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"Why are wolves increasing all around the world, lions decreasing and tigers now holding steady? Basically, because wolves are in rich countries, lions in poor countries and tigers in middle-income countries." --Ridley

Long week at work.
Nice dinner at Senti and came home to an exciting Pens game. Morning at Tazzo, the new Dunkin' in Bloomfield giving away food and coffee, the Italian market and a tea place priced out of Lawrenceville.

At this point, companies listed on the U.S. stock exchanges have accumulated a total of almost 10 trillion dollars of debt.  That is equivalent to approximately 47 percent of U.S. GDP.  A decade of historically low-interest rates has allowed companies to sell record amounts of bonds to investors.

The U.S. government on Monday said it may slap punitive duties of up to 100% on $2.4 billion in imports of French Champagne, handbags, cheese and other products, after concluding that France’s new digital services tax would harm U.S. tech companies.


When we only pay attention to those who survive, we fail to account for base rates and end up misunderstanding how selection processes actually work. The base rate is the probability of a given result we can expect from a sample, expressed as a percentage. If you play roulette, for example, you can be expected to win one out of 38 games, or 2.63%, which is the base rate. The problem arises when we mistake the winners for the rule and not the exception. People like Gates, Lamichhane, and the Beatles are anomalies at one end of a distribution curve. While there is much to learn from them, it would be a mistake to expect the same results from doing the same things. (Farnam St)


From an interesting article by Ferguson:

Part of the confusion regarding gender identity likely comes from the preference among some scholars to characterize gender as an external, behavioral performance “negotiated with” or perhaps enforced by social structures. If we think of gender as the internalized perception of maleness or femaleness (e.g. “I am a man/woman/non-binary”), the evidence suggests it is biological in origin. Specifically, a region of the brain called the hypothalamus appears to differ between males and females so that having a structure that is similar to typical female brains makes one feel female. Testosterone exposure in utero appears to be a critical factor in these developing brain differences, which means that male and female brains are essentially different from birth.

In transsexual/transgendered individuals, irregular degrees of hormone exposure appear to create what is, quite literally, a woman’s brain in a man’s body or vice versa. There are certainly still nuances and ongoing research into the process by which this occurs, but as one scholarly group put it, “There is no evidence that one’s postnatal social environment plays a crucial role in gender identity or sexual orientation.” It should be noted that it isn’t possible to conduct ethical randomly controlled experiments on human fetuses, but the confluence of animal experiments and correlational studies in humans comes as close to a causal model as we can get. For most individuals a sense of gender constancy begins in early childhood and remains stable for the lifespan.

So, our internal perception of maleness or femaleness is largely innate? The truth is, we are inching along in a new and unexplored field where the basic atmosphere should be caution, not exuberance.

All archaeologists agree that the Roman artifacts dug up around Tucson, Arizona, are a hoax. Everyone agrees that there was no Roman colony of “Calalus” in North America that did battle with the Toltec Indians before finally being defeated in the 9th century AD. But who buried dozens of carefully-forged “crosses, swords, religious/ceremonial paraphernalia containing Hebrew and Latin inscriptions, pictures of temples, leaders portraits, angels, and a dinosaur inscribed on the lead blade of a sword” around Tucson during the 1920s to make it look like there was?

And a related, astonishing story: There is a local clinic that holds children for parents in some short term difficulty like health or job logistic problem. The children are age from newborn to 6 years and can stay as long as 7 days. Each child is given a nametag and a pronoun preference assigned by the parent. The majority pronoun is "They."

Today the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. There is always some talk in Europe, and especially the UK, as to America's contribution to WW2 so Churchill's response to the news of the Pearl Harbor attack is instructive: He said, "So, we win after all."

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Uh oh. Data from the meta-analysis by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek (2018), published in Science – summarizes food’s share of total emissions and breaks it down by source. Food is responsible for approximately 26% of global GHG emissions.: