'Writing a
novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your
headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' --
E. L. Doctorow
Public choice theory is well known as a theory that was espoused by Nobel Prize winner James Buchannan. It attempts to provide something of a unified approach to behavior in the economic and political realms. The theory famously argues that people who pursue their selfish interest in the economic realm do not somehow become perfect altruists in the political realm. Instead, one must take serious account of the selfish interests of politicians who present themselves as selflessly pursuing the public interest.
Who is...Alex Bregman?
I still can't get over the World Series.
The Astros tie the game in the ninth, go ahead in the tenth but the Dodgers tie it in the bottom of the tenth. At the beginning of the eleventh, Verlander comes out of the clubhouse and starts screaming at his team.
“I just wanted,” Verlander said, “to really remind these guys how great they are. I’ve pitched against them, I know how good they are. It doesn’t matter how good a pitcher you are, this lineup can hurt you so quickly. And I guess maybe that was just my message, is stay positive. Remember how good you are.”
And Springer hits a two run homer to win it.
“This game has so much failure in it,” Bregman said. “You’re going to go through stretches where you’re not feeling great. and you’re not putting together great at-bats. It’s how you come back, how you bounce back.”
“If you’re beating us, you’re beating us,” Bregman said, smiling in front of his locker. “And guess what, we’re still coming, we’re coming for you.”
Apparently there is some discussion in England of the discriminatory nature of university admissions. Since university indeed create criteria then I suppose they are discriminatory by definition. But my bet is that this is not what the critics mean; my bet is they imply a more insidious selection, a process based upon social bias or, worse, gross bigotry. But unmerited distinctions have arisen long before university level; those distinctions have developed in the lowest educational levels--levels where the society already has a lot of direct control. Why focus upon these very small end-point distinctions when influence at an early age would be so much more productive? Could it possibly be because that has already failed and, anyway, the later and mature problem is higher profile? And easier?
CVS Health is in talks to buy Aetna for more than $66 billion as the drugstore giant scrambles to fortify itself against looming competition from Amazon amid a continuing reordering of the health-care industry. (wsj)
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/an-openminded-man.html
"On Monday, the conservative educational nonprofit Prager University filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for "intentional" censorship of conservative speakers. YouTube made more than fifteen percent of the organization's videos impossible to access in its "restrictive mode" -- meant to protect younger and more sensitive viewers -- and only slowly provided contradictory answers for why they were restricted."
This is from PJMedia and its objection may miss the big point: As a private company, they can do what they want. They are only masquerading as an open-minded public access utility. The real point is the tremendous impact of these gigantic corporations and moneyed interests.
Elliott is a very successful hedge fund run by impressive guys. One of their founders, Paul Singer, recently wrote an article in defense of activist investors, a group he believes are part of the overall "efficient market" scenario. Since, he asks, passive investing--that type of investing in ETFs and the like--is reducing the percentage of active managers to the point where they may actually become the minority in a few years, who is going to do the work that theoretically creates efficient markets?
Ideals are not givens; nor are they universally held.
William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on this day in 1659.
The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death.
The Religious Society of Friends, whose members are commonly known as Quakers, was a Christian movement founded by George Fox in England during the early 1650s. Quakers opposed central church authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight and consensus through egalitarian Quaker meetings. They advocated sexual equality and became some of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in early America. Robinson and Stevenson, who were hanged from an elm tree on Boston Common in Boston, were the first Quakers to be executed in America.
A story from Quora describing the writer's favorite Olympic moment:
"To put it simply, immigration controls are controls on people, and it is not possible to control some people without controlling others. More to the point, it is not possible to control outsiders (aliens, foreigners, would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders as well. Immigration controls are not merely border controls but controls on the freedom of the population residing within those borders." This is from Kukathas but seems to imply that any demonstration of law is by definition oppressive, or portends to be. That is sort of a definition of law, is it not?
According to the UN's annual demographic report, "World Population Prospects," one-sixth of the world's population currently lives in Africa. By 2050, the proportion will be one-quarter, and at the end of the century -- when Africa will have four billion people -- one-third.
Savings, where investment, repairs and retirement come from:
In
medicine, law, finance, retailing, manufacturing, and even scientific
discovery, the key to winning the race is not to compete against
machines but to compete with machines.
While computers win at routine processing, repetitive arithmetic, and
error-free consistency and are quickly getting better at complex
communication and pattern matching, they lack intuition and creativity
and are lost when asked to work even a little outside
a predefined domain. Fortunately, humans are strongest exactly where
computers are weak, creating a potentially beautiful partnership. So in
this chapter we want to focus on recommendations in two areas: improving
the rate and quality of organizational innovation,
and increasing human capital— ensuring that people have the skills they
need to participate in todayʼs
economy, and tomorrowʼs.
Making
progress in these two areas will be the best way to allow human workers
and institutions to race with machines, not against them. --from
Brynjolfsson
and McAfee, MIT.
They are optimistic because they think the U.S. has a big
upside--because we have fallen so far behind in education and thus can
improve.
But this is harsh optimism. According to
Acemoglu’s and Restropo, the impact of just industrial
robots
on jobs from 1993 to 2007 is that every new robot replaced around 5.6
workers, and every additional robot per 1,000 workers reduced the
percentage of the total population employed by 0.34% and also reduced
wages by 0.5%. During that 14-year period of time,
the number of industrial robots quadrupled and between 360,000 and
670,000 jobs were erased. And the robots are getting better; they will
replace more over time. They predict a loss of up to 3.4 million jobs by
2025, alongside depressed wage growth of up to
2.6%, and a drop in the employment-to-population ratio of up to 1.76
percentage points. And this is just industrial jobs, not
software-sensitive work.
Public choice theory is well known as a theory that was espoused by Nobel Prize winner James Buchannan. It attempts to provide something of a unified approach to behavior in the economic and political realms. The theory famously argues that people who pursue their selfish interest in the economic realm do not somehow become perfect altruists in the political realm. Instead, one must take serious account of the selfish interests of politicians who present themselves as selflessly pursuing the public interest.
"I'm
delighted to report that - after experimenting with conventional high
school - my elder sons have resumed homeschooling. Their complaints
were numerous, but our whole family was taken aback by
their school's disinterest in academics. Math aside, every class was
infused by a pedagogical philosophy I can only describe as
"touchy-feely." This philosophy was so pervasive that teachers seemed
unaware of the possibility that other views even exist."
This is from a long article by Caplan with the wonderful title,
"Touchy-Feely Bull in a China Shop," and ends with this:
"Still, as we
economists emphasize, nice people often do bad things. Good intentions
are not enough; if you really want to do good, you have to calmly weigh
the actual consequences of your actions.
You may find drawing posters more fun than reading textbooks, but that's a reflection of your personality type, not a universal
law of human nature."
Who is...Alex Bregman?
I still can't get over the World Series.
The Astros tie the game in the ninth, go ahead in the tenth but the Dodgers tie it in the bottom of the tenth. At the beginning of the eleventh, Verlander comes out of the clubhouse and starts screaming at his team.
“I just wanted,” Verlander said, “to really remind these guys how great they are. I’ve pitched against them, I know how good they are. It doesn’t matter how good a pitcher you are, this lineup can hurt you so quickly. And I guess maybe that was just my message, is stay positive. Remember how good you are.”
And Springer hits a two run homer to win it.
“This game has so much failure in it,” Bregman said. “You’re going to go through stretches where you’re not feeling great. and you’re not putting together great at-bats. It’s how you come back, how you bounce back.”
“If you’re beating us, you’re beating us,” Bregman said, smiling in front of his locker. “And guess what, we’re still coming, we’re coming for you.”
Zipcar
is expanding its bet urban commuters will pay monthly subscriptions for
access to cars to get to and from work, escalating
competition with ride-hailing services. (wsj)
Apparently there is some discussion in England of the discriminatory nature of university admissions. Since university indeed create criteria then I suppose they are discriminatory by definition. But my bet is that this is not what the critics mean; my bet is they imply a more insidious selection, a process based upon social bias or, worse, gross bigotry. But unmerited distinctions have arisen long before university level; those distinctions have developed in the lowest educational levels--levels where the society already has a lot of direct control. Why focus upon these very small end-point distinctions when influence at an early age would be so much more productive? Could it possibly be because that has already failed and, anyway, the later and mature problem is higher profile? And easier?
Researchers
say they created a new Crispr-based system to edit RNA instead of DNA
in human cells, offering a way around some
of the ethical and scientific challenges associated with editing the
genome and helping advance a new avenue to potentially treat diseases.
This is a big advance as it allows the manipulation of gene expression
without altering the
germline cells, egg, sperm and zygote cells that could influence the genetic line by handing down basic changes. This type of
change alters only one individual and does not alter his germ cells. Or so we think.
Chinese
researchers have found small pieces of rice ribonucleic acid (RNA) in
the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing
University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind
to receptors in human liver cells and influence the uptake of
cholesterol from the blood. These proteins are called microRNA
(abbreviated to miRNA) due to its small size. MiRNAs have been studied
extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been
implicated as players in several human diseases including cancer,
Alzheimer's, and diabetes. They usually function by turning down or
shutting down certain genes. That is to say, food might be a
gene-regulator.
Now think about that for a moment.
CVS Health is in talks to buy Aetna for more than $66 billion as the drugstore giant scrambles to fortify itself against looming competition from Amazon amid a continuing reordering of the health-care industry. (wsj)
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/an-openminded-man.html
|
steeleydock.blogspot.com
"War
on Terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the
September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should ...
|
"On Monday, the conservative educational nonprofit Prager University filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its parent company, Google, for "intentional" censorship of conservative speakers. YouTube made more than fifteen percent of the organization's videos impossible to access in its "restrictive mode" -- meant to protect younger and more sensitive viewers -- and only slowly provided contradictory answers for why they were restricted."
This is from PJMedia and its objection may miss the big point: As a private company, they can do what they want. They are only masquerading as an open-minded public access utility. The real point is the tremendous impact of these gigantic corporations and moneyed interests.
Elliott is a very successful hedge fund run by impressive guys. One of their founders, Paul Singer, recently wrote an article in defense of activist investors, a group he believes are part of the overall "efficient market" scenario. Since, he asks, passive investing--that type of investing in ETFs and the like--is reducing the percentage of active managers to the point where they may actually become the minority in a few years, who is going to do the work that theoretically creates efficient markets?
Ideals are not givens; nor are they universally held.
William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony on this day in 1659.
The two had violated a law passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from the colony under penalty of death.
The Religious Society of Friends, whose members are commonly known as Quakers, was a Christian movement founded by George Fox in England during the early 1650s. Quakers opposed central church authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight and consensus through egalitarian Quaker meetings. They advocated sexual equality and became some of the most outspoken opponents of slavery in early America. Robinson and Stevenson, who were hanged from an elm tree on Boston Common in Boston, were the first Quakers to be executed in America.
A story from Quora describing the writer's favorite Olympic moment:
Yamashita
Yasuhiro, the Japanese opponent was the strongest favorite for the gold
medal in LA 1984. Unbeaten for 7 years, 194 consecutive matches in
total, he was the man to beat. However, during the
second bout in the tournament, he tore his right calf while defeating
Arthur Schnabel of West Germany. In the following match, Laurent del
Colombo of France, attacked the injury and was very close to win but
Yamashita scored an
Ippon (the equivalent to a knockout in boxing) and passed to the final.
Rashwan, on the other hand, also stormed smoothly to the final scoring Ippons against all his opponents.
After the final, Rashwan said he purposely didn't target Yamashita's injury, settling for the silver, as he regarded it not fair-play. At the medal ceremony, Rashwan had to help Yamashita up onto the podium.
Rashwan, on the other hand, also stormed smoothly to the final scoring Ippons against all his opponents.
After the final, Rashwan said he purposely didn't target Yamashita's injury, settling for the silver, as he regarded it not fair-play. At the medal ceremony, Rashwan had to help Yamashita up onto the podium.
Sport has too often become like a war, we must return to the core values of sport: an athlete must respect his/her opponent, the students must respect their masters, the referees must respect the competitors and vice versa. - Mohamed Rashwan.
"To put it simply, immigration controls are controls on people, and it is not possible to control some people without controlling others. More to the point, it is not possible to control outsiders (aliens, foreigners, would-be immigrants) without controlling insiders as well. Immigration controls are not merely border controls but controls on the freedom of the population residing within those borders." This is from Kukathas but seems to imply that any demonstration of law is by definition oppressive, or portends to be. That is sort of a definition of law, is it not?
According to the UN's annual demographic report, "World Population Prospects," one-sixth of the world's population currently lives in Africa. By 2050, the proportion will be one-quarter, and at the end of the century -- when Africa will have four billion people -- one-third.
Savings, where investment, repairs and retirement come from:
An interesting article shows a rise in oil rigs but no increase in oil rig workers. This is attributed to a machine called the Iron Roughneck. What is astonishing is the time this took: Two years. In two years the technology arose, its support systems arose, and it is now displacing really high paying jobs. Now, surely, someone makes the machine but the timing and impact is quite impressive.
By definition, GDP is made of domestically-produced goods for consumption, investment, government expenditures, and exports, that is, C+I+G+X. When they actually measure GDP, however, statisticians only find a C, an I, and a G that include imported goods and services. In order to correct for that, they have to remove all imports from the formula, which becomes the familiar C+I+G+X-M, where M represents imports. Compounding the error, the formula is usually written as C+I+G+(X-M), where (X-M) is labeled “net exports,” a subliminal version of the trade balance. It looks as if net imports subtract from GDP while, in fact, M is subtracted only because it was already hidden in the available data.--Lemieux, among many
Mediocracy: noun:
Rule by the mediocre. ety: A blend of mediocre + -ocracy (rule). Earliest documented use: 1845.
USAGE:“Why are gifted individuals always forced out by the
mediocracy?”
Christopher Fowler; The Victoria Vanishes; Bantam; 2008.
Christopher Fowler; The Victoria Vanishes; Bantam; 2008.
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.--Freidman
AAAaaaaannnnndddddd..... a graph of rigs vs. workers:
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