Sure, I'll fill you car's gas tank.")
That's a good point but to be really precise you have to factor in that gold is also much more impressive per unit of volume than silver. There should be some optimal gold-to-silver ratio that gives the most impressiveness per dollars (but I fear impressiveness is more in the eye of the buyer here).
The sort of war that results in US cities being targeted by Chinese nuclear missiles, is the sort of war that results in the leadership of the CCP becoming radioactive grease stains. It baffles me that you think that the CCP will "inevitably" pursue a strategy with this inevitable result. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is less likely than you think, and if it happens will happen very differently than you think.
I don't expect a US-China war in the next decade, because I believe both sides understand that it would be a terrible idea. And, as for China's overconfidence, I bet they know exactly how big our navy is, and "in decline" or not it's a lot bigger than theirs.
China literally has more ships in their navy than the US does, however one wants to define naval size. They're also talking about invading a country 90 miles off their coast, while the US would have to project force thousands of miles away from their mainland. Plus China has the area stocked with anti-carrier missiles that can launch from land, specifically to deny the US entry.
In general I would not say, historically, that most decisions to start wars have come from a particularly rational place
> I don't expect a US-China war in the next decade, because I believe both sides understand that it would be a terrible idea.
This is probably true.
> And, as for China's overconfidence, I bet they know exactly how big our navy is, and "in decline" or not it's a lot bigger than theirs.
This is pretty naive, or at least poorly argued. China won't be using their carriers to fight the US's. China's carriers are also not particularly relevant for their invasion of Taiwan. I've heard people express the opinion the carriers will be to WWIII what the battleship was to WWII. The technology for fighting wars has evolved, and it remains to be seen if the aircraft carrier can keep up.
(Hasn't stopped the US from continue to buy them though; they're still pretty great at getting bombs onto middle east countries.)
If it's just China vs. Taiwan, then China's navy is much bigger and stronger than it needs to be. But if the US enters the war, China has a big problem: they need to get their troops across the sea while the world's strongest navy is trying to stop them.
Maybe someday there will be a new type of ship that renders carriers obsolete, but not in the next ten years. China is currently building a new big ship, and it's another carrier.
Carriers are really important for blue-water combat, that is outside the effective range of land-based air (the word "effective" is relevant here; combat aircraft need things like loiter time, and in-air refuelling means that most aircraft have a nominally infinite range).
But land-based air from the Chinese mainland could easily cover Taiwan, protect amphibs crossing to Taiwan and threaten any US Navy carrier that comes even close to Taiwan. And that's before the ballistic missile argument which I'm much less convinced by.
Because land-based air has advantages over carrier-based air (longer runways mean more capable planes, and it's much harder to destroy a runway than to sink a carrier), there's a modern version of "A Ship's a Fool to Fight a Fort" - carriers really struggle to win a war of attrition against land-based air in range of the shore; their best move is to stand off and force the enemy fleet to come out of the land-based aircover. But if the target (Taiwan) is inside land-based air range, then there isn't much the carriers (ie the USN) can do about that. You need to have a land-based air that can contest the airspace in the Taiwan Strait.
I think you're right that land based air and missiles will be decisive, but I'm not sure that China could "easily" cover Taiwan. Taiwan is numerically outmatched by China's land forces, but it does have a large air force and appears to have a large stockpile of missiles. Taiwan has in excess of 450 fighter jets, and while Taiwan's air bases may make good missile targets it's a lot easier to hide missiles than fighters and Taiwanese anti-ship missiles can take out Chinese boats a lot easier than Chinese missiles can take out Taiwanese land fortifications. They've also been investing heavily in anti-ship sea mines, and there are only two landing sites that would work for a Chinese invasion and they've both been heavily fortified. I'm not saying China couldn't do it, but if Taiwan doesn't surrender immediately it's going to be an expensive and bloody invasion.
@Richard, I think you are overstating the advantages of land-based aviation in this context. In particular, the F-18E/F/G and F-35C are as capable as fifth- and sixth-generation strike aircraft get, and a CVN's catapults can launch them with full fuel+ordnance. USN carriers and USAF airbases generate roughly equivalent sortie rates (1.5-2 per day) in high-intensity conflicts and realistic exercises, and the aircraft carrier can reposition itself at need while the airbase will be stuck in a fixed, probably suboptimal, and globally known location.
Long term, land-based aviation has the advantage of being able to resupply by train or truck rather than AOE, and more rapidly recover from a mission kill. But an amphibious assault will be over before that matters.
And, the attacker needs to get more than "advantages" from his land-based aviation. Gators are big, slow, fragile, and highly constrained once they start landing troops. The attacker needs supremacy, not just superiority, over a threat that will include not just 1-2 CVBGs but the Taiwanese Air Force, the Taiwanese navy, US land-based aircraft out of Guam and Okinawa, a few hundred cruise missiles, and probably 1-2 SSNs operating in the Taiwan strait. And the attacker needs to maintain supremacy 24/7 throughout the operation, while the defenders get to choose the hour of their full-court press.
It's certainly true that the advantage of being land-based rather than carrier-based isn't overwhelming on its own (and there are land bases on Taiwan itself, of course).
But rather that China does not need their own carriers for combat in the Taiwan strait, because they have land bases, and the land bases are generally better than carriers, not worse.
Indeed, China building their own carriers is a sign that they want to project power beyond the combat range of their land-based air, not that they intend to challenge in the Taiwan strait (where Chinese carriers would be staggeringly pointless).
China doesn't need to invade Taiwan. They are perfectly okay with the status quo, and they can seize power through economic means by tying the Taiwanese economy closer to Beijing. It's much easier for them to turn Taiwan into a semi-independent client state rather than risk everything on a disruptive military invasion that will cause billions of dollars in economic damage even if they win.
I agree. I think the main reason we haven't seen any major wars of territorial expansion in the last 50ish years is that it's just too expensive in blood and treasure for two little benefit. What's the gain in taking Taiwan? Prestige, mostly: Taiwan's industries would likely be damaged or destroyed by an invasion, and China is perfectly capable of building up it's own industries. I suppose the island does have strategic value for military purposes.
It could happen, but "inevitable" seems wildly overconfident. China talks tough on Taiwan but they haven't taken any decisive action in the last 70 years, so why are you absolutely certain they will in the next 10?
I wouldn't go with 100%, but the Hong Kong example has made a Taiwanese declaration of independence more likely and the official PRC policy is still "if independence declaration then invasion". It seems more likely than usual that things there could go hot.
I'm wondering if the US would freeze China's trillions in financial assets, sort of like happened with Iran. On the bright side, I guess the US wouldn't have to pay them back anytime soon?
It seems like if China were planning this, they'd want to get their money out, somehow? Or would they write it off?
I've thought for a while that this is the one of the US' best weapons- nationalizing all Chinese property or financial instruments held in the US, including Treasuries. I'm not sure it's great for Treasuries as a supposedly risk-free investment going forward, but I think in a hot war with thousands of American casualties, that's the kind of thing that happens
Not really sure why it'd affect trust in those (beyond the whole "the US will probably get a few major cities burnt by Chinese nukes" thing). The Trading with the Enemy Act is a known quantity and has been used before (the US seized all German-owned and Japanese-owned assets during WWII); "not useful in case my country commits suicide" is already baked into the price.
I mean, there's not that much *to* do to prepare as a private citizen. You can avoid living in a city big enough to be worth a nuke, and you can make sure you have skills that would be useful post-war (which is really most of them), but investments are all susceptible to devaluation or seizure in some form or another.
I have half of my liquid investments in China, so I am betting that China will not do anything too stupid. Could you explain why you think the US would react so much more strongly to an invasion of Taiwan than they have to any of Russia's military adventures?
Primarily, the fact that the USA has declared that it would defend Taiwan in the event of invasion. If the USA chickened out on that, the system of alliances that gives the West unrivalled diplomatic power would crumble to dust.
Six Assurances + Bush II in (I think) 2001. There isn't a treaty obligation - I chose my words carefully - but in practice so much of the West is built on soft power anyway that it'd still be a massive blow to NATO.
Taiwan is a rich, technologically advanced, liberal democracy. It's hard to think of anything outside of the Americas, Western Europe, or Japan, that would be more likely to be defended by the United States.
I mean, we'd be sympathetic, but really. Imagine you're in the White House and you get that call from the Pentagon. China's done it. They're going in. The Joint Chiefs are ready and recommend Plan 3, variant A. They think they can stop the Chinese, and think that they can win the subsequent war, if necessary.
Do you say go? What are your incentives? Wars in faraway places about which we know nothing have become a vote loser. If you commit the country to a land war in Asia, you're screwed, and so is your party at the midterms.
But . . . talk tough. A few sanctions (but nothing to stop the flow of cheap goods), a few speeches, and wait for the news cycle to move on. You'll be good, might even get a bump in the polls for resisting military adventurism.
I don't see it. I might be excessively cynical, but I just don't see it.
Vietnam and Iraq aren't exactly the same as a rival great power that both sides of politics utterly loathe (the progressives because of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and welding people into their houses, the conservatives because Red and/or Yellow Peril, *everyone* because of wolf warriors, brazen cyberwarfare, and covering up COVID early on).
I think the spectre of Chamberlain would be a bigger vote-loser than a hot war against a scary opponent with national pride at stake (shit, Margaret Thatcher got out of polling hell with the Falklands War, not to mention how united everyone was during WWII).
I think it's pretty easy to think of such countries. Besides all NATO countries outside Western Europe, I would imagine that, for instance, Israel, Australia and South Korea would be higher up the list. The US even has a military base in tiny Singapore, but nothing in Taiwan.
From a force strength perspective, sometime in the range of 2025-2027 is probably when things are going to happen, if they do. The US has been getting older systems to work for a few more years for some time, with the expectation that a lot of new things come online in the early-mid 2030's. Replacements aren't really being procured, and R&D/production funding is high right now. So in the mid-to-late 2020's, the US will have relatively fewer systems ready to go.
Now, this is an important move; the previous 20 years have been murder on US force structure, and this major rebuilding is critical if the US wants to be able to project power past the late 2030's, but it means that China will be relatively strong at exactly the point when the US will be the weakest it will be for at least two decades. That's not a happy place to be.
I suspect that if anything happens anywhere in the world, it will happen then.
China knows that the US isn't actually willing to start a nuclear war over Taiwan. It would be a geopolitical disaster for the US if we do nothing but I'm not convinced it would be a financial one.
The United States isn't going to *start* a *nuclear* war over Taiwan. So what? The United States is still likely to *enter* a *conventional* war over Taiwan. If China starts that war in the near future, a highly probable outcome is that the United States Navy (in concert with the Taiwanese) sinks enough Chinese amphibious shipping that the Chinese invasion of Taiwan fails. Without the United States firing a single nuclear weapon, unless the Chinese do so first.
Is *China* going to start a nuclear war over Taiwan? Is China so certain that the United States will be so afraid of China starting a nuclear war over Taiwan, that they are confident the United States will not intervene in a conventional war?
I remember reading somewhere that an invasion of Taiwan is only feasible for a few weeks each year due to the local weather. Can anyone confirm or deny this? Which weeks are they? Seems like it wouldn't be hard to go on vacation to New Zealand every year around this time.
According to the article linked below, an amphibious invasion would most likely occur in April or October, as those are the months that tend to have good wind/wave conditions and low fog. Invasions in other months are possible, but risky.
(Jump to "Treacherous Conditions in the Taiwan Strait")
If the CIA could make cloud seeding work reliably then I think there are a lot more profitable uses it could be put to then sitting on it until Taiwan invades. In any case, I think the wind patterns are a bigger issue for wave height, but I'm certainly no expert. One thing the CIA is sure to notice is the buildup of forces for invasion that would precede an April or October invasion, so at least we'd have advance warning.
SpaceX actually got the sole source human landing system contract for NASA's Project Artemis! Maybe that will get Congress to push for some more funding for NASA, so the most politically connected proposal (the "National Team" of Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin) will get the Option B. In any case, good for SpaceX.
On a downer note, it seems like part of the UK's major soccer teams effectively immunized themselves from Promotion and Relegation. Good for their owners' profits, not so much for the game itself. They'd probably love to have a fully "closed" league where joining requires paying a major upfront payment that the existing owners get to pocket, like with US major sports leagues (there was even an accusation a few years back that MLS was basically a ponzi scheme of getting new teams to use their upfront payments to pay off the pre-existing investors/owners).
Someone else can probably explain it better but as I understand it in their system teams from the equivalent of the minor leagues have the opportunity to get promoted into the "major league" at the expense of the currently underperforming higher teams.
And it seems like it's more of a threat to a *different* really cool feature of European soccer which has equivalent in American sports, the Champions League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Champions_League
What about the CONCACAF Champion's League, which is a sports league with "American" right there in the name? :-)
There's also the NCAA sports' end-of-year tournaments, which are sorta equivalent if you think of the athletic conferences as akin to domestic leagues in international football.
As for the NCAA, I'm not sure what you mean. Winning as a D-II school doesn't promote you to D-I, winning a mid-major conference doesn't promote you to a power 5 conference, and I know of no mechanism for demoting schools (although failing to meet certain obligations would probably get it done). There was some talk recently about promoting SUNY Buffalo, both how it became a D-I school and about the viability of joining a power conference. While a strong record in lower leagues helps, there are other requirements and the conference has no obligation to accept. Basically, promotion requires the conference to accept the school, which is accomplished primarily by spending money. If you're already spending enough to qualify for a higher level then you're probably successful, since spending is a fair sized driver of success. And at a certain level if you're successful then you're probably getting more revenue than an unsuccessful school's athletics and so the gap in spending is easier to close.
You're talking pro/rel now. I was responding to the bit about the Champion's League being a unique feature of European soccer that has no equivalent in American sports. The thing about hte Champion's League isn't that a small group of poorly-performign clubs get "demoted" back to their domestic leagues every year. Rather, it's that teams from a bunch of completely unrelated leagues send their best teams to compete every year.
The CONCACAF Champion's League is literally a Champions League for CONCACAF nations. It's going on right now. It has the same general format as the Champion's League in Europe.
Paul Goodman and Emaystee beat me to it. What's happened is that a set of prominent soccer clubs have branched off to form a league where 12 of them will no longer be subject to promotion and relegation - instead, a small number of slots will be made available for the top teams from below to climb up, and any churn will happen in those slots.
The owners of those permanent "founding" teams very much like this, because it eliminates the potential hit to their profitability from being demoted, and they get more matches between their clubs and other large clubs. It moves them more in the direction of American sports leagues, with exclusive franchises where newcomers (if they're allowed in at all) have to pay up substantially to get in. Given the fact that they're calling the permanent clubs the "founding" members, I strongly suspect they're planning to see if they can get future clubs willing to pay heavily to become permanent members down the line.
The top clubs across Europe are trying to create a "super league" where the (however many) founding members will exclusively play each other. Unlike the ordinary domestic leagues, for example the English Premier League, where the bottom three teams each season go down a level and the top four (it's a bit more complicated than that) from the lower league go up. The new "superleague" would mean no clubs could join but neither would any drop out. Being in the top of your domestic league means Big Money and the idea for these clubs is that, being the top teams of their home leagues, their appeal to fans would mean Even Bigger Money to watch them all play each other.
A lot of people are not very gruntled about this. We already have things like the Champions League, Europa League, and various World Club Cups, Super Cups and the likes. It would also cream off the highest earning and most popular teams from the domestic leagues, leaving them to struggle. I never thought I'd agree with Gary Neville (one of Fergie's old team) but he's correct about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP05EDm9EB8
Association football clubs are privately owned money-making enterprises. They occasionally do things which are perfectly logical from a money-making perspective, but which are greeted with horror by fans , who think they ought to behave in some other way. Cue endless heated rhetoric about the spirit of football, but no rhetoric about the letter of the law. It doesn't strike anyway to organise football in a fundamentally different way, or to defund your club if you don't like its behaviour -- the fact that all their money comes from voluntary subscriptions doesn't register either.
This is true, it's a business and the owners can do what they like to maximise profits. Everyone and his dog is really pissed-off about it, I'm presently listening to Monday Night Football on Sky Sports (live on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQIDff1G1JQ) and yeah, they've already mentioned that the owners are trying to introduce an American-style sports league model.
At the end of the day, the product needs purchasers. If they piss off the fans badly enough, they won't purchase the item. Now it probably is that the owners are calculating that the brand is enough to entice purchasers, especially globally. But if the clubs wanting to set up the Super League are kicked out of Champions League competition, this affects the desirability of the brand: the sales pitch, after all, is "see this multi-cup winning team play that multi-cup winning team" and if they're barred from those cup competitions, that hurts the brand.
Note that "Ponzi scheme" sometimes gets thrown at investments that are basically legit. It's normal for later investors to buy out earlier ones. To be a fraud, there needs to be more to it than that.
For much more about fraud, I recommend reading "Lying For Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World."
I put the list in google sheets and added a randomizer field to it. It should automatically suggest one review to read at random each time you open the document:
I'm somewhat surprised that there's no xkcd comic for micromorts, like there is for radiation and money. What would be a decent substitute? If I attempted to do this myself, what would be a good way to research it and get some solid numbers?
Brazilianists (scholars who specializes in studying, researching, teaching and publishing about Brazil) have been puzzling endlessly over the military overhaul going on in traditionally peaceful Brazil, a country historically aligned to America (actually the only South American country to fight alongside us in WW I and WW II) which has taken lately a strangely aggressive stance. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37151/brazils-upgraded-tiger-iis-might-be-the-most-capable-f-5s-in-the-world
Is it possible the Brazil's ostensibly anti-gay ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S300L ) small r-Republican government's highest echelons have been taken over by a heretofore secret cabal of powerful homosexual monarchists, who are using the beloved South American as a springboard to attack America's interests and exact revenge on it for having inspired the country's 1889 Republican Revolution, which ovethrew and exiled the Imperial Family, which was banned from ever returning to Brazil until its banishment was lifted in the 1920s?
Is it a coincidence "The Prince", a member from Brazil's former Imperial Family, has said he expects Brazil's current leader, President Captain Bolsonaro, to be Brazil's last president? Is it a coincidence Congressman Frota, whose vouching for The Prince was sought, is himself a former gay movies porn star? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Frota What are the odds?
If this cabal's plans are left unchecked, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
> Is it possible the Brazil's ostensibly anti-gay ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S300L ) small r-Republican government's highest echelons have been taken over by a heretofore secret cabal of powerful homosexual monarchists, who are using the beloved South American as a springboard to attack America's interests and exact revenge on it for having inspired the country's 1889 Republican Revolution, which ovethrew and exiled the Imperial Family, which was banned from ever returning to Brazil until its banishment was lifted in the 1920s?
Generally, coincidence is fairly likely for observations with a lot of degrees of freedom - in particular, ones where your being aware of the observation is conditional on an unlikely coincidence happening, but relatively unaffected by the nature of said coincidence.
On the proposition "a hypothetical cabal of homosexual Brazilian monarchists looking for revenge for century-old slights aren't scary enough that the mere possibility demands action"?
Suspect you're kidding, but just in case: Bolsonaro seems to be a loudmouthed idiot and I don't think he's capable of being secretly a member of a cabal. If he claims to be homophobic, then it's not some sort of weird "4D chess" thing, it means he's actually homophobic.
Maybe not him, but people surrounding him. What are the odds of his favored vice presidencial hopeful being secretly gay and the Congressman he asked about it being involved in homossexual dealings too? The last time such a sort of coincidence happened, Kim Philby was investigating Soviet spies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
I take a low daily dose of Venlafaxine, and I've noticed that several different things can give me the disconnected, distracted feeling that presages and underlies "brain zaps":
1) Missing a dose, or even delaying it until evening;
2) Mild to moderate sleep deprivation;
3) Having a fever; and
4) Eating too much dark chocolate.
Is there some simple connection between those? Sleep deprivation might work by just having more waking hours, shifting my next dose until later according to my metabolism. A fever... maybe burns through the medicine or the chemicals in some related pathway faster, by *waves hands* increasing my metabolism? But I have no idea what the deal is with the dark chocolate.
TIL that "brain zaps" are a withdrawal symptom of antidepressants. I experienced this myself complete with the eye-movement-associated buzzing sound but I attributed that to the withdrawal interacting with my one-sided deafness. I've experienced this both before ever taking antidepressants and long after having stopped taking them, both as a result of sleep deprivation, so you can rule out that sleep deprivation is interacting with the medication. (Though, I never got them before going deaf.) Fever probably has a similar effect to the global cortical disinhibition that comes with near-sleep - your immune system wants you to rest, after all - so I don't think that interacts with it either. The dark chocolate has me totally stumped; I have never noticed this effect, but then I don't eat a lot of dark chocolate, just a lot of milk chocolate.
My own (totally amateur) theory is that these "brain zaps" are localized micro-seizures either originating near or spreading to the auditory cortex and frontal eye fields. The antidepressant withdrawal, sleep deprivation and fever all have large-scale effects on your brain, and if either of the latter causes in isolation don't cause brain zaps, then being on antidepressants makes you more vulnerable to them. I don't know how true that is but it seems more likely to be metabolical.
Has anyone had any success in deprogramming a vaccine conspiracy theorist? Is it even possible? I have a relative who I assume is too far gone and I don’t know if there is any point in engaging.
Street epistemology (has other names) is likely your best option. At worst, your relative will feel listened to and you’ll understand where they’re coming from better.
Basically, a dolled up form of the Socratic Method. In street epistemology, you don't advance any evidence or arguments yourself, you try to get the other person to think about their basis for believing something. So you might have questions like:
- What do you consider the single strongest piece of evidence for your belief?
- If the strong evidence turned out to be flawed, would that change your confidence in your beliefs?
- Hypothetically, what kind of evidence would you expect to see if you were wrong?
- Do you think most people agree with you on this issue? Why or why not?
- Is X, a good reason to believe something? What would be a better reason of believing something?
- Etc.
It's all about deep listening and moving slow. You're probably not going to change a person's view in a single conversation, but you might be able to get them to realize on their own that some of their basis for a particular belief is a little shaky.
A Veblen good is defined as a good for which demand increases as the price increases. Supposed examples, according to investopedia, include designer jewelry, yachts, and luxury cars.
While it's obviously true that signalling "Look at me, I'm rich enough to afford this good" is part of the appeal of many goods, I am skeptical that true Veblen goods actually exist; if they did, then surely sellers of these goods would simply keep raising their prices off to infinity.
Obviously, a demand curve can be upward-sloping only within a limited range. Prices aren't going to get so high that literally no one can pay them. I assume this is meant to be understood in most definitions of Veblen goods.
Dogecoin specifically might be the perfect example. It exists almost purely as a "meme stock", unlike Bitcoin no one's buying it because they think it might eventually become part of the global financial system. Because of this, people don't set out to buy a thousand dogecoins, they buy a hundred dollars worth of dogecoins and few people think to themselves "Wait, my hundred dollars is only getting me a thousand dogecoins? That's barely any, what a ripoff! I'm gonna wait until I can get my money's worth."
That doesn't sound like an inverted demand curve to me. An inverted one would be "Wait, my hundred dollars is giving me as much as thousand dogecoins? They must be worthless; I won't buy any then." or "Wait, my thousand dollars only give me ten dogecoins? They must be super valuable; I'll buy even more then.".
This may be a bit of a tangent, but it's interesting. Not all Veblen goods look the same: The Bugatti Chiron is an interesting car, because Bugatti is owned by Volkswagen and they consciously operate Bugatti at a loss - they actually brag about how their cars cost $4M to produce, are sold for $3M, thus operating at a marginal loss of -$1M per car. The business idea is probably a lot less perplexing and sexy; it's likely something like Volkswagen using Bugatti as a testbed for new car technology, so Bugatti doubles as an R&D facility for VW and an exotic car producer. But what's interesting is the bit about how they brag about losing money on their cars:
So what's going on here is not only that their cars are Veblen goods, but Bugatti's (the firm) seemingly extravagant production line spending is a Veblen good itself. Bugatti (the firm) signals Veblen-like affluence and prestige to their customers, who in turn want to align themselves with the brand because of its Veblen-like values. So not only are their cars $3M, which is a price tag with some Veblen properties for the customer, but the brand itself also signals Veblen-like prestige by the way it operates.
To your specific question, when a good is considered a Veblen good you're effectively buying two goods: The actual physical good (the watch), and also the Veblen-like signal (the positive externalities associated with the brand being Rolex). These two goods are tied into one package and sold together. You can divorce these goods and sell them separately, and there are markets for these as well: there are markets for watches that only tell time and don't signal prestige (cheap no-brand watches that work just as well). There are also markets for Veblen-like signals (markets for knock-offs of low quality, but that look real).
The reason Veblen goods aren't infinitely pricy is because the Veblen-signal isn't an upward sloping demand curve - it has a downward-sloping demand curve like everything else, it's just that the Veblen-signal equilibriates at a higher price than the base good.
The underlying mechanism, where more expensive goods are seen as more valuable to some extent, is nigh-universal. A Veblen good is not special because this mechanism applies to it, but because there are circumstances that make this mechanism work so strongly that increasing the price will increase demand.
However, these circumstances don't have to be true for any price. For example, a good might have the Veblen property because nearly all buyers don't want to be seen as cheap or caring about money. So then a company that might produce for a below-average price might increase sales by raising their price close to the normal/average price of that good, but they will not increase their sales further by going above that price (unless they can be seen as 'premium').
I would argue that in a strict sense, if you use the naive definition that most seem to use, either Veblen goods don't exist or most goods are Veblen goods.
However, if you use a more sensible definition, then you can logically argue things like: Ferrari's are Veblen goods from $75k up to $150k.
If you are arguing what I think you're arguing, that Ferrari would sell fewer cars at half the price, then I strongly disagree.
The cheapest new Ferrari in the US costs more like $220K. The market for $100K sports cars is a lot stronger than the market for $220K sports cars, which is why (say) the Porsche 911 vastly outsells any Ferrari.
If the Ferrari were half the price I believe it would sell a lot better than it does; its prestige value would be slightly lower but its value-for-money along every other axis would look a lot better.
Yeah, but look how Altria has done since 2015 - 2015 was a terrible time to buy it. That said, really interesting point, and Altria is on the rise again.
I'm hanging a shingle as a crypto coach: hire me to help you understand the crypto economy, DeFi, yield farming, the future of financial technology, get onboarded onto crypto and special projects I've sourced by dint of being irl friends with many 8 and 9-figure crypto rich "whales". My most recent client said of the money he spent on my services: "the best money I've spent."
People have ideas, for which they want to get funding. By selling percentages of earnings, it incentivizes people to only put their money into good ideas. The stock market is simply an incredibly fluid way of companies obtaining capital.
Companies look at the price of the stock to determine whether to invest in future projects. They can do a share offering to sell more shares beyond the initial offering, and get capital for more projects. The price of the stock determines how much they can raise.
It also works the other way - companies can return capital they don't have a good use for via dividends and stock buybacks.
Note both of these are on an ongoing basis, it's not just about an initial offering.
There are other ways stock prices directly affects a companies investment ability / descisions, such as aquisitions, convertible bonds, but I won't go into them here.
I'm not even sure what your alternative proposal is. That stocks expire upon the death of the share holder? And if that share tries to sell the stock in secrecy, promising to pass on the dividends to the buyer, you prosecute him? Seems cumbersome, and also seems to have no up-sides. What would be the benefit of such a move?
Besides, no IPO would want their stocks to have such properties as being untradeable. If the stocks you buy are lifetime commitments (effectively being larger commitments than owning kids) almost nobody would want to do it because you're effectively betting on the success of a company for decades into the future. Not a lot of useful predictions can be made about 20-30-40-50 years into the future. So the demand for the stock would be low, meaning the price would be low, and the IPO wouldn't pull in much capital at all. So instead, firms make the stocks tradeable such that share holders can get rid of shares, or buy more, as they update their predictions.
Ooh okay, so the goal is to make investment strategies where holding times are longer more attractive, and strategies where holding times are shorter less attractive? Is there a particular reason why you want to accomplish this goal?
With stock offerings but no market, new ideas get funding from the set of people who think they are good ideas, have some spare money, and don't expect to have anything better to do with that money for the next twenty or so years. With stock markets, new ideas get funding from the set of people who think they are good ideas and have some spare money, even if they think they're going to need that money for some other purpose in the next few years. The latter results in good ideas getting *much* more funding than the former.
Owners of stock vote on company leadership. Assuming higher value production = more profit (often a fraught assumption), having transferable skin in the game gives people the right incentives to promote value creation through electing the right board.
Clearly trading leaves both sellers and buyers better off, as otherwise they would not voluntarily engage in it. If leaving people better off is not useful to society, then I do not know what is.
After the recent Progress and Poverty book review, centering on Georgism, I'd been tossing around some economic thoughts and I think they are relevant to this question of the value of the stock market, although it takes a while to get there. This is all off the top of my head speculation and I welcome questions and criticisms of the logic here.
There is a social value in encouraging people to think of things in the long term over the short term, a la the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. (I think this value is a major factor behind a lot of social issues, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion; for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to operate on the assumption is that long term bias is a good thing to socially encourage.)
There is a problem that society needs a mechanism to handle that there is a disconnect between people's production and consumption; there are times when people produce more than they consume and there are times people consume more than they produce. If I am in a time where I am producing more than I consume, long term bias suggests it is good to hold the extra production until I have a need to consume more than I produce. For example, eventually I will want to retire (and thus not produce anything), and therefore it is good for me to set aside production to consume in retirement.
Society needs a mechanism for people to choose how much they want to put off to consume later; if it doesn't provide such a mechanism, the market will provide one on the side. Per some of the comments in the Georgism discussion, it seems that this is often accomplished by hoarding goods which retain value, such as precious metals. This is somewhat suboptimal from a society perspective, since those hoarded goods aren't providing value.
At the same time, there are some times when the consumption must come before the production. For example, children are, strictly speaking, resource sinks up until they are able to enter the work force (and likely for a time after that until they get accustomed to the job). Likewise, if I am starting a factory, it takes consuming a lot of other's production
in the form of building the factory, building the tools and such before the factory can produce for itself.
There is no connection between having excess production to spare and needing to consume production for future growth. A company that needs to modernize to remain competitive needs to consume specifically because it doesn't have the excess production to modernize. Society needs a mechanism for allocating current production to places where it will produce in the future. Societies that don't have a market mechanism for doing so will need something like the Soviet State Planning Committee for performing this duty at the top level.
Having one party with excess production and one party needing to consume production to ensure future production is a good place to solve two problems with one mechanism. I trade my current production to someone that needs it to produce more, and in return, I get a share of their future production.
If I am able to micromanage, the stock market makes this process more efficient on all levels. Rather than trusting a bank to make a fixed term loan with my savings to someone I've never heard of, I can research where to put the loan to make the most value long term and I can get the resources out of the process whenever I need them (or when I think the place I put them will no longer produce the value I require).
Figured I’d put it here, since it’s too late for the Henry George review.
I think the main flaw with Henry George’s argument is that it assumes any gains in productivity will be eaten up by rent. However, what it fails to take note of is that, if all the gains in productivity are eaten up by rent, then no one would invest in improving productivity. It is profitable, for landlords to give up profit - and thus, we figure out how and why people’s incomes have improved.
I do think the land value tax is a fine idea, it’s just rather like Malthus’ idea, in that there’s some reason he overlooked why things can improve.
It looks like George agreed that short term gains could result in large profits for both businesses and laborers. If you invent a new type of business, your gains (highly localized in the short term) can outpace the increase in land value -> increased rents process. By frequent innovation a small subset of companies and laborers can stay ahead for a while.
Computers in Silicon Valley appears to be doing this. Google and Facebook are still quite profitable despite the massive increase in land value in San Francisco. Over a long term the value of land near a new business will increase to equalize, according to George.
I think rather that George missed out on how many businesses and people own their own land. If you own the land, then you gain the increased value directly, instead of it going to the landlord eventually. George's theory only really makes sense when talking about landlords who rent rather than use land, and speculators that don't do either.
If you adopt the full Georgist view (which is rather more extreme than the actual George), then what happens is that the business ends up mostly profiting from rent that it pays itself rather than from business profits.
I can understand why Georgists would want to classify the income as "rent" but that seems wrong, as there will be no line item for rent received on that property, and very clear income from all other sources that make up their entire revenue.
Perhaps it would make more sense to think of it as an opportunity cost, rather than an actual portion of profit paid to itself? Otherwise you would have to discount from business profits (actual manufacture and sale of what your business does) an amount, and then call that amount "rent" that you paid to yourself. I imagine most accountants would be troubled if asked to do that.
Accounting and economics are separate fields with different ways of looking at things.
If I own both the land and the capital, then to figure out how much of my income is economic rent I need to consider how much actual rent I would have to pay if I didn't own the land. But from an accounting perspective I don't worry about this unless tax law says I have to.
The UK used to have a tax (called schedule A) on the imputed income from rent on land that was owned but not leased. This is not a Georgist tax, though, as it was on the full property rent (ie including improvements) not just on the land value. It was abolished in 1963.
Incidentally, in most cases it's easy to get the land value - insurers routinely do valuations of the rebuild cost of buildings, so you can take the market price (ie a real estate agent's valuation), deduct the rebuild cost (an insurer's valuation) and the difference is the unimproved value of the land.
It's not like the comments on the Progress & Poverty review have been closed - you're only making your sub-thread harder to find (and violate netiquette by "spamming" this comment section).
This comment thread is for people to post about "Whatever you want" and if Mr Decker wants to post some thoughts about a previous thread, well all power to his elbow. And he can do so in the next open thread, and the one after that.. He's much more likely to get a response here. In other words, I think you're wrong about violating netiquette - open threads are a splendid resource for people who have things to add to posts that have come and gone.
But it's not "gone", furthermore there wasn't even an article dedicated to a specific topic since !
As for "not getting a response" this is one of the reasons why comment threads should be in reverse chronological order ! (Currently, everyone is incentivized to read only the first comments, which incentivizes starting your own comment thread before even checking if a similar subtopic has already been started !)
Well, I'll agree with you if it's about the tactically best place for a comment. Three days after the H George post went up (and, as you say, no interrim posts) probably I'd stay with the dedicated post. But it's just a choice! It might be that more eyes see the comment here, and if so, then what"s the problem with using the open thread?
Not sure about the chronology problem - I think there are plusses and minuses for both. I read through (happily) chronologically on my first visit to a thread, then on subsequent visits adjust to 'newest first'.
Eh, not a huge problem, I guess that I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't think that it might give me opportunity to illustrate my 2nd point :
Because not everyone has the time or interest to read *all* of the comments each time. If it's oldest first, like it is now, then the oldest comment threads are going to be read disproportionately more than the newest, so *of course* some commenters are then going to think that it's "too late" to start their own !
(Though some people are still posting not just answers to comments there, but new threads : latest is merely 2 hours old.)
Lot of good stuff in the book review slush pile. I read about 10 of them and put down some votes. There was the normal variation in quality you'd expect from that many entries, but I found a couple of easy 10's to nominate for finalist status.
I just watched Collective (Oscar nominated Romanian documentary). Apparently in 2015 Romania had its entire government replaced with unelected technocrats, and the film portrays Vlad Voiculescu in particular as being just an absolute perfect Health Minister. Watching this documentary made me want to replace democracy with whatever process Romania used in 2015.
Apparently Voiculescu was recently (like in the last few weeks) fired for mishandling the Covid Pandemic, I don't understand the details but I'm told by a Romanian friend that he still comes out looking pretty good. Also he's become more of a politician by now than he was in 2015, so I'm not sure how to think about his career after the film ends.
Substack didn't want to let me join without a picture. My usual avatars wouldn't be recognisable at this size.
So I threw in a Brainsucker Pod from X-Com: Apocalypse, which I happened to have lying around from my work on UFOpaedia and which happens to look mushroom-shaped.
My then work paid for a cartoonist to do sketches of people attending a Summer party one year, and I liked the sketch he did of me so much that asked for permission to use it as my online avatar / profile picture, which I have been doing ever since.
I used to link to the cartoonist's business website, but he retired just before Covid.
Mine is a radiolarian by Ernst Haeckel, a naturalist of the enlightenment who used crude microscopes to visualize marine microorganisms and draw them. He didn't get very high res from his microscopes so he had to use his imagination a lot. It's a cool combination of art and science. I like the art more than the artist (the wikipedia page gets into some of his ideological flaws). You can see more by googling his name and "radiolaria".
PS- This thread is inspiring me to change it now... reading more about Haeckel's views on race has left me thoroughly uncomfortable with using his art as my avatar, even though I still appreciate his work.
Damn. This is like when I read Dylan Farrow's essay and I couldn't watch Woody Allen movies anymore.
No worries, A. It was only a matter of time before I discovered information about Haeckel that sufficiently conflicted with my value system for me to change it. I still think he's an impressive artist and I'm still inspired by his work. But I don't want an avatar that feels so complicated. This actually is motivating me to sit down and draw my own, which would feel much more appropriate since I'm an artist ;)
I’m a professional game designer and consultant who in a former life worked in educational game design and that was also the subject of a my masters thesis - (google “super energy apocalypse” if you’re curious. )
RE: the review on Progress & Poverty, I recall it once inspired Elizabeth Maggie to make “The Landlord’s Game”, which was a piece of early procedural rhetoric advocating for the LVT. Through a series of convoluted events, that game gave rise to the game we now know as “Monopoly.”
I have zero free time, but I’ve always wanted to take a whack at doing a modern take on the Landlords game. Any suggestions for how to approach it? And what’s the better route - physical, digital, or Nicky Case-style interactive web essay?
People are notoriously bad at picking things randomly. To help mix things up, I've made the following link that will automatically take you directly to a randomly selected review for you to review...
Note that it can take many seconds to load the document and jump to your assigned review - especially if you get one near the end. Please wait for it!
If people want it and SA approves, I can also break out the reviews into individual web pages that would load much faster. We could even potentially put a voting widget at the bottom of each page to make things easier. Heck, we could even track how many people started a review and did not vote, which is an interesting proxy for negative reviews (which kind people like us might not leave).
Note that my script collected a total of 97 reviews from the two documents. The list with titles and links is available as JSON here...
I talked to this Marxist on Twitter who, not only said that "marginalism" and "subjective value" isn't the correct value theory, but he was even convinced that marginalism was a fad that died out 12 years ago in neo-classical circles. He also said stuff like most of the world is Marxist and the West is the last hold-out, where China is leading the way.
Does anybody know what's going on here? I know Marxism has always been kind of an apocalyptic ideology, where they all believe the revolution is "right around the corner", but I've never seen a level of delusion where they say stuff like "Labor Theory of Value and Law of Value is now the prevailing view among economists". And it's extra weird because I'm an econ major (and he wasn't) who graduated five years ago, but that didn't dissuade his views. Instead, he was convinced that someone had been messing with my head.
My sense is that these communities mostly hang out at r/Marxism and r/Communism, their one-sided information flow creates positive feedback loops of reinforced biases, and they end up with what can really only be described as a parallel universe.
Yea, as Kenny said. The marginalism vs LTV bit is just a clear example of where Marx was incorrect, and I'm wondering if it's a common feature inside Marxist circles to go as far as denying that marginalism is economic orthodoxy.
This doesn't concern the specific bits about Marx that are useful, whatever these might be. This is about Marxists holding onto the bits of Marx that are defunct.
It's true that there's a lot more in Marx than people understand. But Marx doesn't have a lot to say about what theories of value were considered plausible in the era of 2010-2020.
Do firms find it hard to find talented generalists? It seems when firms offer job openings they mostly look for specialists who excel at certain tasks, but in actuality firms generally want flexible people who can fill many roles and take on a more diverse set of responsibilities. So how do firms find generalist talent? And if you're a generalist, how do you advertise yourself in a world where firms seemingly only ask for specialists?
Work a mid-level specialist position and show wide competence outside of it.
Contribution at mid level is table stakes, nobody cares about your amazing generalist skills if you cannot apply them to the domain of interest. Hence the concept of "T-shaped" competence which is all the rage in corporate speak.
Very early stage startups (<20 people) both 1) desperately need generalists and 2) often recognize this need.
I agree with "a real dog" re: T-shaped: any positioned titled "generalist" won't pay that well nor be particularly well-regarded internally, so you want to have a specialty. Additionally, you may want to keep the extent of your generalist tendencies a secret. If you say "I can do X, Y and Z" where typical candidates would say "I can do X", you may come across as delusional, arrogant, or not really good at any of X, Y or Z. So I recommend saying "I can do X, but can wear a lot of hats" (where X is the most influential, highest-paying skill you have).
Also keep in mind that the organization may depend upon you doing X, Y and Z, and would be screwed if you left, but that doesn't mean they'll really value what you're doing. Early in my career, my ability to get difficult stuff done outside of my job description lead my boss to refer to me as an attack dog he wanted to keep chained to his desk. Thus my learning: beware being too good at doing things nobody else wants to do, as the company will have no incentive to promote you out of it. However, being essential IS leverage and I did ultimately arm-wrestle various employers into giving me promotions. Yet it was a difficult road. I've seen plenty of other people achieve similar if not more career progress by being reasonably competent at one thing and, importantly, being highly agreeable with those in power.
"Also keep in mind that the organization may depend upon you doing X, Y and Z, and would be screwed if you left, but that doesn't mean they'll really value what you're doing. "
Ohhhh yeah. "We hired you to do X, that's what it says on your contract, we're paying you to do X. That you can also do Y and Z is nice, and we may indeed take full advantage of you being able to do Y and Z so we don't have to hire people to do Y and people to do Z, but we're not gonna pay you to do Y and Z because that's not in your official job description".
(1) The book reviews? Aw, brilliant! I am going to dive into this but, um, not right away because I do have to do housework and then that pesky "earning a living" thing. But definitely when I have some free time!
My favorite wonkish proposal for this is Harberger taxes. You let land owners declare their land to have whatever value they want, and pay taxes accordingly. The catch is that their declared value is posted publicly and they have to sell at the declared value to anyone interested in buying. No one should be underpricing in order to skate on taxes as that will only get them bought out by real estate speculators, and as a bonus you make the real estate market run much more smoothly by forcing price discovery on what are usually very illiquid goods.
Part of me likes this idea, and then part of me realizes that puts a lot of people who would be using their land and intend to stay there in a very tough position. If anyone can buy your land with no veto from the seller, that opens up a lot of bad possibilities. I guess if we want to maximize tax revenues and land use value (that it's ALWAYS being used for the most profitable purposes), that's a great way to do it.
Think of it this way. Say the goal of your tax was to raise revenue in the amount of 1% of the land value. You could set the rate to be 0.75% and people would overvalue their land by 33% to keep it from being bought out from under them and you'd get your 1%. It could also be 0.5%. If people want to save a few bucks by undervaluing at the risk that their property could be bought out from under them? That's the risk they chose to take.
Sure, but then it's counting on individual property owners to be savvy enough to overprice their property just enough to make that work out. That's also counting on both the local government setting the taxes right and the local property values to remain steady enough that some big real estate company can't recognize a prize difference and scoop up whole neighborhoods for below expectations.
If some big developer wanted to buy my house right now, I can review their offer and determine if I'm satisfied. If I decide that their offer is too low, or that I would never sell at any rate, I can do that. If I overpriced by house by 30% and they bought it anyway, I'm SOL.
"If some big developer wanted to buy my house right now, I can review their offer and determine if I'm satisfied."
All that Harberger taxes mean is that you have to do this in advance. "If some big developer offered me $500k, would I be satisfied? No. $600k? Still no. $700k? Yeah. Let's set the price at $700k then." If you overprice by 30% and they buy it anyway then you're not SOL, you're up hundreds of thousands of dollars which is surely more than enough to balance out the costs of moving (remember, finding a new house is much easier when they all have posted prices).
You indeed can't decide you would never sell at any rate, but that's supposed to be a feature. If you insist on keeping a rustic bungalow in the middle of downtown where developers really want to build apartments, you're going to have to pay for the privilege.
This ignores non-monetary value that families might place on their home. A couple has purchased their first house. They raise a family, etc. After a few decades, they have an emotional connection to the house. There is _a_ price they would sell it at, but it's one far in excess of what htey could afford the taxes on (and in excess of the local values). They aren't speculating, they aren't extracting rents, they are using the land as intended, but merely value it more than it's wider price represents, and more than they could afford under your scheme.
So, they would price it as high as they could possibly afford to pay, and if someone decides it's worth it at that price, they would be forced to sell at a price they don't think is worth it.
That’s a feature not a bug. You would presumably pay less for a house if you knew it might not be a permanent situation. That would lead to overall lower home prices.
My problem with these sorts of plans is families living in their homes. I don't think that it's ok for a family to be able to be booted out of the home that they own, and are living in, simply because someone with more money wants it. I like LVT in general, and think the idea works, but these "must sell" satellite ideas have some _really_ bad effects on the margin. I am currently living in a family home that was built by my great grandfather. It has far more emotional value to me than it has monetary value.
The idea you are proposing complete ignores these non-monetary values in a way that just _having_ and LVT does not. Given the claims throughout this thread about the fact that LVT will have positive effects even at sub-optimal rates (ie, any LVT is better than no LVT and it does not require perfect pricing or the 100% rate to work), I think that I would _much_ prefer a system that imperfectly estimates land costs, and slightly under prices than one in which families can be ousted from their homes with no recourse.
I mean, you're not SOL, since you just got a big cash grant.
Most of these proposals have some sort of time-frame specified for the transfer process, so that you could have a couple months planned for the move-out (and maybe you'd even buy the neighbor's house with the amount you know you're getting for yours, so you don't have to move far).
Lol, and then the neighbor buys its neighbor house in turn, and so on, until because of a single initial buyout the whole town is forced to move 1 house over ! (j/k ... but could it happen actually ?)
It does return to the full property tax rather than the strict land value tax. But one reason for the strict land value tax was to decrease the disincentive for building a property tax has. Under this proposal, the person who wants to build can just buy the property and build, rather than relying on the current owner to build, so the disincentive effect is no longer as big.
That’s a reasonable point, but it doesn’t really answer the question.
There are people out there advocating a LVT but it seems like a LVT is impossible to administer.
If the answer is “that’s a good point which is why everyone has moved to Harbinger” someone should tell the people still talking about George and his LTV.
I think it's a reasonable point, which is why *some* people have moved on to Harbinger. But I think most people thinking about this think that the problems with administering an LVT are less than the problems with Harbinger.
Play this out for me. We put in a harbinger LVT. The owner of the Empire State Building sets the value of the land beneath at $1. You buy it at that price. If nothing particular happens to the building above it (i.e. the old owner continues to own and control it) what good does owning the land do you? On the other hand if you get the building too, then it’s not a land value tax it’s a plain old property tax.
So while Monopoly variations might mot be the ideal option for test driving these sorts of rules, I have run Monopoly games with Harberger taxes and have a few main takeaways.
1) Getting monopolies (aka any large scale project) is so much easier.
2) If you have enough money, you can underprice. I don’t know how much this would apply in the real world, since generally there are more super rich people than there are in a game of monopoly, but if you have a trillion dollars in assets, you can probably underprice them a bit if you bundle them together (i.e. you need good bundling laws, but those are hard to make).
3) Redlining is a serious problem. Basically it makes a ton of sense to buy up poor people’s land and renovate it anyway. But in monopoly you can do it with malice by buying them out and pricing everything over their heads so they can’t afford anything. Considering that this sort of thing has been done with malice in the real world, I think it should be a concern.
"No one should be underpricing in order to skate on taxes as that will only get them bought out by real estate speculators, and as a bonus you make the real estate market run much more smoothly by forcing price discovery on what are usually very illiquid goods."
(1) Get around this by BigCorp underpricing their site, MegaPLC buys it. And then BigCorp in return buys the underpriced MegaPLC site. Notional transfer of ownership, cosy little arrangements so nobody loses out
(2) Shell companies so that BigCorp arranges to set a price of $6 and immediately OverSeas Enterprises buys it. OverSeas Enterprises is owned by the parent company of BigCorp.
No matter what way you set up a tax, *immediately* lawyers and accountants are busily finding loopholes and ways around it. It'll end up that John and Mary Smith have to pay taxes on the full value of their family home, while MegaCorp pays tuppence ha'penny. Remember the famous quote about "my secretary pays more tax than I do"? How do you think that happens?
My review was of The No Breakfast Fallacy. I'm extremely confidant it won't be added to the finalists list, but would welcome any feedback at all.
It's less of a review than it is an extreme polemic hitching a ride on someone elses book. So - not very SSC at all, and I apologise for polluting this vicinity's atmosphere of open intellectual enquiry.
If I haven't yet put you off reading it, you might also think of it as the spirit of Julian Simon channeled and set free upon the topic of resource depletion. Cornucopian, even.
Is there a problem with discussing some of the book reviews? I can't immediately see why not, other than nobody else seems to be doing so. Tell me pronto if it's problematic..
I read the Michael Shellenberger 'Apocalypse Never' review and was a bit disappointed. The reviewers first language isn't English which gave me more of a
Oops again - there's obviously a key on my keyboard which thinks it is 'POST'
... more of a problem than I enjoy admitting. Beyond that, I didn't feel Shellenberger's position was clearly described so the criticisms of it seemed straw-mannish even though maybe they weren't. Structurally, it could have been a bit more organised.
Overall I didn't feel too impressed, though I liked the conversational style of the review.
re: Book Review Contest, in rating the book reviews are we more rating the books themselves or the reviews? It's hard to separate. If I think Book A is wonderful but the review is overly wordy and mediocre how does that compare to Book B which I thought was "meh" but the review is clear and fun to read and makes good points?
Also what about rating reviews of books I haven't read? The review may seem clever and well-written, but if I haven't read the book perhaps the review is very inaccurate?
I would say rate the book review pretty much entirely on the review. Also, a really good review shouldn't need you to have read the book - you should feel you've got the gist of it just from the review.
Rate the review. I just read what was to me a 10. I want to know of the other 9's and 10's so I can read those. For me a good book review should help me decide if I want to read the book or not. (I haven't read any reviews for books I've already read... I mean what's the point of that? :^)
A book review may "help" you decide to read the book or not, but that could be a mistaken decision if it's a poorly done review. Reading a review of a book you've already read is useful because you may learn things about the book that hadn't occurred to you while you were reading it -- and also you learn if the reviewer is trustworthy (or at least if they have similar tastes to you) which comes in handy next time you see a review they've written!
Sure, I did have a smiley face. I only like good reviews for books I might want to read. Bad reviews of books I might like, or good reviews of books I won't like, do nothing for me as a book review. I think I might have rated my first 10 too high... I've gotta give out more tens... Some of these reviews are great! Thanks so much to the authors (of the review) and for the posting.
Something that seems surprisingly unnoticed is the explosion of Covid cases in India. Of all the ups and downs of graphs, and msm claims of exponential increases (at various times over the last year) what's happening in India right now is the thing that has shocked me the most. It threatens to be worse than occurred in Northern Italy last year, but in a country 25 times bigger.
And I say that as someone who has generally seen the pandemic as less serious than most people I know.
India has a strain with a couple of different mutations which might make it more virulent (and maybe escape immunity). It's currently designated VUI-21APR-01
I keep track of a few countries by estimating actual infection rates with a few simple formulas (nothing fancy, but e.g. for the US, the estimates matched quite well with those by the covid machine learning project). You can find them here: https://hmbd.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/covid-19-infection-estimates/
so India is on the list and indeed looks really bad. A few notes for context:
- India is really large (citation needed) and there are probably large regional differences that the "see the country as a homogeneous whole" approach misses. Over the whole of 2020, I estimate 30..40 M infections (both from fatality rates and from testing, both curves match very well) - which is insanely low and doesn't match results from seroprevalence testing Scott mentioned some time ago. My best explanation is that the data for India actually only includes a part of the whole country and that comparing the estimates with the whole 1.4 Bn is probably wrong.
- yup, exponential growth at R = 1.4 or something like that. The model estimate is that they're almost at 1 M new infections per day (again, not sure if this is for the whole country or a part of it). This is really bad.
I was talking with a friend about autism risk of their potential child, given that one of the potential parents has a family history of autism. (Caveat that we both know many lovely people who aren't neurotypical, but the prospect of parenting a child with "never learns to talk" type autism is something that gives them pause.)
The main reason folic acid is recommended as a supplement during pregnancy is preventing neural tube defects like spina bifida, where the spine doesn't form properly. Starting in 1998 in the US, folic acid is also added to foods like breakfast cereal because many pregnancies are unplanned, and for preventing neural tube defects the most important time to get folic acid is just before conceiving and in early pregnancy. This seems to have worked nicely for neural tube defects. https://images.app.goo.gl/A2nEn2U1mFGAUovz7
I suspected the hidden variable here was "more scientifically literate women are more careful about following medical advice, and are also more likely to have autistic traits" but one study says they controlled for "maternal prenatal healthcare-seeking behavior" which I assume means going to prenatal appointments and probably correlates strongly with taking your vitamins. I also feel like taking a prenatal vitamin is a very normal thing to do among educated women and not very correlated with working in STEM or something.
So how much folic acid are pregnant women getting? Looking at both the prenatal vitamins I've taken, they both include 222% of the recommended daily value of folic acid. I have no idea why so much. And that's on top of fortified breads, pastas, and cereals, plus natural folate in green vegetables and beans.
I am not a medical expert but would be interested in hearing more informed opinions here. My impression is that taking folic acid supplements during early pregnancy when the neural tube is forming is a good idea. After that, when the neural tube is already done forming but the brain is still doing lots of development, it might be important not to get too much. Which might mean seeking out a vitamin that contains 100% or less of the RDA of folic acid. (Most women's multivitamins have around 80% or 100% of the folic acid recommended during pregnancy.)
Covid rant. It seems more likely than not, that CV19 came from one of the labs in Wuhan. We should demand they open their doors and books, tell all, or start paying some fine to the world.
The Chinese government is widely known to be engaging in much more reprehensible stuff than sloppy biosecurity procedures, and the world seems to be either unable or unwilling to punish them for that. I don't see why you expect this would be any different.
What sort of things are worse? This is something effecting the whole world. If they were involved and know something it's their responsibility to the world to share that information. But of course there is no short term incentive to share the info now... so fines. But you are right in that this idea means the rest of the world would have to get together and demand answers, and that does look very unlikely.
Genocide. My impression is that the world is trying very hard not to *know* what is happening to the Uyghurs, because no one is interested in making the Chinese stop.
Yeah, I heard about that. Millions in detention/ retraining camps. It sucks, it's also what people do. ~100 years ago we were still moving the natives off their land. Is the suffering of the Uyghurs worse than that from CV-19? (those are tough number to compare.) Imagine the virus was from the lab, and that with the notes/details some smart gal figures out how to put the breaks on mutations... (look don't ask me for details I'm no virologist.) And so we are able to eliminate this virus. What would that be worth? No matter, what and where this virus came from is an important piece of information. And if China is hoarding it, then it's a crime. Uyghurs are a crime too. The CV19 crime is easy for them to fix, but they lose a lot of face, maybe they need to start spinning some renegade researcher in the lab idea.
Well I don't know the truth, maybe a 90% chance it came from the lab. I can find a few links if you are really interested. One was on some betting market Scott posted about. I was more obsessed with this last year... now I sorta take it for granted and also assume everyone will think I'm a wacko...
I feel compelled to add, that as soon as I heard about the Wuhan lab (~3/2020?) and that they were doing research on bats with this type of virus, it became my 'best bet' for the source. All information since then has only increased the odds for me. (IDing my priors.)
This is a serious question, I'm not trying to troll here.
Assumption: there's no conspiracy deliberatly placing Covid into the world. (if you don't agree with this, please feel free to make your case, but don't expect me to answer)
Then we're left with the origin stories:
a) It was an unfortunate chain of events, probably involving bats breeding the virus, a few other animals getting infected and then the virus finally spreading to the population of Wuhan (maybe involving bad hygiene handling on the Wuhan seafood market)
b) It was an unfortunate chain of events, probably involving bats breeding the virus, a labotary assistant getting infected and then the virus finally spreading to the population of Wuhan (maybe involving bad safety in a Wuhan biolab)
To be clear, I personally think a) more likely than b), but I don't really see the consequence of the distinction. _Unless_ of course we could all agree on nations accepting a general liability for all kinds of unintended consequences of their citizen's actions, even in case of really not being able to anticipate how bad things will get... which would still apply to liability on both a and b and hey, I can think of a few other countries that could be held for liability of previous bad actions in way more obvious cases *mumblemumbleglobalwarmingmumble*.
Punitive measures isn't the only reaction we can have to learning that the virus originated in a laboratory. The Wuhan lab in question is supposedly highly regulated and secure to these kinds of outbreaks. If covid originated there, that's a sign that those security measures are not enough.
I honestly don't know much about this stuff. But my understanding is that for a lab to work on these sort of projects generally requires some sort of international oversight, and following of standardized procedure. I would expect that learning the virus originated in a lab would lead the world to strengthen the safety measures required for this type of research.
Wuhan lab is under BSL4 security regime, which is tighter than labs in zombie virus movies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnNohYMkuAE). If it was a lab leak, they didn't follow the procedures correctly, on paper all the safety measures were in place.
That's still evidence. Again, I don't know the details, but if previously it was thought that the honor system for enforcing standardized rules was enough, and COVID-19 was leaked from a lab, then perhaps the international community should insist on more consistent global oversight for all such facilities. If it wasn't a lab leak, then perhaps our current methods are good enough.
Well if it came from GOF (gain of function) research in the lab. Then a detailing of the various GOF trials they did would be helpful for people trying to understand it.
The WHO policies announced in 2015 said that none of them should be named for their country of origin. But they didn't come up with another catchy naming scheme for the variants, so we are falling back on that, even though that usage is deprecated.
This seems like a classic sunk-cost fallacy; COVID-19 exists, it has spread worldwide, why should we care *now* where it came from?
Also, beware bait-and-switch between "COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan" and "COVID-19 was developed as a biological weapon in a lab in Wuhan". The credible theory is that the Wuhan lab was studying naturally occurring bat viruses and accidentally released one. So, there's a theory that a bunch of bats somewhere in rural China were circulating some proto-COVID until it mutated into COVID-19, and then one of those bats was sold in a wet market in Wuhan. And another theory that a bunch of bats somewhere in rural China were circulating some proto-COVID until one of them was scooped up by a scientist for study in a lab in Wuhan from which the -19 strain accidentally escaped into the streets. Why does it matter so much which of these theories is true?
At the most abstract level, absolutely I'm in favor of more facts being made available. But the cost of obtaining accurate factual information in this matter is likely to be high, so it doesn't seem like a particularly high priority
Sunk cost? I'm not following where the sunk cost is? Also no bait and switch. I think most likely was an accidental escape from GoF research. The whole bat-wet market story has been put to bed. The current alternative idea is frozen meat. Which is the idea being pushed by WHO.
Why is it important you ask. I see two obvious answers. (maybe there are more.)
1.) If from GoF, with serial passage and snippets of other DNA added, then what exactly the steps taken were, would be very useful for people studying the virus today. I've heard some different riffing on this, how certain aspects of CV-19 may relate to how the serial passage was done... this was mostly on Bret Weinstein's podcast.
2.) Knowing where and how the virus originated will help to stop things like this happening again.
I guess once I got to the point where a lab leak seemed like the most likely source, then a whole bunch of other ideas follow. The first being, "China, stop being an asshole about this." With apologies to China if my 90% guess is wrong.
No one can get China to stop being an asshole about anything. The end result of pushing on this is to raise tensions between China and the West. Maybe a good idea and maybe a bad one, but let’s not pretend that all we need is a little gentle pressure and China will become a model global citizen.
Well if 90% of the US thought the lab leak was probable, we could have grade school kids writing letters to the Chinese embassy pleading to release the data.... Visions of 'Mr. Smith goes to Washington'. :^) I'm a hopeless romantic. Sadly I think you are correct. Change in China will only come from within China. I do think they care about their image in the world. Which only makes fessing up less probable.
>Knowing where and how the virus originated will help to stop things like this happening again.
I highly doubt that. Whether or not COVID-19 *did* escape from a lab, we know that viruses *can* escape from labs. Lots of very smart people have put a whole lot of thought into minimizing that probability, for all the possible ways it could happen, not just the one way it maybe did. The odds that A: they missed something and B: Chinese data will tell them what it was, are small. And that's if the Chinese cough up the data, which they almost certainly won't.
Oh dear, we seem to be talking past each other. I have almost zero interest in 'how' it escaped from a lab, if it did escape. The data would not be about how it escaped, but all the stuff they had been doing with it for ~10 years.
I think we have underestimated the danger of these labs, and knowing if or if not it escaped from the lab is a very important data point. The underlying truth is important. I don't want the following to be in any way insulting. There is this 'trust science' narrative on the left, which might have been more true in the past, but science is human, and now tied to money, and you should trust science as much as a used car salesman. (with no insult intended to people selling cars. There are honorable people in both fields.)
Re: Caesar. If anyone's interested, I've read pretty much all of classical Latin/Greek literature in the original Latin or Greek. (This is less than it sounds: it's about three bookshelves worth of books.) And I've read a fair number of commentaries. And, now that I think of it, a lot of primary sources from the Dark Ages and the like. Happy to answer questions or at least give comments on specific events or works.
Massive shot in the dark here, but I could have sworn I found a lawyer joke in David Christenson's translation of a play by either Plautus or Terrence - I lost the reference before I could check it against the original text, and now I couldn't even tell you which play it was in despite rereading the entire collection. Does that sound familiar at all, or does my pointlessly esoteric quest continue?
The only issue is it's a target rich environment. There's lots of lawyer jokes in both Greek and Latin literature. Can you describe the general tenor of the joke?
I'm confident it was pre-Classical Latin which narrows it down quite a bit, but not so sure of the exact author. It was insulting someone or something (unrelated to lawyerdom, I think?) by appealing to fairly specific negative stereotypes of the profession that I was surprised would translate so well cross-culturally, hence the search for the original.
(I can specifically rule out the Menaechmi, whose relatable legal humor comes more at the expense of clients.)
Do you know the specific negative stereotype? I wouldn't say the Latin negative image of lawyers is all that different from ours. Perhaps they were considered a bit snobbier and more aristocratic than we consider lawyers today. But it's not that we don't consider lawyers snobby and aristocratic.
I'm going to start including classical lawyer facts. Because I can.
Everyone always quotes the Bible on how hard it is for rich people to get into heaven. But the Bible comes down much more heavily on lawyers: "Woe to you lawyers! For you load men with difficult burdens and do not do any bear any burdens yourself. Woe to you lawyers, the enemies of knowledge and truth. You will not enter heaven and you hinder those who will enter." (Luke 11:45-52)
It depends. If you look at graffiti or lists of jokes, it's likely a fair bit of middle to lower class sentiment seeped in. Additionally, even very elite people aren't necessarily snobs. And lastly, there are degrees here. Not every aristocrat is on top of the heap and not all of them were lawyers.
Sallust, for example, was a Sabine and a Plebeian. Were his family a bunch of peasants? No, they were equestrians and had Roman citizenship (a privilege for his background.) They also could afford his education. So at least some sort of noble. But nobody very important. He only got moderately far in life and that only because he threw his lot in with Caesar. (And yet was still unimportant enough Caesar doesn't mention him at events he was probably at.)
Likewise Gellius, who we get a lot of our reports on jokes from. Was he a peasant? Again no, he appears to have been a provincial nobleman with a bit of money. He briefly held some offices but had very little of a career and he was certainly no one important. When he makes fun of the puffed up grandees of Rome it's undoubtedly him mocking people above him socially, even if he wasn't that lowly.
At the risk of a very bad comparison, think of Jane Austen. Was she a noble? Yes, she was and that's why she had the education to write. Was she anyone important or near the top of society? Well, kind of. Above a lot of people. But nowhere near the pinnacle.
@Scott: if you change the URLs for the Google docs to end in /preview instead of /edit, they'll go to a read-only view which should be easier on people's machines/phones.
Is trying to trade options as an amateur incredibly stupid? Like, if I see GME go up to 300 again and I want to buy puts, should I just...not? Because, even if it does go down I'm still not going to know how to buy the right puts at the right strike over the right time frame to maximize profit? And if I do decide to go ahead and trade, what can I read that's short that might be of value?
If you are reasonably well versed in math read up on black-scholes. That should give you an idea of what people mean when they say “theta decay” or “gamma neutral.” Then read up on common option spreads to get a feel for how different options can work in concert.
With the above you at least won’t be shooting completely blind, but I don’t think there’s anything reasonable an amateur can do to understand trends and movements in the options market. The best you can hope for is understanding what the different gambles you can make mean.
For those who prefer to pick their own book review adventure, here is an easily clickable list of titles which is reshuffled each time the page is visited to help prevent alphabetical order bias....
So, remember the Capitol riot, and its death toll? 5, right? Well, no, not really. Police officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes (two strokes), not caused by a fire extinguisher or pepper spray, as Glenn Greenwald notes.
What does it mean to "die of cardiovascular disease" that are "natural causes" when you were injured in combat a few hours earlier? Is this just not some sort of technicality, like saying that the gunshot victim died of gangrene from an infected gunshot wound, rather than dying of gunshot?
But the determination of a natural cause of death means the medical examiner found that a medical condition alone caused his death — it was not brought on by an injury.
One thing I wonder about is how often this kind of thing happens at other big, stressful events - from mobs to mostly peaceful protests (for Amazon-approved causes or otherwise) to Black Friday shopping sprees to concerts.
If there’s no incentive for there to have been deaths in the days following such an event, would we ever know of any cops died of natural causes? If a tree falls, etc.
I'm reading the Trump prediction discussion, and I'm reminded of a prediction I got wrong-- I expected Trump's tariffs to be very bad for the economy. Now, they might have had a dampening effect and the economy would have been better or ill effects might take longer to show up, but there wasn't an obvious bad effect. Do tariffs matter less than I thought? Were they actually a good idea?
Tariffs cost us money in the short term. (We pay more, when I order electronic parts there is now a tariff cost of ~5-10%) Long term they should encourage manufacturing here in the US. And I would like to see a return of manufacturing, even if I pay more for my toaster. Not all T's ideas were bad, execution was not his strong suit. Tariffs are also an easy target for crony capitalism, rent seeking. US manufacturer gets a tariff on imports so he can charge more.... hmm to be honest if that means more jobs here in the US, how is it different from above? Has Biden gotten rid of Trumps tariffs?
Looks like not. I think this might end up being the most significant long term effect of the Trump years. The elite right convinced the elite left back in the late 80s / early 90s that free trade was a good idea. Both parties converged on this and the subject left the national political debate (Jerry Brown in the 92 Dem primaries being the last protectionist candidate, I think). But they never really convinced the rank and file of either side. Right now, there's still a lot of anti-protectionism on the Dem side because Trump was protectionist, but Trump is fading and if Biden sticks it out, Dems might revert as well. Then it's a live question again, or maybe one where the consensus just settles out the other way. Could US membership in the WTO be on the table in four or eight years? Maybe. That'd be a hell of a legacy for a Republican president.
I know that this is going to sound like a terrible idea to Dems. But a tariff is about the same as a tax. And a balanced tariff system is sorta the same as less business taxes. Both encourage business here, and both cost the consumer more in taxes. (Well no one is paying enough taxes these days.. but's that's a whole 'nother story... Where to tax the economy is an interesting question.)
Maybe, maybe not. Remember. This was your (their?) policy. This is a political question that we (Dems) lost back in the eighties. People only remember the controversies that are still going. Trade was a live political debate for a long time. Then it wasn't. Republicans juked us out of our old trade policy, and then claimed it 25 years later. We might not be as averse as all that to having it back.
OTOH, back when Bernie was running the first time, he was also raising trade as an issue. And during that primary, NPR had an economist on and asked about free trade vs protectionism. At some point the interviewer quoted some stat about 96% of economists claiming that free trade was better policy, and asking how it was that it was being raised in both primaries in 2016 when we now know better. The economist chuckled a little bit, and said something like, "You know, I've heard that stat a few times, and I really wish I could see their call list. Because I just don't see how even 4% of economists could come to such a wrongheaded conclusion. You see [expert explaining issue to audience]."
That was good enough for me. Since W, being the party that listens to the experts has been a serious part of Democratic self-identity. If the professional economists all come out and yell at us, that will keep the liberal office workers in line. Mostly. So I don't know. I mean, I'm torn. I believe experts, but . . . I don't understand this one. I never really have. My hometown used to have a blue jean factory and now it doesn't. Maybe it would be better if jeans cost three times as much and we still had that factory. Maybe I'm a protectionist in my heart even though I know better.
Like I said, if Biden holds the line on this long enough for the policy to lose Trump's stink, I could really see Dems switching en masse. Free trade is anti-intuitive.
I've mostly voted democratic, I did a write in vote for prez. last year. I live in NY, so easy. Bill Clinton (who I voted for) sold out the working class Dems to big business. Scott's post 'A modest proposal' is mostly about the Reps taking over the working class as a constituency.
Tariffs are neither good nor bad. France puts a tariff on wine and cheese (I think) because they want to support locals and don't mind paying a bit more. I think that's fine. (If 95% of experts tell me something, I think preference falsification, not truth.) I think the idea of everyone going to college is silly. We need good manufacturing jobs here too. There are lots of ways to support that if we all agree it's important. (getting everyone to agree is the hard part these days.)
Oh, I need an edit. (If 95% of experts tell me something I think preference falsification, before truth.) (change the previous not to a before, not all things that 95% of experts agree on are false. :^)
“Tariffs are neither good nor bad. France puts a tariff on wine and cheese (I think) because they want to support locals and don't mind paying a bit more. I think that's fine. (If 95% of experts tell me something, I think preference falsification, not truth.) I think the idea of everyone going to college is silly. We need good manufacturing jobs here too.”
Scale matters here. Paying a little (or even a lot) extra for wine and cheese to help out a small percentage of the population working in bucolic vineyards or dairy farms is quite different from a tariff on manufactured goods intended to significantly boost the income of 20% of the working age population.
One is a quirky little policy and the other a massive restructuring of society with unknown consequences.
Why would it be good if the jeans factory were still around? If the factory workers had really wanted their factory jobs, they could have always accepted lower wages and underbid the imports (until they hit the minimum wage); in that case they would have lost exactly as much in dollar terms than consumers would have gained. They didn't do that because they found jobs in other sectors that paid more than they would have had to accept to compete with the imports, even if possibly less than they previously made in the factory. In other words, jeans factory workers lost less (if at all) than jeans buyers gained, at least in dollar terms.
Factory workers may be poorer than the average consumer and, due to the diminishing marginal utility of money, it's possible that they lost more in utility terms than consumers gained. And thus tariffs in sectors that employ especially many low-wage workers may in some cases be a net benefit in utility terms when considering only the citizens of a country. However, if we want to help poorer people at the expense of richer people, there are many ways to do that with less deadweight loss, such as handing out tax-funded subsidies to low-wage workers. (Also, these don't hurt foreign workers in a way tariffs do.)
Because people like jobs, and making things locally is good, and it's neat when you can take a class for a tour of how things are made?
Look, I get it. It's better for us to pay a Vietnamese person two bucks an hour and have ten dollar Walmart jeans, and then just give people money. I understand, more or less, and I vote that way, more or less.
I just . . . I only know it with my head. I don't really believe it in my guts, like most of the other political stuff I believe in.
Actually, you know what, while I have you here, why *is* that better? Why is it better that the people from my hometown have to compete with people from places where there are no labor standards and the standard of living is so much lower that an illegal poverty wage (in the US) is a good (or at least acceptable) deal?
Like. I understand on much better grounds why free trade with Europe or Canada or Japan are good ideas. Treat workers fairly and let everyone compete, because competition makes everybody richer (usually). Sure. I'm there.
But how does it help a factory worker in my country to compete with a low skill worker in a craphole where wages that are low enough that they can take pay my countryman can't live on? I don't actually get that one. I get that it helps me, because I can buy jeans for less. But aren't the factory workers - or anyone who does basically fungible labor - just getting screwed?
Hmm that all sounds right. But I think the equation (of how rich I am) should include a term that says I'm richer if my neighbor is richer, vs some poor person elsewhere... community, county, state, nation, world... some (not understood by me) sliding scale, of nearness, shop locally, save money.
No, tariffs aren't the same as more consumer taxes and less business taxes. If your country is better at producing certain things, and another country is better at producing other things, it's in the interest of both to do what they are better at, and swap their products. Tariffs reduce the incentive to do this, taxes don't. In addition, tariffs or taxes that only apply to certain products create an incentive to spend less on those products and more on others, leading to a suboptimal allocation of spending in a way evenly applied taxes don't.
Right! (thanks) taxes are better than tariffs in general. But if France wants a tariff on wine, (or Japan on rice or the US on pickup trucks) for whatever national reason, and they don't mind paying more... That seems fine by me.
Perhaps the tariffs simply weren't enough to be significant. The new tariffs amounted to something like 0.2% of the US GDP. Even in the worst case, it's unlikely that they would reduce the GDP by more than a few tens of a percent, and that's easily drowned out by year-to-year variation from other causes.
And it's likely that it takes more than a few years for the harm to take full effect: if some business relying on imported products becomes less profitable, but the capital is already invested, it's probably not worth shuttering it when tariffs are introduced, but future investment is reduced in that sector.
Well, my prediction on the Chauvin trial didn't pan out, I thought a hung jury or acquittal was significantly more likely than a conviction. The main factors I didn't give enough weight to were:
1. The police witnesses testifying for the prosecution. Everyone knows about the Blue Wall of Silence, and to see multiple cops breaking it and unambiguously saying the restraint did not conform with accepted standards was a big deal. This helped convince the jury to not give Chauvin the deference most police get. I expected the cops to at least hedge a bit.
2. The weak defense. I wasn't impressed with the defense witnesses. They didn't sound convincing at all, and they didn't present a strong scientific case that other factors may have caused Floyd's death. I expected better from Chauvin's legal team.
3. The pressure on the jury. The short deliberation time makes me think that the jury was convinced with little dissent. I have to wonder if one or two jurors had silent and reasonable doubts, but didn't want to speak up for whatever reason. I expected for there to be extended discussions and vigorous debate, but.that didn't happen.
They deliberated for 10 hours, and state laws require unanimous agreement on conviction or acquittal, so in cases like this the jury often breaks to ask the Judge questions or make inquiries. The jury did not do so in this case, and I've been told that 10 hours short for this kind of case in that particular case.
there have been 3 other trials in MN where officers were tried for on-duty deaths. The deliberations were 5 days, 11 hours, and 7 hours. So deliberations could have a long tail, but 10 hours does not seem to suggest the jury wasn't doing their job.
I wouldn't want to say they weren't doing their job, just that in the context of such a high profile trail with a lot of complicated charges the jury didn't deliberate for several days, as is possible and would be expected if there was some disagreement within the jury. Certainly it implies that there was likely no major dissent during deliberations. Not that there necessarily should be major dissent, mind.
I’m looking for reliable sources of information about high-functioning autism in girls and women. There’s a lot of information out there from diagnosed women, but I’m unsure how reliable they are. I’m also curious whether it is really important to have a named diagnosis for one’s peculiarities.
It doesn't say why this would explain the decrease in the ratio of the median wage to productivity. If the idea is correct, it could have slowed down productivity growth, but why would it slow down median wage growth more than productivity growth? One could speculate e.g. that innovation slowed down, and so productivity can only be increased through increased use of capital (so the gains go to capitalists) or through better organization (so gains go to managers), but the post doesn't really touch on it.
Also, how much drugs did people do before 1970? I'd imagine that if drug use had been widespread in general, or ubiquitous in a prestigious class such as scientists, there would have been more resistance to banning it, just like banning alcohol or tobacco is not being seriously considered due to their popularity.
I think it's relatively common to find other people's problems easier to spot than your own.
Not really straightforward answers for you, but two things I thought of:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1223437467375636481
http://mindingourway.com/obvious-advice/
This sounds similar to what Kahneman calls the inside view and the outside view.
Did you know that there is a mayoral campaign going on in the nation's largest city? I didn't, and I live there!
I've often heard that the more local the jurisdiction, the more power it has over your daily life. Which would make the low turnout in local elections a paradox.
Is it really true though? Federal elections are seeing high turnout lately, and I would be surprised if most people were getting it wrong and focusing their energy on distant federal elections while sitting out important local elections.
I'm not sure I would. It can be pretty hard to see the link between your actions and distant political decisions months after you made a choice, while Federal level politics has become an important way for people to express their culture and identity, so they get a much more immediate payoff for focussing on it.
Most internet expression is optimizing(at least a bit) for attention. Most people I'm going to reach on the social internet are Americans, and nearly all of them know all about the US presidential races even if they don't live in the US. No matter how spicy my takes are on local elections, there is less of a market for that content, and thus less social incentive to even pay attention to it at all.
I wouldn't be surprised. And many local elections are deliberately scheduled to be on days when few are voting so that insiders (such as employees of that local government) will have disproportionate heft.
NYC's primaries are on June 22, 2021, a Tuesday. There's no excuse not to vote.
I don't think it's true that the more local the jurisdiction, the more power it has over your daily life. There are generally much more bounds on what the local government may do than on higher-level governments. All sorts of things from financial regulations to drug approval to trade treaties etc. etc. are decided on the national level. There are no local financial crises that affect the residents' lives as much as a nationwide financial crisis may. There is no risk that a local government executes a self-coup and establishes a dictatorship, or appoint supreme court judges to reinterpret the constitution to its bidding.
Moreover, local politics are generally less ideological. Many of the most ideological decisions: whether to allow abortions, how high to tax the rich, whether to incentivize affirmative action are decided largely on the national level. I guess this is because voters consider them important enough to push their parties to force their preference on the entire country. (Also, e.g. high local taxes would be easier to evade by moving than high national taxes.)
Whether at the local or the national level, it's often hard to predict which candidate is more competent; it's much easier to decide which candidate you agree with on ideological questions. If most ideological questions are decided at a higher level, then on the local level it's mostly competence what matters; since it's hard to decide, people don't have a strong motivation to vote.
There are local abortion laws, local taxes, and most government employees (relevant for affirmative action) work for local government.
Yes, but local abortion bans can't take effect a s long as they are held unconstitutional at the federal level; local taxes tend to be lower than taxes at higher administrative levels and have less redistributive function (I guess because of tax competition; e.g. NYC income tax is lower and less progressive than NY state income tax, which is in turn lower and less progressive than federal income tax); and it appears to me that it's primarily federal anti-discrimination laws and court decisions that determine to what extent employers (whether local governments or private companies) are incentivized to use affirmative action or, to the contrary, what forms of it are prohibited.
I think you are undervaluing the breadth of power a big city mayor has.
On the other hand, if a city passes bad laws, new taxes, whatever - it's a whole lot easier to move between cities in the US than to leave the US entirely. That seems to be a really strong inhibitor on local power, even when they literally have the power to do more.
This *is* the issue in the upcoming NYC mayoral election. A number of very rich people pay the lion’s share of city income taxes. Several of the mayoral candidates are outright hostile to these people, but they can easily leave. They can leave without even changing jobs—just moving to Hoboken or Bronxville is enough to put them out of reach of NYC’s taxes.
Municipal governments are heavily incentivized to minimize the level of services relative to tax revenue. This is generally achieved by zoning laws that keep poor people out of town by limiting dense residential construction. This affects the people who want to live in town, but can't, to a huge degree, while similarly affecting current residents by raising rent and housing prices. You could argue this is more central to the daily lives of more people in a given town (along with those who would like to live in that town but can't) than is abortion or ACA or foreign policy.
Zoning is a good point.
I don't think that it's true that more local elections have more power over your life. Just more power relative to your vote. I.e. your vote is several orders of magnitude more influential and the local government is not several orders of magnitude less influential on your life.
For instance there's not really any local ordnance that's would be anywhere near as influential on my life as the ACA or it's overturning.
Who votes?
http://www.nyccfb.info/PDF/issue_reports/WhoVotes.pdf
In the past six years, since moving to Texas, I've missed out in participating in three local elections, because I didn't know they were happening until a few weeks in advance, and then didn't know enough about candidates to bother going to wait in line. In California, I never missed an election, because I always got a brochure in the mail with information, and could always sit down and spend an hour on it and fill out a ballot and mail it in.
People don't vote out of rational self-interest. The rational self-interested move is almost certainly not to vote, since the amount of time it takes you to vote is a much higher cost than the expected payoff in terms of the probability it results in more preferred governance times the improvement preferred governance has on your life.
Instead, people vote because they want to make their society better, and perceive voting as a way to do that. When that motive is taken into account, it explains why people can be more motivated to vote in national elections. National elections may be more consequential for broader society, even if they have less of an impact on the voter in particular.
This also explains why people vote to enact policies that don't necessarily help them personally. If your goal is to improve society, you might vote for something which you think will help the average citizen, even if it involves raising your own taxes in order to help others.
It's rational to want to make your society better.
This does not make it rational to do things that have a negligible probability of making your society better.
Per Bryan Caplan voters are neither rationally self-interested nor altruistic. Rather, voting is GROUP interested: https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/e854/pc4.htm
My heart is with Morales, but it's over. Yang has it.
I don't live there but it might be interesting to read the case for Morales anyway. How would we pick mayors if we were doing it right?
Arrow’s Theorem and Anarchy Theory agree: no "right way" exists.
Yang has a lot of new ideas. It could be they are mostly bad, but he seems like the kind of guy who's willing to abandon something that's not working. See-what-sticks governance would be great if politicians were actually willing to terminate ineffective programs, but there's always the risk that they will develop a small group of vocal constituents.
At least Yang wouldn't put his wife in charge of a billion-dollar slush fund that does nothing. Google "Thrive NYC." de Blasio is the worst mayor in modern NY history.
It'd be kind of neat to see a write-up on basically
1. Some stuff the Mayor of NYC can definitely do
2. Some stuff he theoretically can do, but in practice can't because of local politics
3. What he simply can't do (I know that includes the Subway).
I mean, you can look up a formal description of duties, but that doesn't tell you much about whether those powers fall into category #1 or category #2.
+1 would love to read this
Great idea! One thing the NYC mayor can do is set up slush funds for his wife to funnel a billion dollars of taxpayer money.
1. Appoint and remove commissioners of city agencies - NYPD, FDNY, Education, Sanitation, Parks, DOT (mostly roads), Environmental Protection (which runs the water system and manages a vast network of reservoirs upstate). Appoint a majority of the Planning Commission (which enacts zoning ordinances) and the entirety of the Board of Standards and Appeals (which grants variances). Amend city regulations. Present the annual budget to the city council and propose local legislation, though the council has to approve of both.
2. Control the NYPD, which in practice answers to the police unions, not the commissioner. Other departments may operate similarly to various extents, they just aren't in the news as often. Civil service, gotta love it.
The zoning boards are somewhat constrained in that they have to let the community boards for affected neighborhoods hold hearings on most of their decisions. They don't have to listen to the CBs, but they usually do.
3. Increase taxes unilaterally. Ban large sodas from restaurants, much to Bloomberg's chagrin. As you mentioned, the subway is under the MTA, which is controlled by the governor (who appoints 6 of the 14 board members and can veto the others - 4 chosen by the mayor and 4 by suburban counties).
Any tax increase has to go through Albany, because localities can only impose taxes authorized by the state tax code. A city with more than one million residents can impose an income tax of up to 3.876%, and that's the tax NYC collects. (No other cities in the state are even halfway to a million. The only other cities that can impose income taxes are those with between 180,000 and 215,000 residents. This was meant for Yonkers, which has stayed consistently in that range for decades, but Rochester has shrunk enough that they qualify too. But they won't do it if they want to stay above 180,000.)
If the next mayor wants higher taxes or other modifications to state law, he'll need to go through Cuomo and the legislature. Bloomberg was fairly adept at getting what he wanted, but still couldn't push his soda tax through, while de Blasio seemingly gave up on doing anything at all a couple of months into his first term. Albany has changed dramatically in the last few years - the Senate is now more progressive than the Assembly, while the once-dictatorial Cuomo is on the ropes following multiple scandals and more willing to cut deals than he's ever been. On the other hand, the state has a lot of leverage too: mayoral control of the school system expires next year. It'd be a shame if the renewal got held up in committee and the dysfunctional old system came back. Wouldn't want that to happen, would we.
Thanks. I'd also add that mayors set a tone. They have not only the powers you listed, but influence. That's important.
In every way, de Blasio has been a disaster. Bill Thompson (for whom I voted twice) would have been far better.
Thank goodness! I don’t think we could survive much more BdB.
We survived?
But do your nation's largest city's mayoral election candidates include: Count Binface; a Brexiteer whose name is literally Peter Gammons*; Jeremy Corbyn's meteorologist brother; not one but two youtubers and a man known only as 'Drillminister'?
The Bookies are predicing that Sadiq Khan will keep London. In NYC, Yang'll fetch odds between 4/9 and 1/3 (representing a probability of 70-75%).
*'Gammon' being a political insult directed towards ruddy-faced right-wing populists
No, but we have Paperboy Prince, and Madam Cleopatra FitzGerald. (That's how she refers to herself.)
Disappointed but not surprised to find my submission in the runner up pile. C'est la vie, the three we got so far have been of immensely high quality and I can't gainsay nothing.
Still gonna vote for myself though, lol.
+1 on all points.
Blast - I submitted one, but it didn't make the list! But I'm not too broken up about this; there's no way I could have competed with the ones that have been featured so far.
I was going to vote for myself and found my conscience wouldn't let me - at least it wouldn't let me give myself a favourable review. Quite annoying!
But it's so good that I could've written it myself!
Or is that: so bad that I could've written it myself?
It froze up google docs on my phone. I’ll try on my work pc tomorrow
Hi All,
I'm sure this has been covered before, but it seems like something this community, and our host, would know quite a bit about.
The "opiod crisis"
Has anybody else noticed that nownere in the discussion of the "opiod crisis", nowhere and I mean nowhere, is one particular group of people ever mentioned? We are supposed to believe that evil pharma companies used their huge financial muscle and deceptive evil advertizing to force these pills on poor stupid trusting yokels.
Who is not involved here?
DOCTORS
The AMA seems to have done an incredible job of whitewashing the entire discussion so that no MD will ever be held accountable for overprescribing pills. I mean this is a Roger Goodell NFL level Jedi Mind Trick.
Has anybody else noticed this? Anybody pointed this out? Or is it all down the dissapeared memory hole, and Doctors are still supposed to be the heroic self-sacrificing demigods that the AMA pays Hollywood to portray them as?
Just asking.
"The AMA seems to have done an incredible job of whitewashing the entire discussion so that no MD will ever be held accountable for overprescribing pills. I mean this is a Roger Goodell NFL level Jedi Mind Trick."
I thought doctors were getting very reluctant to prescribe opiods for fear of losing their licenses. No?
The Atlantic has done a a few articles about this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/04/rock-doc-opioid-prescribe/618453/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/opioid-epidemic-west-virginia-doctor/586036/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/did-free-pens-cause-the-opioid-crisis/576394/
It's my understanding that in the early 2000s, the guidelines that doctors were supposed to follow had a strong emphasis on doing whatever was necessary to alleviate pain, while downplaying the risks of long-term opioid use. The research showing the dangers existed, but any doctor making what we now know to be correct prescribing decisions was seen as outside the mainstream at best, and a monster who didn't care about their patient's pain at worst.
I recall a whole lot of moral panic articles in the NYTimes in the early 2000s about how doctors were being way too stingy with pain medications.
Ditto, for sources other than the NYT.
It has indeed been covered before: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
The closest thing I have to an article about this is https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/16/against-against-pseudoaddiction/
I think it's fair to say that the drug companies did a good job making opioids look less addictive than they were. It would have been possible for a heroically brilliant doctor to sift through this and figure out the real story, but nobody expects heroic brilliance of doctors, and even expecting competence or the ability to check non-pharma sources is sometimes iffy. Doctors already have been so scared by this experience that they refuse to prescribe opioids even to patients who desperately need them, and I'm not sure scaring them further is really necessary.
I don't prescribe opioids myself and can't comment from a place of knowledge.
Scott,
Your post on pseudoacction was ecellent and well reasoned as always. What struck me overwhelmingly were the endless list of incompetent and arrogant MDs you described.
How is this possible? These seem like mistakes that would get one fired from a Jiffy Lube, or an Outback Steakhouse. Any auto mechanic who was so cavalier and arrogant about fixing cars would immediately get people killed and be ruined or prosecuted for his incompetence.
I guess the AMA is just the most successful Union out there, akin to police unions that cover up criminal behavior and negligence because protecting their members is the ONLY PRIORITY.
It is fortunate that opiods are astonishingly easy to get on the street now, dealers seem to be awash in them, still $$ but 1,000-10,000 pill quantities are out there begging for customers.
I suppose that the opioid-happy M.D. could say that what he was doing was accepted medical practice at the time.
This went back to an offhand remark in an otherwise unremarkable study that suggested that addiction following opioid prescription was less common (and more easily managed) in cases of chronic pain than previously suspected. (I can't find a reference to the actual study.)
Apparently Perdue Pharma seized on that remark.
Part of the problem is in how things are billed:
Doctors are substantially paid for doing things rather than fixing problems. In-general, the goal is that the things which are done should have a direct impact on fixing problems. But that isn't required for reimbursement.
As an example, back surgery (very generally) results in 1/3 of patients seeing improvements, 1/3 of patients staying the same, and 1/3 of patients getting worse. Yet back surgery is still performed.
Imagine that only the 1/3 of cases where improvements were seen were reimbursed! At the same time, roughly nobody would be willing to perform that kind of procedure under those conditions.
Medicine has to face that it's at-best all probabilistic. There are very few complex scenarios in which you can be certain that a specific patient is going to have a net positive outcome. Insisting on absolute guarantees (rather than probabilistic results) would effectively end medicine.
Thanks for all the thoughtful replies. I still get a subjective sense that the role of doctors has been massively redacted, along the lines of nobody in the NFL ever mentioning the word "concussion".
But I admit this is subjective, and we are supposed to gather here to be rational!
Unrelated, but thanks to Scott for linking to the piece on "MMAcevedo". I thought it was excellent and subtle. Unfortunately nobody I know reads -- I txt them a question about work and they send me a video of them talking to answer it -- so I've been unable to share it. I'll hit the comments section to see what was said there...
BRetty
Has it ever been established how much the epidemic was fuelled by good faith overprescription of legit patients vs. how much was crooked pill-mill doctors prescribing to people who obviously wanted to abuse drugs? I think the press tended to focus on the former because the victims are more sympathetic. Every article would have some version of "Joe Workingclass wrenched his back doing good working stuff and was prescribed Oxycontin. Six months later . . ." But I don't know if that was the usual case.
As an aside, the phenomenon of pill-mill doctors is still weird to me. Like, you have an M.D., there are ways for you to make six figure income without risking prison. The doc on Justified goes that route because Boyd Crowder threatens to kill his mother, but I'd be curious what the non-fictional stories are like.
My recollection is that "Dreamland" discussed doctors and what caused them to prescribe more and more painkillers. I reviewed the book here:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2019/03/13/dreamland/
Dreamland is one of the best books I've read this century, and thoroughly discusses the 4-6 separate events/trends that formed this perfect storm.
Doctors is one of them. As it happened, this crisis coincided with US doctors starting to consider pain an important condition to treat in itself, and worry less about addiction. It turned out to be an unfortunate overreaction...
Big Pharma is something approximating a monolithic, internally aligned entity (or a small batch thereof), whereas the group constituting "all doctors" is not. Except insofar as many of them might be part of the same union or something (no idea if this is even a thing), each doctor acts as an individual afaik.
Treating "doctors" as a single entity and blaming it for something just doesn't make sense. You assign blame to an entity that has monolithic intent or else blame itself has no useful meaning. Why? Because the point of blame is for aiming your intervention. What is your intervention supposed to be if "doctors" is the where the problem is?
"We are supposed to believe that evil pharma companies used their huge financial muscle and deceptive evil advertising to force these pills on poor stupid trusting yokels."
Also, we are supposed to believe the "poor stupid trusting yokels" are too poor, stupid, trusting, and yokel-ish to have any moral agency whatsoever.
At this point, I think most of the "yokel" community has seen firsthand what happens if you get in the habit of taking opioids beyond the level necessary to alleviate immediate physical pain. And I'm pretty sure that taking opioids *at* the level needed to alleviate immediate physical pain, doesn't result in one becoming a mindless drug-zombie. But it feels good, and so there's a tradeoff and a decision to be made. Possibly a rational decision under some circumstances. But it's not just the Careless Doctor and the Evil Drug Company making the decision.
Now that the opioid crisis is in the news, people are cautious about it. But before it was in the news, what reason would patients have to doubt their doctors?
A cousin / co-worker / college roommate addicted to them. Granted that first round of people were screwed and it took a while for it to become common knowledge that so-and-so was addicted to oxy but eventually people knew or should have known that something was going on even without the media.
Not everybody knows somebody with an opioid addiction. I don't! Or maybe I do, but they're hiding it well, which amounts to the same thing for the purpose of me figuring out that it's a problem.
If it was provable, I would bet money that you do know at least one, and that they are "high functioning" and you would never know. At least until their supply got cut off, probably by moralizing dogooders with good intentions.
Carl Hart's Drug Use for Grown-Ups argues that recreational drugs (including hard drugs) are harmless-to-beneficial for the vast majority of people who use them.
If you've looked into it, what do you think?
If you don’t know anyone all these years later, but there were surely people that had surgeries over that time, what does that say about your local risk?
I do not believe that the opioid crisis was caused by people trusting their doctors. Certainly there are *some* cases where a careless doctor prescribed far more vicodin or whatever than was necessary for pain management and said "take exactly this much even if the pain has gone away", but I'm pretty sure that's a rounding error in the scope of this crisis. Opioids even semi-competently prescribed for actual pain management, and used as prescribed, pose a low addiction risk. Most of the problem is people noticing that they make you feel good whether they were in pain or not, and ignoring the doctor who said "no you shouldn't do that".
Which, in some cases, may have been rational given the paucity of other options for ever feeling good about any part of their life. But it isn't a Careless Doctor / Evil Drug Company issue.
Anyone who hasn't worked for a few months at a heavy labor job that left them in pain every night, to go back and do it again the next morning, the classic "16 tons and what do you get" style job, doesn't get claim to have an informed opinion about the flyover bluecollar "opiod crisis".
The opiod crisis happened because a lot of people got a lot of jobs like that and suffered workplace overload or prompt damage injuries that needed painkillers, and then when the thing they needed to keep working started getting regulated out of their reach, they panicked and started searching for anyone anything anywhere that would keep them out of agony's grasp.
My proposed solution to the "opiod crisis"? Give them the fucking drugs. And legalize THC, it works better for chronic pain.
Well, maybe you mean the AMA has done well protecting doctors in the court of public opinion, but in actual federal courts, they haven't gotten off entirely scot free. The FBI put together a task force specifically to go after doctors and other medical professionals who were running pill mills:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/arpo-strike-force-opioid-takedown-041719
"one particular group of people ever mentioned?"
Yes. The national security apparatus, which just happened to get up to its elbows in a dirty war involving heavy use of corrupt local proxies in the global center of illegal opiate production shortly before the opioid crisis kicked off.
But I'm sure that was just a coincidence and it's all because of the doctors and big pharma. Please also pay no attention to where that apparatus was focused when the last big drug epidemic happened, there is definitely no pattern here.
I'm baffled at this. My understanding of the issue is that doctors have been blamed for opioid epidemic, not ignored, and that the problems with prescription opioids and the street fentanyl crisis are linked in the public mind. I don't think anyone has proved a causal relationship between the two. Prescription opioids are necessary for some pain management. The scandals prove that the system is capable of self-correction. The street fentanyl epidemic is a political fail. Of course pols are happy to blame everything on doctors.
What's the status of the 50-50 debate in prediction calibration? Is there a community consensus at this point? I have a resolution in mind, but am curious about what's been arrived at.
I think the consensus is that 50-50 predictions are sensible, testing your calibration on them is just kind of meaningless because the result is entirely determined by whether you use a prediction or the negation of that prediction when you score it.
Flip a coin before deciding to write the prediction or its negation?
That guarantees that you get perfect calibration (over a large enough number of predictions).
For each prediction either it is true or the negation is true. If you flip a coin before you choose which one to write down you guarantee that you have a 50-50 chance of being right.
I think the fact that this case is degenerate does not suggest something is weird about 50-50 predictions, but rather that something is wrong with this definition of "calibration".
Indeed for any x between 0 and 100, we can get "perfect calibration" on x% predictions just by assigning x% to x events that are actually ~100% to happen, and (100-x) events that are ~0% to happen.
(Ignoring practical difficulties of actually administering this..) A different measure of how well calibrated a prediction is, could be how much money others make or lose betting against you. If Scott's 50-50 predictions were instead presented as a fairly tight two sided market such as 47 bid 53 offer, and ASX readers on average lose money betting against Scott's market, then I would say Scott's market is well calibrated.
If you're doing a subclass of prediction then you can test this by having two consistent sides. For instance, if you're predicting election results, you can say did they go more often to the left-wing or the right-wing. But that doesn't generalise to other types of prediction
Who is "the community"? Several people seem to have moved on from calibration, towards other scoring methods, where this isn't an issue.
Great - this is what I want to know. Can you link or expand?
I thought that Zvi and some others had listed their scores on latest rounds of prediction instead of calibration, but I can't find it off the top of my head, so I'll instead give you some of my academic context on this.
The general idea of a scoring rule is described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule
A scoring rule measures the inaccuracy of a set of predictions. The two most common scoring rules are the one that says the inaccuracy of a probability is the square of the difference between the probability and the truth value (so that probability 1/2 gives a penalty of 0.25 either way, while probability .9 gives a penalty of .81 if false and .01 if true) or the one that says the inaccuracy of a probability is the negative logarithm (to whatever base you want - that's just a scalar factor, but I'll use base 2 for ease of calculation) of the difference between the probability and the opposite of the truth value (so that probability 1/2 gives a penalty of 1 either way, while probability .75 gives a penalty of 2 if false and .415 if true).
The quadratic scoring rule emphasizes getting the right side of various middling probabilities, while the logarithmic one emphasizes not being extreme in the wrong direction.
Some philosophical/statistical papers on the contrast between calibration and scoring are here:
https://philpapers.org/rec/SEICCA
https://philpapers.org/rec/HOLISO-3
https://philpapers.org/rec/LAMCPA-2
and a paper describing ways to go about figuring out a role for a particular scoring rule to play is here: https://philpapers.org/rec/LEVAPG
If you don't have institutional credentials to get access to academic papers, there is a Facebook community called "The Philosophical Underclass" that can help get access, or you could e-mail me (my address can be found via google) and I can send you things, for research purposes only of course.
Ok, cool. The latter (negative log of the prior probability of the eventual outcome) is roughly what I had in mind, the difference accounted for by the fact that the specification you give penalizes refinement of the probability space even when conserving predictions.
I'm also interested in arguing that the quality of a prediction should be assessed by computing its entropy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting_density_of_discrete_points
Thanks.
I wonder if one could think of a scoring system as a game design problem in which the design maximises the score of players who not only guess correctly, but assess a high value to the probability of their correct guesses. So it should incentivise saying 99% when that is how certain you are. Let's say every guess results in an implicit bet on the outcome, you win if you are right and lose if you are wrong.
Now if you offer odds based on the probabilities you declare, then if you say 50%, you win or lose $X depending on how it comes out. If you declare 90%, you win $Y or lose $9Y. Obviously this is not only risky, but non-profitable. So we sweeten the deal by tilting the odds in your direction. Say we tilt them by 10%. You win $1.1X or lose X; you win $1.1Y or lose $9Y. Still doesn't seem good enough. You have to be able to bet more on the 90% chance. Maybe a square root function:
50:50 -> bet is $1, $1.1 if you win, -$1 if you lose
90:10 -> bet is $3, $3.3 if you win, -$27 if you lose
99:1 -> bet is $10, $11 if you win, -$990 if you lose
The biggest issue is that making a wrong bet with high certainty would wreck your score, but maybe that's a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, that's the nucleus of an idea, maybe somebody can improve on it.
Yes, this is exactly the idea of the scoring rule system - you say how the amount someone loses if the claim turns out to be true or false depends on the probability that they report. A "proper" scoring rule (like the square of your difference from the truth, or the negative logarithm of your difference from the opposite of the truth) is one where the expected value of reporting your actual probability is higher than the expected value of reporting any other probability. The different proper scoring rules will have different properties if someone has non-linear risk aversion or something.
I understand that - I was just wondering what it would look like if we focused on making a single-player betting game out of it.
Scott, do you think you could upload those review docs in PDF form? I'm trying to download them in PDF form from Docs, but it's lagging like hell.
I've done this and added the links to the end of the post.
Thanks!
Tyler Cower, Derek Lowe, and others have claimed that (our evidence supports that) vaccination offers superior protection than natural infection. But I can't find any actual evidence for this: Tyler doesn't give any, and Derek cites this article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-01180-x), which doesn’t provide support for that claim at all. It's just a letter to the editor, the conclusion of which is “Overall, we are optimistic, given the number of platforms being investigated and the huge ongoing efforts, that a vaccine (or vaccines) against COVID-19 with immune responses and protection superior to that achieved through natural infection is an achievable goal.”
In fact, my impression was that the evidence pointed in the other direction: there are *very* few confirmed cases of reinfection after natural infection, and few but still many more confirmed cases of infection after vaccination. It's hard to confirm reinfections after natural infection, but even going to suspected cases doesn't get us to a very big number (using even that number, the percentage of people who’ve been reinfected is minuscule): https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/08/covid-19-reinfection-tracker/
This study looked at the protection from natural infection and it looks at least as good as that from vaccination “Incidence rate of reinfection versus month of follow-up did not show any evidence of waning of immunity for over seven months of follow-up...Efficacy of natural infection against reinfection was estimated at 95.2% (95% CI: 94.1-96.0%)”: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.15.21249731v2
Anyhow, the level of protection that comes from natural infection is a pretty important question, and I don't like disagreeing with Cowen and Lowe. Does anyone know of evidence that supports their position?
The lack of evidence either way is surprising given the number of previously infected people still getting vaccines. Another failing of humanities messaging response to covid. Number? 6? 7? Major failings imo.
Can any vaccines (other than a live-attenuated virus) cause T-cell immunity like a real infection can?
OTOH, I think than mRNA vaccines can create a lot more antigens than a real infection does or something. It's one of the reasons why they were researching the technology pre-covid.
You might like to look into the SIREN study, which looked at reinfections in UK hospital staff: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.13.21249642v1
There's a bit of complexity in terms of exactly how much evidence you need to be convinced a reinfection was real, but the headline number from the study authors is ~85% protection from reinfection over the first five months.
I'm pretty sure there are more known cases of reinfection than infection after vaccination - the problem is that if you want to be absolutely 100% sure someone was reinfected rather than having a resurgence of dormant virus, then you need to genetically sequence viral samples from both infections and show that they're different. That often doesn't happen, especially if the first infection was in the first wave when most people weren't being tested.
Great, thanks everyone. My interpretation of the SIREN study is that natural infection offers at least roughly the same level of protection as vaccination. Does that seem right? (They say 83% lower is the minimum, and in the wild mRNA vaccine efficacy is estimated to be in the 80s I believe.) Similarly, the Lancet article estimates an 80.5% reduction via natural infection. So it seems like natural infection doesn't offer vastly superior protection at least. But does anyone have a theory for why the reinfection tracker numbers are so low? Sure, it's hard to confirm reinfection. But even their estimated reinfection numbers are minuscule (34K), relative to the total number of people who've had covid.
Yes, good to remember! The measured effectives of the vaccines (at least in this study, not sure how representative it is) in the wild is lower for older people, but significantly better than 45%!: https://www.arc-gm.nihr.ac.uk/media/Resources/ARC/Health%20Economics/Covid-19/Effects%20of%20BNT162b2%20mRNA%20vaccine%20on%20Covid-19%20infection%20and%20hospitalisation%20among%20older%20people%20in%20England.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2B3H2tDTzgTGFggwjKMZ6uTv-A7f4ZH1-6ChR5f01oo0Kpshbw4F0fsIQ
someone made a lesswrong post diving into this question a few days ago: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/63BsSJm65Ke3cpffG/the-case-for-extreme-vaccine-effectiveness
This was really useful (even if pretty speculative at points), thanks!
I'd suggest that you take the median of the ratings you have for each book, rather than the average. Medians are more robust against partisanship and extreme opinions (not that I expect too much partisanship about these book reviews, but you never know...).
In some ways, yes - in other ways, no. To take the obvious example, if 50% + 1 rate a given book 10 and the rest rate it 1 (ultimate partisanship), the median is much worse than the mean (or at least, I'd much prefer that a book with 50% + 1 rating it 9 and the rest 10 get to the final).
It *is* robust against outlier opinions, but do we *want* to be robust against those?
Geometric mean is another approach.
Takes into account the extreme values in a way that the median does not, but isn't as impacted by them as the arithmetic mean.
Software benchmarking suites often use geometric mean for this reason when summarizing/aggregating sub-tests
GM isn't impacted less by extremes. GM compared to AM is a penalty for variance. That makes low outliers matter more and high outliers matter less (in the extreme case where zero scores are allowed, GM is literally a liberum veto). It's useful for exponential processes, and for cases where a distribution is long-tailed in only one direction.
I don't think this is a good use-case for GM.
The reason for GM over AM in benchmarking is to make it agnostic to the units of each sub-benchmark. For example, if you change a sub-benchmark from minutes to seconds, the scores in that sub-benchmark will multiply by 60. That sub-benchmark will now have an outsized impact in the AM. But under GM, total score is multiplied by a constant factor of 60^(1/N), and relative rankings are preserved.
As the sibling commenter pointed out, GM is actually less robust to outliers than AM, as a single value of 0 makes GM=0.
The ratings can only go from 1 to 5. You can't have a very extreme opinion, even listing 1 or 5 on everything won't change the average much if there are sufficient votes.
I'd propose taking a weighted average where strong positive votes are give a much heavier weight than other votes. Maybe an exponential-looking curve. I think this maximizes utility to the audience. Reason being, strong positive votes are likely to provide value to some constituency of the readership, while strong negative votes may be wrong or offensive but are unlikely to cause actual harm, and even in the most realistically bad circumstances readers are free to stop reading them at any point.
What about taking the root-mean-square or however quadratic voting works?
https://www.radicalxchange.org/concepts/quadratic-voting/
What are you doing to prepare for the inevitable US-China war over Taiwan in the next decade? This is just kind of an open-ended question, whether you're preparing financially, career-wise, or more traditional 'prepping'. Regardless of whether an actual apocalyptic nuclear scenario happens- even a sub-nuclear war between the world's two largest economies would seem to harbor a global second Great Depression. To my understanding, even if the US did not react at all to an invasion of Taiwan (unlikely), there would be a run on the dollar & Treasuries- all that financial dominance is heavily intertwined with military dominance. The US being displaced as the world's economic & military superpower would have some pretty tremendous consequences for everyone, regardless of where you live or what you do.
Also, with the US having 30k+ troops in South Korea, it would be tough for the war not to escalate. No reason for China to not strike them if they lose a few ships or a few cities get bombed! Even worse, I would assume that Russia would use the chaos to engage in mischief in Eastern Europe, North Korea could get frisky with South Korea, and it's not tough to see how India & Pakistan could somehow get dragged into a shooting war from there.
If you don't think war will happen in the next decade- why, exactly? Conquering Taiwan appears to be China's number one priority, they view the US as a declining power, and they have little to no actual warfighting experience so it's easy for them to be overconfident. History is littered with nations who thought 'oh we can fight a short little war over here', and that it metastasizes into something much larger. The USSR back in the day at least knew exactly what extended war was like and were not eager to start WW3. In general as a Westerner I am fairly pessimistic about what the next few decades will bring
To answer my own question- I live & own property in a rural state reasonably far away from being a cruise missile target, I have a number of guns, I save a large chunk of my income and my business is geared towards generating cashflow for saving now- I'm not reinvesting to grow the business any more than I have to. And I own Bitcoin. What else can I really do? But US-China tensions in the 2020s are the difference between me forgoing cash now to grow my business, versus just hoarding everything
If you really believe an all out war between US and China is likely, I'm pretty sure the right kind of saving is not "bitcoin and fancy financial investment" but rather good old "gold under your mattress".
Anyway I don't expect a US-China war over Taiwan as I expect the US to do a lot of stern talking in the weeks before Chinese invasion, take a couple of not-too-threatening sanctions in the aftermath and get back to business as usual (with slightly more humiliation) in the following months to years.
(Also the Covid crisis and the difference in the response between China and the US makes me think the overconfident country is not China...)
If you're buying precious metals as SHTF prep, I would suggest silver. The lower price per ounce means you can buy more impressiveness per dollar. ("That looks pretty valuable. Sure, I'll fill you car's gas tank.")
That's a good point but to be really precise you have to factor in that gold is also much more impressive per unit of volume than silver. There should be some optimal gold-to-silver ratio that gives the most impressiveness per dollars (but I fear impressiveness is more in the eye of the buyer here).
The sort of war that results in US cities being targeted by Chinese nuclear missiles, is the sort of war that results in the leadership of the CCP becoming radioactive grease stains. It baffles me that you think that the CCP will "inevitably" pursue a strategy with this inevitable result. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is less likely than you think, and if it happens will happen very differently than you think.
How do guns and bitcoin help, or even cash savings? Unless you're keeping the cash in Euros.
I don't expect a US-China war in the next decade, because I believe both sides understand that it would be a terrible idea. And, as for China's overconfidence, I bet they know exactly how big our navy is, and "in decline" or not it's a lot bigger than theirs.
China literally has more ships in their navy than the US does, however one wants to define naval size. They're also talking about invading a country 90 miles off their coast, while the US would have to project force thousands of miles away from their mainland. Plus China has the area stocked with anti-carrier missiles that can launch from land, specifically to deny the US entry.
In general I would not say, historically, that most decisions to start wars have come from a particularly rational place
China has two aircraft carriers. We have eleven, each of which carries more than both Chinese vessels put together.
If they do invade Taiwan, it won't be because they think they can beat us. It'll be because they think we'll stay out of it.
Which we'll do, considering how we acted for Georgia, Crimea and Hong-Kong.
Right. War with China means that the 60 inch tv quadruples in price. We aren't doing that for Taiwan.
> I don't expect a US-China war in the next decade, because I believe both sides understand that it would be a terrible idea.
This is probably true.
> And, as for China's overconfidence, I bet they know exactly how big our navy is, and "in decline" or not it's a lot bigger than theirs.
This is pretty naive, or at least poorly argued. China won't be using their carriers to fight the US's. China's carriers are also not particularly relevant for their invasion of Taiwan. I've heard people express the opinion the carriers will be to WWIII what the battleship was to WWII. The technology for fighting wars has evolved, and it remains to be seen if the aircraft carrier can keep up.
(Hasn't stopped the US from continue to buy them though; they're still pretty great at getting bombs onto middle east countries.)
If it's just China vs. Taiwan, then China's navy is much bigger and stronger than it needs to be. But if the US enters the war, China has a big problem: they need to get their troops across the sea while the world's strongest navy is trying to stop them.
Maybe someday there will be a new type of ship that renders carriers obsolete, but not in the next ten years. China is currently building a new big ship, and it's another carrier.
IDK why you think it'll be a "ship" that renders carriers obsolete. Or at least obsolete for superpower combat.
I also don't know how you think a carrier can stop amphibs from making the 90-mile journey to Taiwan.
I apologize for not being specific about anything...
Carriers are really important for blue-water combat, that is outside the effective range of land-based air (the word "effective" is relevant here; combat aircraft need things like loiter time, and in-air refuelling means that most aircraft have a nominally infinite range).
But land-based air from the Chinese mainland could easily cover Taiwan, protect amphibs crossing to Taiwan and threaten any US Navy carrier that comes even close to Taiwan. And that's before the ballistic missile argument which I'm much less convinced by.
Because land-based air has advantages over carrier-based air (longer runways mean more capable planes, and it's much harder to destroy a runway than to sink a carrier), there's a modern version of "A Ship's a Fool to Fight a Fort" - carriers really struggle to win a war of attrition against land-based air in range of the shore; their best move is to stand off and force the enemy fleet to come out of the land-based aircover. But if the target (Taiwan) is inside land-based air range, then there isn't much the carriers (ie the USN) can do about that. You need to have a land-based air that can contest the airspace in the Taiwan Strait.
I think you're right that land based air and missiles will be decisive, but I'm not sure that China could "easily" cover Taiwan. Taiwan is numerically outmatched by China's land forces, but it does have a large air force and appears to have a large stockpile of missiles. Taiwan has in excess of 450 fighter jets, and while Taiwan's air bases may make good missile targets it's a lot easier to hide missiles than fighters and Taiwanese anti-ship missiles can take out Chinese boats a lot easier than Chinese missiles can take out Taiwanese land fortifications. They've also been investing heavily in anti-ship sea mines, and there are only two landing sites that would work for a Chinese invasion and they've both been heavily fortified. I'm not saying China couldn't do it, but if Taiwan doesn't surrender immediately it's going to be an expensive and bloody invasion.
"easily" in range terms. Obviously, Taiwan's (also land-based) air force would have something to say about it.
@Richard, I think you are overstating the advantages of land-based aviation in this context. In particular, the F-18E/F/G and F-35C are as capable as fifth- and sixth-generation strike aircraft get, and a CVN's catapults can launch them with full fuel+ordnance. USN carriers and USAF airbases generate roughly equivalent sortie rates (1.5-2 per day) in high-intensity conflicts and realistic exercises, and the aircraft carrier can reposition itself at need while the airbase will be stuck in a fixed, probably suboptimal, and globally known location.
Long term, land-based aviation has the advantage of being able to resupply by train or truck rather than AOE, and more rapidly recover from a mission kill. But an amphibious assault will be over before that matters.
And, the attacker needs to get more than "advantages" from his land-based aviation. Gators are big, slow, fragile, and highly constrained once they start landing troops. The attacker needs supremacy, not just superiority, over a threat that will include not just 1-2 CVBGs but the Taiwanese Air Force, the Taiwanese navy, US land-based aircraft out of Guam and Okinawa, a few hundred cruise missiles, and probably 1-2 SSNs operating in the Taiwan strait. And the attacker needs to maintain supremacy 24/7 throughout the operation, while the defenders get to choose the hour of their full-court press.
It's certainly true that the advantage of being land-based rather than carrier-based isn't overwhelming on its own (and there are land bases on Taiwan itself, of course).
But rather that China does not need their own carriers for combat in the Taiwan strait, because they have land bases, and the land bases are generally better than carriers, not worse.
Indeed, China building their own carriers is a sign that they want to project power beyond the combat range of their land-based air, not that they intend to challenge in the Taiwan strait (where Chinese carriers would be staggeringly pointless).
China doesn't need to invade Taiwan. They are perfectly okay with the status quo, and they can seize power through economic means by tying the Taiwanese economy closer to Beijing. It's much easier for them to turn Taiwan into a semi-independent client state rather than risk everything on a disruptive military invasion that will cause billions of dollars in economic damage even if they win.
I agree. I think the main reason we haven't seen any major wars of territorial expansion in the last 50ish years is that it's just too expensive in blood and treasure for two little benefit. What's the gain in taking Taiwan? Prestige, mostly: Taiwan's industries would likely be damaged or destroyed by an invasion, and China is perfectly capable of building up it's own industries. I suppose the island does have strategic value for military purposes.
It could happen, but "inevitable" seems wildly overconfident. China talks tough on Taiwan but they haven't taken any decisive action in the last 70 years, so why are you absolutely certain they will in the next 10?
I wouldn't go with 100%, but the Hong Kong example has made a Taiwanese declaration of independence more likely and the official PRC policy is still "if independence declaration then invasion". It seems more likely than usual that things there could go hot.
Because in the last 30 years they have transitioned from an impoverished third world country to one of the top world powers ?
I'm wondering if the US would freeze China's trillions in financial assets, sort of like happened with Iran. On the bright side, I guess the US wouldn't have to pay them back anytime soon?
It seems like if China were planning this, they'd want to get their money out, somehow? Or would they write it off?
I've thought for a while that this is the one of the US' best weapons- nationalizing all Chinese property or financial instruments held in the US, including Treasuries. I'm not sure it's great for Treasuries as a supposedly risk-free investment going forward, but I think in a hot war with thousands of American casualties, that's the kind of thing that happens
Not really sure why it'd affect trust in those (beyond the whole "the US will probably get a few major cities burnt by Chinese nukes" thing). The Trading with the Enemy Act is a known quantity and has been used before (the US seized all German-owned and Japanese-owned assets during WWII); "not useful in case my country commits suicide" is already baked into the price.
I mean, there's not that much *to* do to prepare as a private citizen. You can avoid living in a city big enough to be worth a nuke, and you can make sure you have skills that would be useful post-war (which is really most of them), but investments are all susceptible to devaluation or seizure in some form or another.
> Conquering Taiwan appears to be China's number one priority
This is a pretty bold claim backed up by nothing I've seen.
There's certainly some chance that a war occurs, but asserting it as a certainty is ridiculous.
And if you're serious about this, why not just leave the US? Canada or Europe are likely to be much safer.
I have half of my liquid investments in China, so I am betting that China will not do anything too stupid. Could you explain why you think the US would react so much more strongly to an invasion of Taiwan than they have to any of Russia's military adventures?
Primarily, the fact that the USA has declared that it would defend Taiwan in the event of invasion. If the USA chickened out on that, the system of alliances that gives the West unrivalled diplomatic power would crumble to dust.
I'm not aware of any current such declaration. Could you enlighten me?
Six Assurances + Bush II in (I think) 2001. There isn't a treaty obligation - I chose my words carefully - but in practice so much of the West is built on soft power anyway that it'd still be a massive blow to NATO.
I don't see any such declaration in the Six Assurances.
Taiwan is a rich, technologically advanced, liberal democracy. It's hard to think of anything outside of the Americas, Western Europe, or Japan, that would be more likely to be defended by the United States.
I mean, we'd be sympathetic, but really. Imagine you're in the White House and you get that call from the Pentagon. China's done it. They're going in. The Joint Chiefs are ready and recommend Plan 3, variant A. They think they can stop the Chinese, and think that they can win the subsequent war, if necessary.
Do you say go? What are your incentives? Wars in faraway places about which we know nothing have become a vote loser. If you commit the country to a land war in Asia, you're screwed, and so is your party at the midterms.
But . . . talk tough. A few sanctions (but nothing to stop the flow of cheap goods), a few speeches, and wait for the news cycle to move on. You'll be good, might even get a bump in the polls for resisting military adventurism.
I don't see it. I might be excessively cynical, but I just don't see it.
Vietnam and Iraq aren't exactly the same as a rival great power that both sides of politics utterly loathe (the progressives because of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and welding people into their houses, the conservatives because Red and/or Yellow Peril, *everyone* because of wolf warriors, brazen cyberwarfare, and covering up COVID early on).
I think the spectre of Chamberlain would be a bigger vote-loser than a hot war against a scary opponent with national pride at stake (shit, Margaret Thatcher got out of polling hell with the Falklands War, not to mention how united everyone was during WWII).
I think it's pretty easy to think of such countries. Besides all NATO countries outside Western Europe, I would imagine that, for instance, Israel, Australia and South Korea would be higher up the list. The US even has a military base in tiny Singapore, but nothing in Taiwan.
From a force strength perspective, sometime in the range of 2025-2027 is probably when things are going to happen, if they do. The US has been getting older systems to work for a few more years for some time, with the expectation that a lot of new things come online in the early-mid 2030's. Replacements aren't really being procured, and R&D/production funding is high right now. So in the mid-to-late 2020's, the US will have relatively fewer systems ready to go.
Now, this is an important move; the previous 20 years have been murder on US force structure, and this major rebuilding is critical if the US wants to be able to project power past the late 2030's, but it means that China will be relatively strong at exactly the point when the US will be the weakest it will be for at least two decades. That's not a happy place to be.
I suspect that if anything happens anywhere in the world, it will happen then.
China knows that the US isn't actually willing to start a nuclear war over Taiwan. It would be a geopolitical disaster for the US if we do nothing but I'm not convinced it would be a financial one.
The United States isn't going to *start* a *nuclear* war over Taiwan. So what? The United States is still likely to *enter* a *conventional* war over Taiwan. If China starts that war in the near future, a highly probable outcome is that the United States Navy (in concert with the Taiwanese) sinks enough Chinese amphibious shipping that the Chinese invasion of Taiwan fails. Without the United States firing a single nuclear weapon, unless the Chinese do so first.
Is *China* going to start a nuclear war over Taiwan? Is China so certain that the United States will be so afraid of China starting a nuclear war over Taiwan, that they are confident the United States will not intervene in a conventional war?
I remember reading somewhere that an invasion of Taiwan is only feasible for a few weeks each year due to the local weather. Can anyone confirm or deny this? Which weeks are they? Seems like it wouldn't be hard to go on vacation to New Zealand every year around this time.
According to the article linked below, an amphibious invasion would most likely occur in April or October, as those are the months that tend to have good wind/wave conditions and low fog. Invasions in other months are possible, but risky.
(Jump to "Treacherous Conditions in the Taiwan Strait")
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/25/taiwan-can-win-a-war-with-china/
Thank you!
I wonder if the CIA is looking into cloud seeding / other covert ops to keep conditions treacherous all year round
If the CIA could make cloud seeding work reliably then I think there are a lot more profitable uses it could be put to then sitting on it until Taiwan invades. In any case, I think the wind patterns are a bigger issue for wave height, but I'm certainly no expert. One thing the CIA is sure to notice is the buildup of forces for invasion that would precede an April or October invasion, so at least we'd have advance warning.
SpaceX actually got the sole source human landing system contract for NASA's Project Artemis! Maybe that will get Congress to push for some more funding for NASA, so the most politically connected proposal (the "National Team" of Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin) will get the Option B. In any case, good for SpaceX.
On a downer note, it seems like part of the UK's major soccer teams effectively immunized themselves from Promotion and Relegation. Good for their owners' profits, not so much for the game itself. They'd probably love to have a fully "closed" league where joining requires paying a major upfront payment that the existing owners get to pocket, like with US major sports leagues (there was even an accusation a few years back that MLS was basically a ponzi scheme of getting new teams to use their upfront payments to pay off the pre-existing investors/owners).
What does "immunized themselves from Promotion and Relegation" mean?
Someone else can probably explain it better but as I understand it in their system teams from the equivalent of the minor leagues have the opportunity to get promoted into the "major league" at the expense of the currently underperforming higher teams.
Promotion and relegation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promotion_and_relegation
But I think this is what is being referenced: (paywall alert, sorry) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/18/sports/soccer/super-league-united-liverpool-juventus-madrid.html
And it seems like it's more of a threat to a *different* really cool feature of European soccer which has equivalent in American sports, the Champions League: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Champions_League
EDIT: *has _no_ equivalent in American sports
What about the CONCACAF Champion's League, which is a sports league with "American" right there in the name? :-)
There's also the NCAA sports' end-of-year tournaments, which are sorta equivalent if you think of the athletic conferences as akin to domestic leagues in international football.
I take it the CONCACAF comment is in jest
As for the NCAA, I'm not sure what you mean. Winning as a D-II school doesn't promote you to D-I, winning a mid-major conference doesn't promote you to a power 5 conference, and I know of no mechanism for demoting schools (although failing to meet certain obligations would probably get it done). There was some talk recently about promoting SUNY Buffalo, both how it became a D-I school and about the viability of joining a power conference. While a strong record in lower leagues helps, there are other requirements and the conference has no obligation to accept. Basically, promotion requires the conference to accept the school, which is accomplished primarily by spending money. If you're already spending enough to qualify for a higher level then you're probably successful, since spending is a fair sized driver of success. And at a certain level if you're successful then you're probably getting more revenue than an unsuccessful school's athletics and so the gap in spending is easier to close.
You're talking pro/rel now. I was responding to the bit about the Champion's League being a unique feature of European soccer that has no equivalent in American sports. The thing about hte Champion's League isn't that a small group of poorly-performign clubs get "demoted" back to their domestic leagues every year. Rather, it's that teams from a bunch of completely unrelated leagues send their best teams to compete every year.
The CONCACAF Champion's League is literally a Champions League for CONCACAF nations. It's going on right now. It has the same general format as the Champion's League in Europe.
Ugh, I wish it would let us edit comments:
Paul Goodman and Emaystee beat me to it. What's happened is that a set of prominent soccer clubs have branched off to form a league where 12 of them will no longer be subject to promotion and relegation - instead, a small number of slots will be made available for the top teams from below to climb up, and any churn will happen in those slots.
The owners of those permanent "founding" teams very much like this, because it eliminates the potential hit to their profitability from being demoted, and they get more matches between their clubs and other large clubs. It moves them more in the direction of American sports leagues, with exclusive franchises where newcomers (if they're allowed in at all) have to pay up substantially to get in. Given the fact that they're calling the permanent clubs the "founding" members, I strongly suspect they're planning to see if they can get future clubs willing to pay heavily to become permanent members down the line.
Here's a Foreign Affairs piece (somewhat polemical) that was talking about this risk before it happened: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/02/english-soccer-football-financial-crisis-leagues-project-big-picture/
The top clubs across Europe are trying to create a "super league" where the (however many) founding members will exclusively play each other. Unlike the ordinary domestic leagues, for example the English Premier League, where the bottom three teams each season go down a level and the top four (it's a bit more complicated than that) from the lower league go up. The new "superleague" would mean no clubs could join but neither would any drop out. Being in the top of your domestic league means Big Money and the idea for these clubs is that, being the top teams of their home leagues, their appeal to fans would mean Even Bigger Money to watch them all play each other.
A lot of people are not very gruntled about this. We already have things like the Champions League, Europa League, and various World Club Cups, Super Cups and the likes. It would also cream off the highest earning and most popular teams from the domestic leagues, leaving them to struggle. I never thought I'd agree with Gary Neville (one of Fergie's old team) but he's correct about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP05EDm9EB8
Association football clubs are privately owned money-making enterprises. They occasionally do things which are perfectly logical from a money-making perspective, but which are greeted with horror by fans , who think they ought to behave in some other way. Cue endless heated rhetoric about the spirit of football, but no rhetoric about the letter of the law. It doesn't strike anyway to organise football in a fundamentally different way, or to defund your club if you don't like its behaviour -- the fact that all their money comes from voluntary subscriptions doesn't register either.
This is true, it's a business and the owners can do what they like to maximise profits. Everyone and his dog is really pissed-off about it, I'm presently listening to Monday Night Football on Sky Sports (live on Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQIDff1G1JQ) and yeah, they've already mentioned that the owners are trying to introduce an American-style sports league model.
Jurgen Klopp isn't happy. Liverpool fans are demanding the club take down banners at Anfield and that's a big thing https://www.football365.com/news/liverpool-fan-groups-demand-take-down-flags-banners-protest
At the end of the day, the product needs purchasers. If they piss off the fans badly enough, they won't purchase the item. Now it probably is that the owners are calculating that the brand is enough to entice purchasers, especially globally. But if the clubs wanting to set up the Super League are kicked out of Champions League competition, this affects the desirability of the brand: the sales pitch, after all, is "see this multi-cup winning team play that multi-cup winning team" and if they're barred from those cup competitions, that hurts the brand.
Though who would have thought that there would be a bigger story than Spurs sacking Mourinho today? 😀
Note that "Ponzi scheme" sometimes gets thrown at investments that are basically legit. It's normal for later investors to buy out earlier ones. To be a fraud, there needs to be more to it than that.
For much more about fraud, I recommend reading "Lying For Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of Our World."
So I was trying to pick runners-up properly at random and created a numbered list of them. It's here, in case anyone else would find it useful:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jlAvS9tgmvWDBVXJoXvOJ2k17arqeMDJyGLGIJ8hbcU/edit?usp=sharing
Not sure I understand. This is a random sample of 98 of the runner-ups?
No, no, sorry, this is just an ordered list. So you pick a number at random from 1 to 98 and choose the corresponding review.
I put the list in google sheets and added a randomizer field to it. It should automatically suggest one review to read at random each time you open the document:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1K2ihzz7LEcr1fENzfKe3ErFiXWk7BbWFekwN2-OOI78/edit?usp=sharing
A micromort is a one-in-a-million chance of death. Wikipedia has some interesting examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort
I'm somewhat surprised that there's no xkcd comic for micromorts, like there is for radiation and money. What would be a decent substitute? If I attempted to do this myself, what would be a good way to research it and get some solid numbers?
I would just use the wikipedia article linked?
Brazilianists (scholars who specializes in studying, researching, teaching and publishing about Brazil) have been puzzling endlessly over the military overhaul going on in traditionally peaceful Brazil, a country historically aligned to America (actually the only South American country to fight alongside us in WW I and WW II) which has taken lately a strangely aggressive stance. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37151/brazils-upgraded-tiger-iis-might-be-the-most-capable-f-5s-in-the-world
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN27R2AA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_submarine_%C3%81lvaro_Alberto
Is it possible the Brazil's ostensibly anti-gay ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S300L ) small r-Republican government's highest echelons have been taken over by a heretofore secret cabal of powerful homosexual monarchists, who are using the beloved South American as a springboard to attack America's interests and exact revenge on it for having inspired the country's 1889 Republican Revolution, which ovethrew and exiled the Imperial Family, which was banned from ever returning to Brazil until its banishment was lifted in the 1920s?
https://mobile.twitter.com/BrazilianReport/status/1194673711774867456
Is it a coincidence "The Prince", a member from Brazil's former Imperial Family, has said he expects Brazil's current leader, President Captain Bolsonaro, to be Brazil's last president? Is it a coincidence Congressman Frota, whose vouching for The Prince was sought, is himself a former gay movies porn star? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Frota What are the odds?
If this cabal's plans are left unchecked, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.
Fascists love shiny toys. Authoritarians like having a military to either distract the public with wars or protect them when they go dictator.
But then why the gay angle?
Updating substantially in the direction of Thiago being a deliberate troll rather than just a crank. This comment is hilarious.
An AGI is to a Turing test as a deliberate troll is to _______?
Thiago Ribero is the name of a legendary troll of the Marginal Revolution blog comments section. It looks like he's made his way here.
> Is it possible the Brazil's ostensibly anti-gay ( https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKCN1S300L ) small r-Republican government's highest echelons have been taken over by a heretofore secret cabal of powerful homosexual monarchists, who are using the beloved South American as a springboard to attack America's interests and exact revenge on it for having inspired the country's 1889 Republican Revolution, which ovethrew and exiled the Imperial Family, which was banned from ever returning to Brazil until its banishment was lifted in the 1920s?
Yes. Is it probable?
What are the odds of it all being a coincidence?
Generally, coincidence is fairly likely for observations with a lot of degrees of freedom - in particular, ones where your being aware of the observation is conditional on an unlikely coincidence happening, but relatively unaffected by the nature of said coincidence.
Are you read to bet America's future and the world on it?
On the proposition "a hypothetical cabal of homosexual Brazilian monarchists looking for revenge for century-old slights aren't scary enough that the mere possibility demands action"?
Yes.
So you want Munich for our time.
Suspect you're kidding, but just in case: Bolsonaro seems to be a loudmouthed idiot and I don't think he's capable of being secretly a member of a cabal. If he claims to be homophobic, then it's not some sort of weird "4D chess" thing, it means he's actually homophobic.
Maybe not him, but people surrounding him. What are the odds of his favored vice presidencial hopeful being secretly gay and the Congressman he asked about it being involved in homossexual dealings too? The last time such a sort of coincidence happened, Kim Philby was investigating Soviet spies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Philby
Well that'll be the most fabulous cabal of secret governmenet conspiricists in history, if you ask me
We don't know what they intend.
I take a low daily dose of Venlafaxine, and I've noticed that several different things can give me the disconnected, distracted feeling that presages and underlies "brain zaps":
1) Missing a dose, or even delaying it until evening;
2) Mild to moderate sleep deprivation;
3) Having a fever; and
4) Eating too much dark chocolate.
Is there some simple connection between those? Sleep deprivation might work by just having more waking hours, shifting my next dose until later according to my metabolism. A fever... maybe burns through the medicine or the chemicals in some related pathway faster, by *waves hands* increasing my metabolism? But I have no idea what the deal is with the dark chocolate.
TIL that "brain zaps" are a withdrawal symptom of antidepressants. I experienced this myself complete with the eye-movement-associated buzzing sound but I attributed that to the withdrawal interacting with my one-sided deafness. I've experienced this both before ever taking antidepressants and long after having stopped taking them, both as a result of sleep deprivation, so you can rule out that sleep deprivation is interacting with the medication. (Though, I never got them before going deaf.) Fever probably has a similar effect to the global cortical disinhibition that comes with near-sleep - your immune system wants you to rest, after all - so I don't think that interacts with it either. The dark chocolate has me totally stumped; I have never noticed this effect, but then I don't eat a lot of dark chocolate, just a lot of milk chocolate.
My own (totally amateur) theory is that these "brain zaps" are localized micro-seizures either originating near or spreading to the auditory cortex and frontal eye fields. The antidepressant withdrawal, sleep deprivation and fever all have large-scale effects on your brain, and if either of the latter causes in isolation don't cause brain zaps, then being on antidepressants makes you more vulnerable to them. I don't know how true that is but it seems more likely to be metabolical.
Has anyone had any success in deprogramming a vaccine conspiracy theorist? Is it even possible? I have a relative who I assume is too far gone and I don’t know if there is any point in engaging.
Not me personally, it can be done though. You have to be incredibly patient, it might takes years.
Street epistemology (has other names) is likely your best option. At worst, your relative will feel listened to and you’ll understand where they’re coming from better.
Can you elaborate?
Basically, a dolled up form of the Socratic Method. In street epistemology, you don't advance any evidence or arguments yourself, you try to get the other person to think about their basis for believing something. So you might have questions like:
- What do you consider the single strongest piece of evidence for your belief?
- If the strong evidence turned out to be flawed, would that change your confidence in your beliefs?
- Hypothetically, what kind of evidence would you expect to see if you were wrong?
- Do you think most people agree with you on this issue? Why or why not?
- Is X, a good reason to believe something? What would be a better reason of believing something?
- Etc.
It's all about deep listening and moving slow. You're probably not going to change a person's view in a single conversation, but you might be able to get them to realize on their own that some of their basis for a particular belief is a little shaky.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Have-Impossible-Conversations-Practical-ebook/dp/B07NL74KR2/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=How+to+Have+Impossible+Conversations&qid=1618821082&sr=8-1
Not read it myself
There's a good episode of the "You Are Not So Smart" podcast where David McRaney addresses just this: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2020/09/21/yanss-189-why-we-must-use-social-science-to-fight-misinformation-partisanship-conspiratorial-thinking-and-general-confusion-when-we-finally-have-a-vaccine-for-covid-19/ (Side note: the YANSS podcast often covers a whole bunch of other Rationalist topics, particularly mental models and failures thereof. I really enjoy it.)
Veblen goods: do they really exist?
A Veblen good is defined as a good for which demand increases as the price increases. Supposed examples, according to investopedia, include designer jewelry, yachts, and luxury cars.
While it's obviously true that signalling "Look at me, I'm rich enough to afford this good" is part of the appeal of many goods, I am skeptical that true Veblen goods actually exist; if they did, then surely sellers of these goods would simply keep raising their prices off to infinity.
Obviously, a demand curve can be upward-sloping only within a limited range. Prices aren't going to get so high that literally no one can pay them. I assume this is meant to be understood in most definitions of Veblen goods.
Perhaps some speculative goods, like tulip bulbs or bitcoin?
Dogecoin specifically might be the perfect example. It exists almost purely as a "meme stock", unlike Bitcoin no one's buying it because they think it might eventually become part of the global financial system. Because of this, people don't set out to buy a thousand dogecoins, they buy a hundred dollars worth of dogecoins and few people think to themselves "Wait, my hundred dollars is only getting me a thousand dogecoins? That's barely any, what a ripoff! I'm gonna wait until I can get my money's worth."
That doesn't sound like an inverted demand curve to me. An inverted one would be "Wait, my hundred dollars is giving me as much as thousand dogecoins? They must be worthless; I won't buy any then." or "Wait, my thousand dollars only give me ten dogecoins? They must be super valuable; I'll buy even more then.".
I propose that "Wow, dogecoin is up 1000%, I need to go out and buy myself some meme stocks" gets us to an inverted demand curve.
This may be a bit of a tangent, but it's interesting. Not all Veblen goods look the same: The Bugatti Chiron is an interesting car, because Bugatti is owned by Volkswagen and they consciously operate Bugatti at a loss - they actually brag about how their cars cost $4M to produce, are sold for $3M, thus operating at a marginal loss of -$1M per car. The business idea is probably a lot less perplexing and sexy; it's likely something like Volkswagen using Bugatti as a testbed for new car technology, so Bugatti doubles as an R&D facility for VW and an exotic car producer. But what's interesting is the bit about how they brag about losing money on their cars:
So what's going on here is not only that their cars are Veblen goods, but Bugatti's (the firm) seemingly extravagant production line spending is a Veblen good itself. Bugatti (the firm) signals Veblen-like affluence and prestige to their customers, who in turn want to align themselves with the brand because of its Veblen-like values. So not only are their cars $3M, which is a price tag with some Veblen properties for the customer, but the brand itself also signals Veblen-like prestige by the way it operates.
To your specific question, when a good is considered a Veblen good you're effectively buying two goods: The actual physical good (the watch), and also the Veblen-like signal (the positive externalities associated with the brand being Rolex). These two goods are tied into one package and sold together. You can divorce these goods and sell them separately, and there are markets for these as well: there are markets for watches that only tell time and don't signal prestige (cheap no-brand watches that work just as well). There are also markets for Veblen-like signals (markets for knock-offs of low quality, but that look real).
The reason Veblen goods aren't infinitely pricy is because the Veblen-signal isn't an upward sloping demand curve - it has a downward-sloping demand curve like everything else, it's just that the Veblen-signal equilibriates at a higher price than the base good.
The underlying mechanism, where more expensive goods are seen as more valuable to some extent, is nigh-universal. A Veblen good is not special because this mechanism applies to it, but because there are circumstances that make this mechanism work so strongly that increasing the price will increase demand.
However, these circumstances don't have to be true for any price. For example, a good might have the Veblen property because nearly all buyers don't want to be seen as cheap or caring about money. So then a company that might produce for a below-average price might increase sales by raising their price close to the normal/average price of that good, but they will not increase their sales further by going above that price (unless they can be seen as 'premium').
I would argue that in a strict sense, if you use the naive definition that most seem to use, either Veblen goods don't exist or most goods are Veblen goods.
However, if you use a more sensible definition, then you can logically argue things like: Ferrari's are Veblen goods from $75k up to $150k.
If you are arguing what I think you're arguing, that Ferrari would sell fewer cars at half the price, then I strongly disagree.
The cheapest new Ferrari in the US costs more like $220K. The market for $100K sports cars is a lot stronger than the market for $220K sports cars, which is why (say) the Porsche 911 vastly outsells any Ferrari.
If the Ferrari were half the price I believe it would sell a lot better than it does; its prestige value would be slightly lower but its value-for-money along every other axis would look a lot better.
My comment is intended to be about the general mechanism. Whether it is true for a specific example isn't really the point.
Yeah, but look how Altria has done since 2015 - 2015 was a terrible time to buy it. That said, really interesting point, and Altria is on the rise again.
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Can someone explain to me why the stock market is useful to society?
People have ideas, for which they want to get funding. By selling percentages of earnings, it incentivizes people to only put their money into good ideas. The stock market is simply an incredibly fluid way of companies obtaining capital.
I understand usury (of which stock *offering* is essentially a special case) and will grudgingly concede that in a market economy it is useful.
What I don't get is the societal benefit from allowing *trading* of stock (which does not actually finance anything).
I am much more willing to buy newly issued stock if I know that I can later sell it to someone else if circumstances change; this effect is recursive.
Companies look at the price of the stock to determine whether to invest in future projects. They can do a share offering to sell more shares beyond the initial offering, and get capital for more projects. The price of the stock determines how much they can raise.
It also works the other way - companies can return capital they don't have a good use for via dividends and stock buybacks.
Note both of these are on an ongoing basis, it's not just about an initial offering.
There are other ways stock prices directly affects a companies investment ability / descisions, such as aquisitions, convertible bonds, but I won't go into them here.
I'm not even sure what your alternative proposal is. That stocks expire upon the death of the share holder? And if that share tries to sell the stock in secrecy, promising to pass on the dividends to the buyer, you prosecute him? Seems cumbersome, and also seems to have no up-sides. What would be the benefit of such a move?
Besides, no IPO would want their stocks to have such properties as being untradeable. If the stocks you buy are lifetime commitments (effectively being larger commitments than owning kids) almost nobody would want to do it because you're effectively betting on the success of a company for decades into the future. Not a lot of useful predictions can be made about 20-30-40-50 years into the future. So the demand for the stock would be low, meaning the price would be low, and the IPO wouldn't pull in much capital at all. So instead, firms make the stocks tradeable such that share holders can get rid of shares, or buy more, as they update their predictions.
Well, the obvious alternative is a sales tax of some sort. Wouldn't have to be much to make speculation less profitable than investment.
Ooh okay, so the goal is to make investment strategies where holding times are longer more attractive, and strategies where holding times are shorter less attractive? Is there a particular reason why you want to accomplish this goal?
With stock offerings but no market, new ideas get funding from the set of people who think they are good ideas, have some spare money, and don't expect to have anything better to do with that money for the next twenty or so years. With stock markets, new ideas get funding from the set of people who think they are good ideas and have some spare money, even if they think they're going to need that money for some other purpose in the next few years. The latter results in good ideas getting *much* more funding than the former.
> What I don't get is the societal benefit from allowing *trading* of stock
Stocks are property, so the benefit is the same as for allowing the sale of other forms of property.
Owners of stock vote on company leadership. Assuming higher value production = more profit (often a fraught assumption), having transferable skin in the game gives people the right incentives to promote value creation through electing the right board.
Ideally, teams of experts determine what ideas are likely to be successful and give them more money.
s/expert/oracle, and oracles have the slight problem of not existing.
Luckily there's a selection effect that weed out non-experts and non-oracles out of the game.
Clearly trading leaves both sellers and buyers better off, as otherwise they would not voluntarily engage in it. If leaving people better off is not useful to society, then I do not know what is.
After the recent Progress and Poverty book review, centering on Georgism, I'd been tossing around some economic thoughts and I think they are relevant to this question of the value of the stock market, although it takes a while to get there. This is all off the top of my head speculation and I welcome questions and criticisms of the logic here.
There is a social value in encouraging people to think of things in the long term over the short term, a la the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. (I think this value is a major factor behind a lot of social issues, but that is beyond the scope of this discussion; for the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to operate on the assumption is that long term bias is a good thing to socially encourage.)
There is a problem that society needs a mechanism to handle that there is a disconnect between people's production and consumption; there are times when people produce more than they consume and there are times people consume more than they produce. If I am in a time where I am producing more than I consume, long term bias suggests it is good to hold the extra production until I have a need to consume more than I produce. For example, eventually I will want to retire (and thus not produce anything), and therefore it is good for me to set aside production to consume in retirement.
Society needs a mechanism for people to choose how much they want to put off to consume later; if it doesn't provide such a mechanism, the market will provide one on the side. Per some of the comments in the Georgism discussion, it seems that this is often accomplished by hoarding goods which retain value, such as precious metals. This is somewhat suboptimal from a society perspective, since those hoarded goods aren't providing value.
At the same time, there are some times when the consumption must come before the production. For example, children are, strictly speaking, resource sinks up until they are able to enter the work force (and likely for a time after that until they get accustomed to the job). Likewise, if I am starting a factory, it takes consuming a lot of other's production
in the form of building the factory, building the tools and such before the factory can produce for itself.
There is no connection between having excess production to spare and needing to consume production for future growth. A company that needs to modernize to remain competitive needs to consume specifically because it doesn't have the excess production to modernize. Society needs a mechanism for allocating current production to places where it will produce in the future. Societies that don't have a market mechanism for doing so will need something like the Soviet State Planning Committee for performing this duty at the top level.
Having one party with excess production and one party needing to consume production to ensure future production is a good place to solve two problems with one mechanism. I trade my current production to someone that needs it to produce more, and in return, I get a share of their future production.
If I am able to micromanage, the stock market makes this process more efficient on all levels. Rather than trusting a bank to make a fixed term loan with my savings to someone I've never heard of, I can research where to put the loan to make the most value long term and I can get the resources out of the process whenever I need them (or when I think the place I put them will no longer produce the value I require).
Figured I’d put it here, since it’s too late for the Henry George review.
I think the main flaw with Henry George’s argument is that it assumes any gains in productivity will be eaten up by rent. However, what it fails to take note of is that, if all the gains in productivity are eaten up by rent, then no one would invest in improving productivity. It is profitable, for landlords to give up profit - and thus, we figure out how and why people’s incomes have improved.
I do think the land value tax is a fine idea, it’s just rather like Malthus’ idea, in that there’s some reason he overlooked why things can improve.
It looks like George agreed that short term gains could result in large profits for both businesses and laborers. If you invent a new type of business, your gains (highly localized in the short term) can outpace the increase in land value -> increased rents process. By frequent innovation a small subset of companies and laborers can stay ahead for a while.
Computers in Silicon Valley appears to be doing this. Google and Facebook are still quite profitable despite the massive increase in land value in San Francisco. Over a long term the value of land near a new business will increase to equalize, according to George.
I think rather that George missed out on how many businesses and people own their own land. If you own the land, then you gain the increased value directly, instead of it going to the landlord eventually. George's theory only really makes sense when talking about landlords who rent rather than use land, and speculators that don't do either.
If you adopt the full Georgist view (which is rather more extreme than the actual George), then what happens is that the business ends up mostly profiting from rent that it pays itself rather than from business profits.
I can understand why Georgists would want to classify the income as "rent" but that seems wrong, as there will be no line item for rent received on that property, and very clear income from all other sources that make up their entire revenue.
Perhaps it would make more sense to think of it as an opportunity cost, rather than an actual portion of profit paid to itself? Otherwise you would have to discount from business profits (actual manufacture and sale of what your business does) an amount, and then call that amount "rent" that you paid to yourself. I imagine most accountants would be troubled if asked to do that.
Accounting and economics are separate fields with different ways of looking at things.
If I own both the land and the capital, then to figure out how much of my income is economic rent I need to consider how much actual rent I would have to pay if I didn't own the land. But from an accounting perspective I don't worry about this unless tax law says I have to.
The UK used to have a tax (called schedule A) on the imputed income from rent on land that was owned but not leased. This is not a Georgist tax, though, as it was on the full property rent (ie including improvements) not just on the land value. It was abolished in 1963.
Incidentally, in most cases it's easy to get the land value - insurers routinely do valuations of the rebuild cost of buildings, so you can take the market price (ie a real estate agent's valuation), deduct the rebuild cost (an insurer's valuation) and the difference is the unimproved value of the land.
It's not like the comments on the Progress & Poverty review have been closed - you're only making your sub-thread harder to find (and violate netiquette by "spamming" this comment section).
This comment thread is for people to post about "Whatever you want" and if Mr Decker wants to post some thoughts about a previous thread, well all power to his elbow. And he can do so in the next open thread, and the one after that.. He's much more likely to get a response here. In other words, I think you're wrong about violating netiquette - open threads are a splendid resource for people who have things to add to posts that have come and gone.
But it's not "gone", furthermore there wasn't even an article dedicated to a specific topic since !
As for "not getting a response" this is one of the reasons why comment threads should be in reverse chronological order ! (Currently, everyone is incentivized to read only the first comments, which incentivizes starting your own comment thread before even checking if a similar subtopic has already been started !)
Well, I'll agree with you if it's about the tactically best place for a comment. Three days after the H George post went up (and, as you say, no interrim posts) probably I'd stay with the dedicated post. But it's just a choice! It might be that more eyes see the comment here, and if so, then what"s the problem with using the open thread?
Not sure about the chronology problem - I think there are plusses and minuses for both. I read through (happily) chronologically on my first visit to a thread, then on subsequent visits adjust to 'newest first'.
Eh, not a huge problem, I guess that I wouldn't have brought it up if I didn't think that it might give me opportunity to illustrate my 2nd point :
Because not everyone has the time or interest to read *all* of the comments each time. If it's oldest first, like it is now, then the oldest comment threads are going to be read disproportionately more than the newest, so *of course* some commenters are then going to think that it's "too late" to start their own !
(Though some people are still posting not just answers to comments there, but new threads : latest is merely 2 hours old.)
Lot of good stuff in the book review slush pile. I read about 10 of them and put down some votes. There was the normal variation in quality you'd expect from that many entries, but I found a couple of easy 10's to nominate for finalist status.
I just watched Collective (Oscar nominated Romanian documentary). Apparently in 2015 Romania had its entire government replaced with unelected technocrats, and the film portrays Vlad Voiculescu in particular as being just an absolute perfect Health Minister. Watching this documentary made me want to replace democracy with whatever process Romania used in 2015.
I was reminded of the recent discourse about [just putting Zvi in charge of everything](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible). Is this a real-world example of a similar idea working pretty well?
Apparently Voiculescu was recently (like in the last few weeks) fired for mishandling the Covid Pandemic, I don't understand the details but I'm told by a Romanian friend that he still comes out looking pretty good. Also he's become more of a politician by now than he was in 2015, so I'm not sure how to think about his career after the film ends.
I'm sure some people whose profile pictures are not self-explanatory would love to explain them!
So here is a thread for anyone who would like to tell us about their profile picture.
Substack didn't want to let me join without a picture. My usual avatars wouldn't be recognisable at this size.
So I threw in a Brainsucker Pod from X-Com: Apocalypse, which I happened to have lying around from my work on UFOpaedia and which happens to look mushroom-shaped.
My then work paid for a cartoonist to do sketches of people attending a Summer party one year, and I liked the sketch he did of me so much that asked for permission to use it as my online avatar / profile picture, which I have been doing ever since.
I used to link to the cartoonist's business website, but he retired just before Covid.
Mine is a radiolarian by Ernst Haeckel, a naturalist of the enlightenment who used crude microscopes to visualize marine microorganisms and draw them. He didn't get very high res from his microscopes so he had to use his imagination a lot. It's a cool combination of art and science. I like the art more than the artist (the wikipedia page gets into some of his ideological flaws). You can see more by googling his name and "radiolaria".
PS- This thread is inspiring me to change it now... reading more about Haeckel's views on race has left me thoroughly uncomfortable with using his art as my avatar, even though I still appreciate his work.
Damn. This is like when I read Dylan Farrow's essay and I couldn't watch Woody Allen movies anymore.
Pavan Dev, or Vayu, the Hindu god of the wind and air. Icon image taken from the series "Sankat Mochan Mahabali Hanumaan".
I had wondered about yours. Thanks for sharing :)
...Now it's a frog that I found sleeping in my winery microscope.
Nothing against frogs, but I'm very sorry I made you change your profile picture. It was nice, whoever the author.
No worries, A. It was only a matter of time before I discovered information about Haeckel that sufficiently conflicted with my value system for me to change it. I still think he's an impressive artist and I'm still inspired by his work. But I don't want an avatar that feels so complicated. This actually is motivating me to sit down and draw my own, which would feel much more appropriate since I'm an artist ;)
Some of us still follow the old ways
I’m a professional game designer and consultant who in a former life worked in educational game design and that was also the subject of a my masters thesis - (google “super energy apocalypse” if you’re curious. )
RE: the review on Progress & Poverty, I recall it once inspired Elizabeth Maggie to make “The Landlord’s Game”, which was a piece of early procedural rhetoric advocating for the LVT. Through a series of convoluted events, that game gave rise to the game we now know as “Monopoly.”
I have zero free time, but I’ve always wanted to take a whack at doing a modern take on the Landlords game. Any suggestions for how to approach it? And what’s the better route - physical, digital, or Nicky Case-style interactive web essay?
Atlas Shrugged is reviewed twice. How do we know which is which on the ranking form?
A Sense of Déjà Vu : Peak Oil
https://www.ecosophia.net/a-sense-of-deja-vu/
People are notoriously bad at picking things randomly. To help mix things up, I've made the following link that will automatically take you directly to a randomly selected review for you to review...
https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbwaWnDZdrjaHPm1Vj8SOOutKSYvlDy2gtpHcPZ7K3aKRVg-gQgATiroLR-11CWdkLJS/exec
Note that it can take many seconds to load the document and jump to your assigned review - especially if you get one near the end. Please wait for it!
If people want it and SA approves, I can also break out the reviews into individual web pages that would load much faster. We could even potentially put a voting widget at the bottom of each page to make things easier. Heck, we could even track how many people started a review and did not vote, which is an interesting proxy for negative reviews (which kind people like us might not leave).
Note that my script collected a total of 97 reviews from the two documents. The list with titles and links is available as JSON here...
http://josh.com/ly/BookReviews.JSON
+1 for all of this
Another +1
+1
Nice. I was gonna suggest everyone ask Alexa/google assistant/Siri to pick a number for them but this is much better
I talked to this Marxist on Twitter who, not only said that "marginalism" and "subjective value" isn't the correct value theory, but he was even convinced that marginalism was a fad that died out 12 years ago in neo-classical circles. He also said stuff like most of the world is Marxist and the West is the last hold-out, where China is leading the way.
Does anybody know what's going on here? I know Marxism has always been kind of an apocalyptic ideology, where they all believe the revolution is "right around the corner", but I've never seen a level of delusion where they say stuff like "Labor Theory of Value and Law of Value is now the prevailing view among economists". And it's extra weird because I'm an econ major (and he wasn't) who graduated five years ago, but that didn't dissuade his views. Instead, he was convinced that someone had been messing with my head.
My sense is that these communities mostly hang out at r/Marxism and r/Communism, their one-sided information flow creates positive feedback loops of reinforced biases, and they end up with what can really only be described as a parallel universe.
Have you read Marx? Perhaps it is you who has the one-sided information flow here.
Also can you link us to this conversation? I want to make sure that you are representing the arguments correctly.
Yea, as Kenny said. The marginalism vs LTV bit is just a clear example of where Marx was incorrect, and I'm wondering if it's a common feature inside Marxist circles to go as far as denying that marginalism is economic orthodoxy.
This doesn't concern the specific bits about Marx that are useful, whatever these might be. This is about Marxists holding onto the bits of Marx that are defunct.
It's true that there's a lot more in Marx than people understand. But Marx doesn't have a lot to say about what theories of value were considered plausible in the era of 2010-2020.
Hiring Generalists?
Do firms find it hard to find talented generalists? It seems when firms offer job openings they mostly look for specialists who excel at certain tasks, but in actuality firms generally want flexible people who can fill many roles and take on a more diverse set of responsibilities. So how do firms find generalist talent? And if you're a generalist, how do you advertise yourself in a world where firms seemingly only ask for specialists?
Work a mid-level specialist position and show wide competence outside of it.
Contribution at mid level is table stakes, nobody cares about your amazing generalist skills if you cannot apply them to the domain of interest. Hence the concept of "T-shaped" competence which is all the rage in corporate speak.
Very early stage startups (<20 people) both 1) desperately need generalists and 2) often recognize this need.
I agree with "a real dog" re: T-shaped: any positioned titled "generalist" won't pay that well nor be particularly well-regarded internally, so you want to have a specialty. Additionally, you may want to keep the extent of your generalist tendencies a secret. If you say "I can do X, Y and Z" where typical candidates would say "I can do X", you may come across as delusional, arrogant, or not really good at any of X, Y or Z. So I recommend saying "I can do X, but can wear a lot of hats" (where X is the most influential, highest-paying skill you have).
Also keep in mind that the organization may depend upon you doing X, Y and Z, and would be screwed if you left, but that doesn't mean they'll really value what you're doing. Early in my career, my ability to get difficult stuff done outside of my job description lead my boss to refer to me as an attack dog he wanted to keep chained to his desk. Thus my learning: beware being too good at doing things nobody else wants to do, as the company will have no incentive to promote you out of it. However, being essential IS leverage and I did ultimately arm-wrestle various employers into giving me promotions. Yet it was a difficult road. I've seen plenty of other people achieve similar if not more career progress by being reasonably competent at one thing and, importantly, being highly agreeable with those in power.
"Also keep in mind that the organization may depend upon you doing X, Y and Z, and would be screwed if you left, but that doesn't mean they'll really value what you're doing. "
Ohhhh yeah. "We hired you to do X, that's what it says on your contract, we're paying you to do X. That you can also do Y and Z is nice, and we may indeed take full advantage of you being able to do Y and Z so we don't have to hire people to do Y and people to do Z, but we're not gonna pay you to do Y and Z because that's not in your official job description".
Generalists that can talk on equal footing with the specialists can be very valuable in *some* roles but they are
a) (very) rare
b) not the easiest employees to manage as they tend to like variety
(1) The book reviews? Aw, brilliant! I am going to dive into this but, um, not right away because I do have to do housework and then that pesky "earning a living" thing. But definitely when I have some free time!
(2) It was our president's 80th birthday yesterday, here's a clip for a TV chat show episode for it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3aOlfXKXm8
One of his two Bernese mountain dogs died a little while back, but he has a replacement dog now: Misneach https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/president-releases-photos-of-new-dog-misneach-1.4503401
How do you actually go about regularly measuring the value of each parcel of land in a built up area?
My favorite wonkish proposal for this is Harberger taxes. You let land owners declare their land to have whatever value they want, and pay taxes accordingly. The catch is that their declared value is posted publicly and they have to sell at the declared value to anyone interested in buying. No one should be underpricing in order to skate on taxes as that will only get them bought out by real estate speculators, and as a bonus you make the real estate market run much more smoothly by forcing price discovery on what are usually very illiquid goods.
Part of me likes this idea, and then part of me realizes that puts a lot of people who would be using their land and intend to stay there in a very tough position. If anyone can buy your land with no veto from the seller, that opens up a lot of bad possibilities. I guess if we want to maximize tax revenues and land use value (that it's ALWAYS being used for the most profitable purposes), that's a great way to do it.
Think of it this way. Say the goal of your tax was to raise revenue in the amount of 1% of the land value. You could set the rate to be 0.75% and people would overvalue their land by 33% to keep it from being bought out from under them and you'd get your 1%. It could also be 0.5%. If people want to save a few bucks by undervaluing at the risk that their property could be bought out from under them? That's the risk they chose to take.
Sure, but then it's counting on individual property owners to be savvy enough to overprice their property just enough to make that work out. That's also counting on both the local government setting the taxes right and the local property values to remain steady enough that some big real estate company can't recognize a prize difference and scoop up whole neighborhoods for below expectations.
If some big developer wanted to buy my house right now, I can review their offer and determine if I'm satisfied. If I decide that their offer is too low, or that I would never sell at any rate, I can do that. If I overpriced by house by 30% and they bought it anyway, I'm SOL.
"If some big developer wanted to buy my house right now, I can review their offer and determine if I'm satisfied."
All that Harberger taxes mean is that you have to do this in advance. "If some big developer offered me $500k, would I be satisfied? No. $600k? Still no. $700k? Yeah. Let's set the price at $700k then." If you overprice by 30% and they buy it anyway then you're not SOL, you're up hundreds of thousands of dollars which is surely more than enough to balance out the costs of moving (remember, finding a new house is much easier when they all have posted prices).
You indeed can't decide you would never sell at any rate, but that's supposed to be a feature. If you insist on keeping a rustic bungalow in the middle of downtown where developers really want to build apartments, you're going to have to pay for the privilege.
This ignores non-monetary value that families might place on their home. A couple has purchased their first house. They raise a family, etc. After a few decades, they have an emotional connection to the house. There is _a_ price they would sell it at, but it's one far in excess of what htey could afford the taxes on (and in excess of the local values). They aren't speculating, they aren't extracting rents, they are using the land as intended, but merely value it more than it's wider price represents, and more than they could afford under your scheme.
So, they would price it as high as they could possibly afford to pay, and if someone decides it's worth it at that price, they would be forced to sell at a price they don't think is worth it.
This sounds like a deeply non-optimal outcome.
“ I'm SOL.”
That’s a feature not a bug. You would presumably pay less for a house if you knew it might not be a permanent situation. That would lead to overall lower home prices.
My problem with these sorts of plans is families living in their homes. I don't think that it's ok for a family to be able to be booted out of the home that they own, and are living in, simply because someone with more money wants it. I like LVT in general, and think the idea works, but these "must sell" satellite ideas have some _really_ bad effects on the margin. I am currently living in a family home that was built by my great grandfather. It has far more emotional value to me than it has monetary value.
The idea you are proposing complete ignores these non-monetary values in a way that just _having_ and LVT does not. Given the claims throughout this thread about the fact that LVT will have positive effects even at sub-optimal rates (ie, any LVT is better than no LVT and it does not require perfect pricing or the 100% rate to work), I think that I would _much_ prefer a system that imperfectly estimates land costs, and slightly under prices than one in which families can be ousted from their homes with no recourse.
I mean, you're not SOL, since you just got a big cash grant.
Most of these proposals have some sort of time-frame specified for the transfer process, so that you could have a couple months planned for the move-out (and maybe you'd even buy the neighbor's house with the amount you know you're getting for yours, so you don't have to move far).
Lol, and then the neighbor buys its neighbor house in turn, and so on, until because of a single initial buyout the whole town is forced to move 1 house over ! (j/k ... but could it happen actually ?)
Except you can’t sell just the land, right?
That gets you the value of the property but the whole idea is to move from taxing property to just land.
It does return to the full property tax rather than the strict land value tax. But one reason for the strict land value tax was to decrease the disincentive for building a property tax has. Under this proposal, the person who wants to build can just buy the property and build, rather than relying on the current owner to build, so the disincentive effect is no longer as big.
That’s a reasonable point, but it doesn’t really answer the question.
There are people out there advocating a LVT but it seems like a LVT is impossible to administer.
If the answer is “that’s a good point which is why everyone has moved to Harbinger” someone should tell the people still talking about George and his LTV.
I think it's a reasonable point, which is why *some* people have moved on to Harbinger. But I think most people thinking about this think that the problems with administering an LVT are less than the problems with Harbinger.
Why couldn't you sell just the land ?
What happens to the building that’s on top of it?
AFAIK, nothing in particular ?
Play this out for me. We put in a harbinger LVT. The owner of the Empire State Building sets the value of the land beneath at $1. You buy it at that price. If nothing particular happens to the building above it (i.e. the old owner continues to own and control it) what good does owning the land do you? On the other hand if you get the building too, then it’s not a land value tax it’s a plain old property tax.
So while Monopoly variations might mot be the ideal option for test driving these sorts of rules, I have run Monopoly games with Harberger taxes and have a few main takeaways.
1) Getting monopolies (aka any large scale project) is so much easier.
2) If you have enough money, you can underprice. I don’t know how much this would apply in the real world, since generally there are more super rich people than there are in a game of monopoly, but if you have a trillion dollars in assets, you can probably underprice them a bit if you bundle them together (i.e. you need good bundling laws, but those are hard to make).
3) Redlining is a serious problem. Basically it makes a ton of sense to buy up poor people’s land and renovate it anyway. But in monopoly you can do it with malice by buying them out and pricing everything over their heads so they can’t afford anything. Considering that this sort of thing has been done with malice in the real world, I think it should be a concern.
"No one should be underpricing in order to skate on taxes as that will only get them bought out by real estate speculators, and as a bonus you make the real estate market run much more smoothly by forcing price discovery on what are usually very illiquid goods."
(1) Get around this by BigCorp underpricing their site, MegaPLC buys it. And then BigCorp in return buys the underpriced MegaPLC site. Notional transfer of ownership, cosy little arrangements so nobody loses out
(2) Shell companies so that BigCorp arranges to set a price of $6 and immediately OverSeas Enterprises buys it. OverSeas Enterprises is owned by the parent company of BigCorp.
No matter what way you set up a tax, *immediately* lawyers and accountants are busily finding loopholes and ways around it. It'll end up that John and Mary Smith have to pay taxes on the full value of their family home, while MegaCorp pays tuppence ha'penny. Remember the famous quote about "my secretary pays more tax than I do"? How do you think that happens?
If John and Mary Smith are willing to pay $12 to get their land back, they can do it, no matter how many shells there are holding it at a value of $6.
My review was of The No Breakfast Fallacy. I'm extremely confidant it won't be added to the finalists list, but would welcome any feedback at all.
It's less of a review than it is an extreme polemic hitching a ride on someone elses book. So - not very SSC at all, and I apologise for polluting this vicinity's atmosphere of open intellectual enquiry.
If I haven't yet put you off reading it, you might also think of it as the spirit of Julian Simon channeled and set free upon the topic of resource depletion. Cornucopian, even.
Is there a problem with discussing some of the book reviews? I can't immediately see why not, other than nobody else seems to be doing so. Tell me pronto if it's problematic..
I re
Oops, accidentally posted, no idea how..
I read the Michael Shellenberger 'Apocalypse Never' review and was a bit disappointed. The reviewers first language isn't English which gave me more of a
Oops again - there's obviously a key on my keyboard which thinks it is 'POST'
... more of a problem than I enjoy admitting. Beyond that, I didn't feel Shellenberger's position was clearly described so the criticisms of it seemed straw-mannish even though maybe they weren't. Structurally, it could have been a bit more organised.
Overall I didn't feel too impressed, though I liked the conversational style of the review.
re: Book Review Contest, in rating the book reviews are we more rating the books themselves or the reviews? It's hard to separate. If I think Book A is wonderful but the review is overly wordy and mediocre how does that compare to Book B which I thought was "meh" but the review is clear and fun to read and makes good points?
Also what about rating reviews of books I haven't read? The review may seem clever and well-written, but if I haven't read the book perhaps the review is very inaccurate?
I would say rate the book review pretty much entirely on the review. Also, a really good review shouldn't need you to have read the book - you should feel you've got the gist of it just from the review.
I'll rate by "would I recommend reading this review to a friend?" with the friend resembling what I believe the general ACX audience is like.
Rate the review. I just read what was to me a 10. I want to know of the other 9's and 10's so I can read those. For me a good book review should help me decide if I want to read the book or not. (I haven't read any reviews for books I've already read... I mean what's the point of that? :^)
A book review may "help" you decide to read the book or not, but that could be a mistaken decision if it's a poorly done review. Reading a review of a book you've already read is useful because you may learn things about the book that hadn't occurred to you while you were reading it -- and also you learn if the reviewer is trustworthy (or at least if they have similar tastes to you) which comes in handy next time you see a review they've written!
Sure, I did have a smiley face. I only like good reviews for books I might want to read. Bad reviews of books I might like, or good reviews of books I won't like, do nothing for me as a book review. I think I might have rated my first 10 too high... I've gotta give out more tens... Some of these reviews are great! Thanks so much to the authors (of the review) and for the posting.
Missed the smiley I'm obtuse that way!
Something that seems surprisingly unnoticed is the explosion of Covid cases in India. Of all the ups and downs of graphs, and msm claims of exponential increases (at various times over the last year) what's happening in India right now is the thing that has shocked me the most. It threatens to be worse than occurred in Northern Italy last year, but in a country 25 times bigger.
And I say that as someone who has generally seen the pandemic as less serious than most people I know.
I've been seeing news reports about it-- and about vaccine shortages there.
India has a strain with a couple of different mutations which might make it more virulent (and maybe escape immunity). It's currently designated VUI-21APR-01
I keep track of a few countries by estimating actual infection rates with a few simple formulas (nothing fancy, but e.g. for the US, the estimates matched quite well with those by the covid machine learning project). You can find them here: https://hmbd.wordpress.com/2020/12/30/covid-19-infection-estimates/
so India is on the list and indeed looks really bad. A few notes for context:
- India is really large (citation needed) and there are probably large regional differences that the "see the country as a homogeneous whole" approach misses. Over the whole of 2020, I estimate 30..40 M infections (both from fatality rates and from testing, both curves match very well) - which is insanely low and doesn't match results from seroprevalence testing Scott mentioned some time ago. My best explanation is that the data for India actually only includes a part of the whole country and that comparing the estimates with the whole 1.4 Bn is probably wrong.
- yup, exponential growth at R = 1.4 or something like that. The model estimate is that they're almost at 1 M new infections per day (again, not sure if this is for the whole country or a part of it). This is really bad.
Prenatal folic acid and autism risk:
I was talking with a friend about autism risk of their potential child, given that one of the potential parents has a family history of autism. (Caveat that we both know many lovely people who aren't neurotypical, but the prospect of parenting a child with "never learns to talk" type autism is something that gives them pause.)
The main reason folic acid is recommended as a supplement during pregnancy is preventing neural tube defects like spina bifida, where the spine doesn't form properly. Starting in 1998 in the US, folic acid is also added to foods like breakfast cereal because many pregnancies are unplanned, and for preventing neural tube defects the most important time to get folic acid is just before conceiving and in early pregnancy. This seems to have worked nicely for neural tube defects. https://images.app.goo.gl/A2nEn2U1mFGAUovz7
I had a vague impression that prenatal folic acid supplementation reduced autism risk. Looking into it more closely, it seems like either too little OR too much folic acid might increase autism risk. https://motheriskinternational.com/high-dose-gestational-folic-acid-and-the-risk-for-autism-the-birth-order-effect/
I suspected the hidden variable here was "more scientifically literate women are more careful about following medical advice, and are also more likely to have autistic traits" but one study says they controlled for "maternal prenatal healthcare-seeking behavior" which I assume means going to prenatal appointments and probably correlates strongly with taking your vitamins. I also feel like taking a prenatal vitamin is a very normal thing to do among educated women and not very correlated with working in STEM or something.
So how much folic acid are pregnant women getting? Looking at both the prenatal vitamins I've taken, they both include 222% of the recommended daily value of folic acid. I have no idea why so much. And that's on top of fortified breads, pastas, and cereals, plus natural folate in green vegetables and beans.
I am not a medical expert but would be interested in hearing more informed opinions here. My impression is that taking folic acid supplements during early pregnancy when the neural tube is forming is a good idea. After that, when the neural tube is already done forming but the brain is still doing lots of development, it might be important not to get too much. Which might mean seeking out a vitamin that contains 100% or less of the RDA of folic acid. (Most women's multivitamins have around 80% or 100% of the folic acid recommended during pregnancy.)
Covid rant. It seems more likely than not, that CV19 came from one of the labs in Wuhan. We should demand they open their doors and books, tell all, or start paying some fine to the world.
The Chinese government doesn't do what we tell them.
Yeah by 'we' I meant the world. And sure I have no idea how to enforce the fine.
The Chinese government is widely known to be engaging in much more reprehensible stuff than sloppy biosecurity procedures, and the world seems to be either unable or unwilling to punish them for that. I don't see why you expect this would be any different.
What sort of things are worse? This is something effecting the whole world. If they were involved and know something it's their responsibility to the world to share that information. But of course there is no short term incentive to share the info now... so fines. But you are right in that this idea means the rest of the world would have to get together and demand answers, and that does look very unlikely.
Genocide. My impression is that the world is trying very hard not to *know* what is happening to the Uyghurs, because no one is interested in making the Chinese stop.
Yeah, I heard about that. Millions in detention/ retraining camps. It sucks, it's also what people do. ~100 years ago we were still moving the natives off their land. Is the suffering of the Uyghurs worse than that from CV-19? (those are tough number to compare.) Imagine the virus was from the lab, and that with the notes/details some smart gal figures out how to put the breaks on mutations... (look don't ask me for details I'm no virologist.) And so we are able to eliminate this virus. What would that be worth? No matter, what and where this virus came from is an important piece of information. And if China is hoarding it, then it's a crime. Uyghurs are a crime too. The CV19 crime is easy for them to fix, but they lose a lot of face, maybe they need to start spinning some renegade researcher in the lab idea.
"More likely than not"?
Greater than 50% probability.
What's the evidence that made you believe this?
Well I don't know the truth, maybe a 90% chance it came from the lab. I can find a few links if you are really interested. One was on some betting market Scott posted about. I was more obsessed with this last year... now I sorta take it for granted and also assume everyone will think I'm a wacko...
A quick search,
https://www.axios.com/wuhan-lab-coronavirus-cdc-director-c599cf7b-9e30-4314-909b-a9bdac28ead6.html
https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2
https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/opinion/2021/03/22/why-covid-lab-leak-theory-wuhan-shouldnt-dismissed-column/4765985001/
I feel compelled to add, that as soon as I heard about the Wuhan lab (~3/2020?) and that they were doing research on bats with this type of virus, it became my 'best bet' for the source. All information since then has only increased the odds for me. (IDing my priors.)
Why do you care?
This is a serious question, I'm not trying to troll here.
Assumption: there's no conspiracy deliberatly placing Covid into the world. (if you don't agree with this, please feel free to make your case, but don't expect me to answer)
Then we're left with the origin stories:
a) It was an unfortunate chain of events, probably involving bats breeding the virus, a few other animals getting infected and then the virus finally spreading to the population of Wuhan (maybe involving bad hygiene handling on the Wuhan seafood market)
b) It was an unfortunate chain of events, probably involving bats breeding the virus, a labotary assistant getting infected and then the virus finally spreading to the population of Wuhan (maybe involving bad safety in a Wuhan biolab)
To be clear, I personally think a) more likely than b), but I don't really see the consequence of the distinction. _Unless_ of course we could all agree on nations accepting a general liability for all kinds of unintended consequences of their citizen's actions, even in case of really not being able to anticipate how bad things will get... which would still apply to liability on both a and b and hey, I can think of a few other countries that could be held for liability of previous bad actions in way more obvious cases *mumblemumbleglobalwarmingmumble*.
Punitive measures isn't the only reaction we can have to learning that the virus originated in a laboratory. The Wuhan lab in question is supposedly highly regulated and secure to these kinds of outbreaks. If covid originated there, that's a sign that those security measures are not enough.
I honestly don't know much about this stuff. But my understanding is that for a lab to work on these sort of projects generally requires some sort of international oversight, and following of standardized procedure. I would expect that learning the virus originated in a lab would lead the world to strengthen the safety measures required for this type of research.
Wuhan lab is under BSL4 security regime, which is tighter than labs in zombie virus movies (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnNohYMkuAE). If it was a lab leak, they didn't follow the procedures correctly, on paper all the safety measures were in place.
I don't know. But according to the USA piece (linked to above) there have been numerous accidents both in the US and China.
That's still evidence. Again, I don't know the details, but if previously it was thought that the honor system for enforcing standardized rules was enough, and COVID-19 was leaked from a lab, then perhaps the international community should insist on more consistent global oversight for all such facilities. If it wasn't a lab leak, then perhaps our current methods are good enough.
Well if it came from GOF (gain of function) research in the lab. Then a detailing of the various GOF trials they did would be helpful for people trying to understand it.
Also: how come variants often (always?) get named for their country of origin but not the original strain?
The WHO policies announced in 2015 said that none of them should be named for their country of origin. But they didn't come up with another catchy naming scheme for the variants, so we are falling back on that, even though that usage is deprecated.
This seems like a classic sunk-cost fallacy; COVID-19 exists, it has spread worldwide, why should we care *now* where it came from?
Also, beware bait-and-switch between "COVID-19 escaped from a lab in Wuhan" and "COVID-19 was developed as a biological weapon in a lab in Wuhan". The credible theory is that the Wuhan lab was studying naturally occurring bat viruses and accidentally released one. So, there's a theory that a bunch of bats somewhere in rural China were circulating some proto-COVID until it mutated into COVID-19, and then one of those bats was sold in a wet market in Wuhan. And another theory that a bunch of bats somewhere in rural China were circulating some proto-COVID until one of them was scooped up by a scientist for study in a lab in Wuhan from which the -19 strain accidentally escaped into the streets. Why does it matter so much which of these theories is true?
At the most abstract level, absolutely I'm in favor of more facts being made available. But the cost of obtaining accurate factual information in this matter is likely to be high, so it doesn't seem like a particularly high priority
Sunk cost? I'm not following where the sunk cost is? Also no bait and switch. I think most likely was an accidental escape from GoF research. The whole bat-wet market story has been put to bed. The current alternative idea is frozen meat. Which is the idea being pushed by WHO.
hmm I guess that has changed, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00495-0
Why is it important you ask. I see two obvious answers. (maybe there are more.)
1.) If from GoF, with serial passage and snippets of other DNA added, then what exactly the steps taken were, would be very useful for people studying the virus today. I've heard some different riffing on this, how certain aspects of CV-19 may relate to how the serial passage was done... this was mostly on Bret Weinstein's podcast.
2.) Knowing where and how the virus originated will help to stop things like this happening again.
I guess once I got to the point where a lab leak seemed like the most likely source, then a whole bunch of other ideas follow. The first being, "China, stop being an asshole about this." With apologies to China if my 90% guess is wrong.
No one can get China to stop being an asshole about anything. The end result of pushing on this is to raise tensions between China and the West. Maybe a good idea and maybe a bad one, but let’s not pretend that all we need is a little gentle pressure and China will become a model global citizen.
Well if 90% of the US thought the lab leak was probable, we could have grade school kids writing letters to the Chinese embassy pleading to release the data.... Visions of 'Mr. Smith goes to Washington'. :^) I'm a hopeless romantic. Sadly I think you are correct. Change in China will only come from within China. I do think they care about their image in the world. Which only makes fessing up less probable.
>Knowing where and how the virus originated will help to stop things like this happening again.
I highly doubt that. Whether or not COVID-19 *did* escape from a lab, we know that viruses *can* escape from labs. Lots of very smart people have put a whole lot of thought into minimizing that probability, for all the possible ways it could happen, not just the one way it maybe did. The odds that A: they missed something and B: Chinese data will tell them what it was, are small. And that's if the Chinese cough up the data, which they almost certainly won't.
Oh dear, we seem to be talking past each other. I have almost zero interest in 'how' it escaped from a lab, if it did escape. The data would not be about how it escaped, but all the stuff they had been doing with it for ~10 years.
I think we have underestimated the danger of these labs, and knowing if or if not it escaped from the lab is a very important data point. The underlying truth is important. I don't want the following to be in any way insulting. There is this 'trust science' narrative on the left, which might have been more true in the past, but science is human, and now tied to money, and you should trust science as much as a used car salesman. (with no insult intended to people selling cars. There are honorable people in both fields.)
Re: Caesar. If anyone's interested, I've read pretty much all of classical Latin/Greek literature in the original Latin or Greek. (This is less than it sounds: it's about three bookshelves worth of books.) And I've read a fair number of commentaries. And, now that I think of it, a lot of primary sources from the Dark Ages and the like. Happy to answer questions or at least give comments on specific events or works.
Massive shot in the dark here, but I could have sworn I found a lawyer joke in David Christenson's translation of a play by either Plautus or Terrence - I lost the reference before I could check it against the original text, and now I couldn't even tell you which play it was in despite rereading the entire collection. Does that sound familiar at all, or does my pointlessly esoteric quest continue?
The only issue is it's a target rich environment. There's lots of lawyer jokes in both Greek and Latin literature. Can you describe the general tenor of the joke?
I'm confident it was pre-Classical Latin which narrows it down quite a bit, but not so sure of the exact author. It was insulting someone or something (unrelated to lawyerdom, I think?) by appealing to fairly specific negative stereotypes of the profession that I was surprised would translate so well cross-culturally, hence the search for the original.
(I can specifically rule out the Menaechmi, whose relatable legal humor comes more at the expense of clients.)
Do you know the specific negative stereotype? I wouldn't say the Latin negative image of lawyers is all that different from ours. Perhaps they were considered a bit snobbier and more aristocratic than we consider lawyers today. But it's not that we don't consider lawyers snobby and aristocratic.
I'm going to start including classical lawyer facts. Because I can.
Everyone always quotes the Bible on how hard it is for rich people to get into heaven. But the Bible comes down much more heavily on lawyers: "Woe to you lawyers! For you load men with difficult burdens and do not do any bear any burdens yourself. Woe to you lawyers, the enemies of knowledge and truth. You will not enter heaven and you hinder those who will enter." (Luke 11:45-52)
Weren't the authors of Latin texts mostly snobby and aristocratic themselves?
It depends. If you look at graffiti or lists of jokes, it's likely a fair bit of middle to lower class sentiment seeped in. Additionally, even very elite people aren't necessarily snobs. And lastly, there are degrees here. Not every aristocrat is on top of the heap and not all of them were lawyers.
Sallust, for example, was a Sabine and a Plebeian. Were his family a bunch of peasants? No, they were equestrians and had Roman citizenship (a privilege for his background.) They also could afford his education. So at least some sort of noble. But nobody very important. He only got moderately far in life and that only because he threw his lot in with Caesar. (And yet was still unimportant enough Caesar doesn't mention him at events he was probably at.)
Likewise Gellius, who we get a lot of our reports on jokes from. Was he a peasant? Again no, he appears to have been a provincial nobleman with a bit of money. He briefly held some offices but had very little of a career and he was certainly no one important. When he makes fun of the puffed up grandees of Rome it's undoubtedly him mocking people above him socially, even if he wasn't that lowly.
At the risk of a very bad comparison, think of Jane Austen. Was she a noble? Yes, she was and that's why she had the education to write. Was she anyone important or near the top of society? Well, kind of. Above a lot of people. But nowhere near the pinnacle.
@Scott: if you change the URLs for the Google docs to end in /preview instead of /edit, they'll go to a read-only view which should be easier on people's machines/phones.
Any other betting markets on the George Floyd case besides Polymarket?
https://polymarket.com/market/how-many-charges-will-derek-chauvin-be-convicted-of
Is trying to trade options as an amateur incredibly stupid? Like, if I see GME go up to 300 again and I want to buy puts, should I just...not? Because, even if it does go down I'm still not going to know how to buy the right puts at the right strike over the right time frame to maximize profit? And if I do decide to go ahead and trade, what can I read that's short that might be of value?
It isn't stupid if you view it as gambling
If you are reasonably well versed in math read up on black-scholes. That should give you an idea of what people mean when they say “theta decay” or “gamma neutral.” Then read up on common option spreads to get a feel for how different options can work in concert.
With the above you at least won’t be shooting completely blind, but I don’t think there’s anything reasonable an amateur can do to understand trends and movements in the options market. The best you can hope for is understanding what the different gambles you can make mean.
Thanks!
For those who prefer to pick their own book review adventure, here is an easily clickable list of titles which is reshuffled each time the page is visited to help prevent alphabetical order bias....
https://josh.com/ly/BookReviewShuffle.html
So, remember the Capitol riot, and its death toll? 5, right? Well, no, not really. Police officer Brian Sicknick died of natural causes (two strokes), not caused by a fire extinguisher or pepper spray, as Glenn Greenwald notes.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer
Protestor Kevin Greeson died of cardiovascular disease.
Protestor Benhamin Phillips also died of cardiovascular disease
Protestor Rosanne Boyland, the woman reported trampled in the Capitol, died of amphetamine overdose.
Protestor Ashli Babbit was shot by a police officer.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/04/07/capitol-riot-deaths-cause-death-released-4-5-not-sicknick/7128040002/
So it turns out only one person was killed (as in homicide) in the Capitol riot, and she was shot by the police.
How did three people out of several hundred (several thousand at most?) all happen to die of natural causes within the space of a few hours?
What does it mean to "die of cardiovascular disease" that are "natural causes" when you were injured in combat a few hours earlier? Is this just not some sort of technicality, like saying that the gunshot victim died of gangrene from an infected gunshot wound, rather than dying of gunshot?
from snopes:
But the determination of a natural cause of death means the medical examiner found that a medical condition alone caused his death — it was not brought on by an injury.
One thing I wonder about is how often this kind of thing happens at other big, stressful events - from mobs to mostly peaceful protests (for Amazon-approved causes or otherwise) to Black Friday shopping sprees to concerts.
If there’s no incentive for there to have been deaths in the days following such an event, would we ever know of any cops died of natural causes? If a tree falls, etc.
A pun suitable for the sequel to the Unsong Book: Qlipot/(Paper)clips
I'm reading the Trump prediction discussion, and I'm reminded of a prediction I got wrong-- I expected Trump's tariffs to be very bad for the economy. Now, they might have had a dampening effect and the economy would have been better or ill effects might take longer to show up, but there wasn't an obvious bad effect. Do tariffs matter less than I thought? Were they actually a good idea?
Tariffs cost us money in the short term. (We pay more, when I order electronic parts there is now a tariff cost of ~5-10%) Long term they should encourage manufacturing here in the US. And I would like to see a return of manufacturing, even if I pay more for my toaster. Not all T's ideas were bad, execution was not his strong suit. Tariffs are also an easy target for crony capitalism, rent seeking. US manufacturer gets a tariff on imports so he can charge more.... hmm to be honest if that means more jobs here in the US, how is it different from above? Has Biden gotten rid of Trumps tariffs?
Looks like not. I think this might end up being the most significant long term effect of the Trump years. The elite right convinced the elite left back in the late 80s / early 90s that free trade was a good idea. Both parties converged on this and the subject left the national political debate (Jerry Brown in the 92 Dem primaries being the last protectionist candidate, I think). But they never really convinced the rank and file of either side. Right now, there's still a lot of anti-protectionism on the Dem side because Trump was protectionist, but Trump is fading and if Biden sticks it out, Dems might revert as well. Then it's a live question again, or maybe one where the consensus just settles out the other way. Could US membership in the WTO be on the table in four or eight years? Maybe. That'd be a hell of a legacy for a Republican president.
I know that this is going to sound like a terrible idea to Dems. But a tariff is about the same as a tax. And a balanced tariff system is sorta the same as less business taxes. Both encourage business here, and both cost the consumer more in taxes. (Well no one is paying enough taxes these days.. but's that's a whole 'nother story... Where to tax the economy is an interesting question.)
Maybe, maybe not. Remember. This was your (their?) policy. This is a political question that we (Dems) lost back in the eighties. People only remember the controversies that are still going. Trade was a live political debate for a long time. Then it wasn't. Republicans juked us out of our old trade policy, and then claimed it 25 years later. We might not be as averse as all that to having it back.
OTOH, back when Bernie was running the first time, he was also raising trade as an issue. And during that primary, NPR had an economist on and asked about free trade vs protectionism. At some point the interviewer quoted some stat about 96% of economists claiming that free trade was better policy, and asking how it was that it was being raised in both primaries in 2016 when we now know better. The economist chuckled a little bit, and said something like, "You know, I've heard that stat a few times, and I really wish I could see their call list. Because I just don't see how even 4% of economists could come to such a wrongheaded conclusion. You see [expert explaining issue to audience]."
That was good enough for me. Since W, being the party that listens to the experts has been a serious part of Democratic self-identity. If the professional economists all come out and yell at us, that will keep the liberal office workers in line. Mostly. So I don't know. I mean, I'm torn. I believe experts, but . . . I don't understand this one. I never really have. My hometown used to have a blue jean factory and now it doesn't. Maybe it would be better if jeans cost three times as much and we still had that factory. Maybe I'm a protectionist in my heart even though I know better.
Like I said, if Biden holds the line on this long enough for the policy to lose Trump's stink, I could really see Dems switching en masse. Free trade is anti-intuitive.
I've mostly voted democratic, I did a write in vote for prez. last year. I live in NY, so easy. Bill Clinton (who I voted for) sold out the working class Dems to big business. Scott's post 'A modest proposal' is mostly about the Reps taking over the working class as a constituency.
Tariffs are neither good nor bad. France puts a tariff on wine and cheese (I think) because they want to support locals and don't mind paying a bit more. I think that's fine. (If 95% of experts tell me something, I think preference falsification, not truth.) I think the idea of everyone going to college is silly. We need good manufacturing jobs here too. There are lots of ways to support that if we all agree it's important. (getting everyone to agree is the hard part these days.)
Oh, I need an edit. (If 95% of experts tell me something I think preference falsification, before truth.) (change the previous not to a before, not all things that 95% of experts agree on are false. :^)
“Tariffs are neither good nor bad. France puts a tariff on wine and cheese (I think) because they want to support locals and don't mind paying a bit more. I think that's fine. (If 95% of experts tell me something, I think preference falsification, not truth.) I think the idea of everyone going to college is silly. We need good manufacturing jobs here too.”
Scale matters here. Paying a little (or even a lot) extra for wine and cheese to help out a small percentage of the population working in bucolic vineyards or dairy farms is quite different from a tariff on manufactured goods intended to significantly boost the income of 20% of the working age population.
One is a quirky little policy and the other a massive restructuring of society with unknown consequences.
Why would it be good if the jeans factory were still around? If the factory workers had really wanted their factory jobs, they could have always accepted lower wages and underbid the imports (until they hit the minimum wage); in that case they would have lost exactly as much in dollar terms than consumers would have gained. They didn't do that because they found jobs in other sectors that paid more than they would have had to accept to compete with the imports, even if possibly less than they previously made in the factory. In other words, jeans factory workers lost less (if at all) than jeans buyers gained, at least in dollar terms.
Factory workers may be poorer than the average consumer and, due to the diminishing marginal utility of money, it's possible that they lost more in utility terms than consumers gained. And thus tariffs in sectors that employ especially many low-wage workers may in some cases be a net benefit in utility terms when considering only the citizens of a country. However, if we want to help poorer people at the expense of richer people, there are many ways to do that with less deadweight loss, such as handing out tax-funded subsidies to low-wage workers. (Also, these don't hurt foreign workers in a way tariffs do.)
Because people like jobs, and making things locally is good, and it's neat when you can take a class for a tour of how things are made?
Look, I get it. It's better for us to pay a Vietnamese person two bucks an hour and have ten dollar Walmart jeans, and then just give people money. I understand, more or less, and I vote that way, more or less.
I just . . . I only know it with my head. I don't really believe it in my guts, like most of the other political stuff I believe in.
Actually, you know what, while I have you here, why *is* that better? Why is it better that the people from my hometown have to compete with people from places where there are no labor standards and the standard of living is so much lower that an illegal poverty wage (in the US) is a good (or at least acceptable) deal?
Like. I understand on much better grounds why free trade with Europe or Canada or Japan are good ideas. Treat workers fairly and let everyone compete, because competition makes everybody richer (usually). Sure. I'm there.
But how does it help a factory worker in my country to compete with a low skill worker in a craphole where wages that are low enough that they can take pay my countryman can't live on? I don't actually get that one. I get that it helps me, because I can buy jeans for less. But aren't the factory workers - or anyone who does basically fungible labor - just getting screwed?
Hmm that all sounds right. But I think the equation (of how rich I am) should include a term that says I'm richer if my neighbor is richer, vs some poor person elsewhere... community, county, state, nation, world... some (not understood by me) sliding scale, of nearness, shop locally, save money.
No, tariffs aren't the same as more consumer taxes and less business taxes. If your country is better at producing certain things, and another country is better at producing other things, it's in the interest of both to do what they are better at, and swap their products. Tariffs reduce the incentive to do this, taxes don't. In addition, tariffs or taxes that only apply to certain products create an incentive to spend less on those products and more on others, leading to a suboptimal allocation of spending in a way evenly applied taxes don't.
Right! (thanks) taxes are better than tariffs in general. But if France wants a tariff on wine, (or Japan on rice or the US on pickup trucks) for whatever national reason, and they don't mind paying more... That seems fine by me.
Perhaps the tariffs simply weren't enough to be significant. The new tariffs amounted to something like 0.2% of the US GDP. Even in the worst case, it's unlikely that they would reduce the GDP by more than a few tens of a percent, and that's easily drowned out by year-to-year variation from other causes.
And it's likely that it takes more than a few years for the harm to take full effect: if some business relying on imported products becomes less profitable, but the capital is already invested, it's probably not worth shuttering it when tariffs are introduced, but future investment is reduced in that sector.
Well, my prediction on the Chauvin trial didn't pan out, I thought a hung jury or acquittal was significantly more likely than a conviction. The main factors I didn't give enough weight to were:
1. The police witnesses testifying for the prosecution. Everyone knows about the Blue Wall of Silence, and to see multiple cops breaking it and unambiguously saying the restraint did not conform with accepted standards was a big deal. This helped convince the jury to not give Chauvin the deference most police get. I expected the cops to at least hedge a bit.
2. The weak defense. I wasn't impressed with the defense witnesses. They didn't sound convincing at all, and they didn't present a strong scientific case that other factors may have caused Floyd's death. I expected better from Chauvin's legal team.
3. The pressure on the jury. The short deliberation time makes me think that the jury was convinced with little dissent. I have to wonder if one or two jurors had silent and reasonable doubts, but didn't want to speak up for whatever reason. I expected for there to be extended discussions and vigorous debate, but.that didn't happen.
re 3:
how long did they deliberate? how long would not be considered 'short'? how does this compare to other times in big name murder cases?
They deliberated for 10 hours, and state laws require unanimous agreement on conviction or acquittal, so in cases like this the jury often breaks to ask the Judge questions or make inquiries. The jury did not do so in this case, and I've been told that 10 hours short for this kind of case in that particular case.
and how long would not be considered short?
I honestly don't know what is expected, but according to:
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/04/17/jury-deliberations-begin-monday-in-the-chauvin-trial-key-questions-answered#jury_deliberations
there have been 3 other trials in MN where officers were tried for on-duty deaths. The deliberations were 5 days, 11 hours, and 7 hours. So deliberations could have a long tail, but 10 hours does not seem to suggest the jury wasn't doing their job.
I wouldn't want to say they weren't doing their job, just that in the context of such a high profile trail with a lot of complicated charges the jury didn't deliberate for several days, as is possible and would be expected if there was some disagreement within the jury. Certainly it implies that there was likely no major dissent during deliberations. Not that there necessarily should be major dissent, mind.
Not your reply, but OP seemed to be hinting that something unusual had happened.
What are people's thoughts on Armin Laschet, who has been chosen to succeed Merkel as CDU/CSU candidate?
I get the impression that the decision of who should replace Merkel is an unenviable one. Söder is too Bavarian, nobody outside Saarland likes AKK.
I’m looking for reliable sources of information about high-functioning autism in girls and women. There’s a lot of information out there from diagnosed women, but I’m unsure how reliable they are. I’m also curious whether it is really important to have a named diagnosis for one’s peculiarities.
The three reviews already posted here are not in the poll. Maybe that's intentional, but I thought one of them was really great.
I thought only non-finalists were in the poll, as it's used to promote a few of them to finalists.
Oh thanks, my mistake. Read over the non-
This was wrong.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/4816/will-derek-chauvin-be-acquitted-of-all-murder-charges/
A probability estimate can't be proven wrong by a single example. But, it as a surprising result to the forecasters if that's what you mean.
I made a dead-simple website that will show you a random review when you go to it (with a link to the rating form at the bottom): https://book-review-contest.firebaseapp.com/
Thanks to all the contributors and the good soul who compiled it! Amazing content