dlakelan

dlakelan, 2 days ago to socialism

So, every other subthread is someone talking #capitalism this and #socialism that with very poor commonality of definitions. So here's one to try on for size:

Capitalism: a system of economics in which the state determines through threat of violence a special group of people who have exclusive say in how capital goods are used.

That covers for example both the USA, and USSR pretty well. any other capitalist countries we'd like to discuss?

dlakelan, 18 days ago to random

So I started a mild side quest on Andrew Gelmans blog, where they are discussing Trump and politicians and started discussing deficit spending and such. I wrote several long posts describing how I think deficit spending drove inequality through amplifying the money supply and concentrating it into the hands of wealthy capitalists. I discuss debt and money creation and link to stuff I've found here from some of you #mmt types. https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/05/05/on-lying-politicians-and-bullshitting-scientists/#comment-2371714 and related comments @djl

dlakelan, 27 days ago to random

People seem to be confusing the ideas of #MMT with some of the stupidest straw men imaginable. At its core, modern monetary theory appears to say nothing more than that the amount of money in the system is the total amount spent by the govt minus the total amount taxed, maybe plus a constant.
The second part is that the price of a basket of consumer goods will increase when the quantity avg citizens demand given available money exceeds the quantity being produced.
@economics@a.gup.pe

dlakelan, 1 month ago to random

The last few days I had some conversations with some very interesting fediverse Anarchists. It made me ask the question "If there is an overwhelmingly popular idea, but you have to convince 100% of people, how big is the biggest group that has much chance to succeed?" This graph is relevant and I'll explain below.

dlakelan, 19 days ago to statistics

Here's the logical structure of what you will be taught in terms of #statistics as a masters student in pretty much any #science field.

If MY DATA is a sample from two random number generators of PARTICULAR TYPE, and MY TEST has a small p value then MY FAVORITE EXPLANATION FOR THE DIFFERENCES IS TRUE.

This is, quite simply, a logical fallacy. The first thing wrong is that your data IS NOT a sample from a random number generator of that particular type. So we can ignore the rest logically.

dlakelan, 25 days ago to random

I'm against student loan forgiveness, not because I'm against giving the money out... but because I'm against giving it out only to student loan debtors. Here's the idea... give everyone equally a #UBI and let the people with student loans repay it from there. I'm ok with limiting interest rates too, and rolling back capitalization of back interest... totally fine with that. But if we're creating money out of thin air and giving it to anyone, it should 100% be equally distributed.

dlakelan, 7 days ago to Economics

@economics@a.gup.pe #economics #mmt #money

Steve Keen discusses the money creation mechanisms here https://profstevekeen.substack.com/p/why-are-economists-trying-to-hide

A thing I think he doesn't give enough attention to is the role the Fed DOES play. The Fed indirectly controls bank lending rate through a couple mechanisms. The first is whatever rules it has for declaring a bank solvent. They've eliminated reserve requirements but now it's something like a stress test or whatever. A bank can't keep lending

dlakelan, 15 days ago to random

Read a thread about hiring processes and corporations etc. It make me think about how incredibly much smaller the ideal company size is than the companies we work for today. Has anyone ever noticed how incredibly productive Anarchist groups of open source software developers are compared to... Google/Facebook/IBM/Microsoft/Whatever? Like, the Slashdot software was written by a couple of guys, Mastodon by a couple of guys, Git was created by Linus Torvalds and passed off to a few tens of people?

dlakelan, 17 days ago to random

@economics@a.gup.pe

Deficit spending, good, bad, or it depends? #mmt people seem to promote the idea that we can just deficit spend until the limit of inflation. This seems to me to be a wrong headed idea. On the one hand, it makes a huge difference what you spend on. Wars and subsidies for bad businesses vs housing, infrastructure, or quality scientific research for example. But the second point is that once you put money into the system it tends

dlakelan, 9 days ago to statistics

So I'm probably going to be nerd sniped into developing a Jupyter notebook to examine the question of how well are mid income families 2 adults and 2 kids doing relative to how well their parents were doing 30 years earlier. I'm going to use a dirichlet prior over the weights on a 5 item CPI based expense index. The missing part is paired nominal earnings of people and their parents... Anyone know a dataset #statistics #data #economics @economics@a.gup.pe

dlakelan, 1 month ago to random

The Ratio of CPI all-items to the equal weighted average of 5 items: rent, food, transport, childcare, energy.

When this goes down it means the 5 item index grows faster than the "overall average index" (ie. "families real needs becoming more expensive faster than the CPI suggests"). When it goes up it means that other expenses outside of family core needs go up faster.

dlakelan, 1 month ago to Teachers

Have any of you ever read r/Teachers on Reddit? Shit is WILD over there. Like, my kids come home from 7th and 8th grade and talk about how there are 7th graders who just can't read and I'm like "my kid is exaggerating" and then there's actual damn TEACHERs talking to each other saying "Shit my kids can't read like just CAN'T"... and it's apparently stuff teachers have been saying for around 10 yrs... In about 5-10 years our society is going to collapse as far as I can see. #teachers #education

dlakelan, 1 month ago to random

It doesn't matter how many economists insist that everything is looking rosy and Bright... Lived experience is people are doing worse at affording the things that matter. This graph shows median income relative to a uniform weighted rent,food,childcare,transportation, and energy index.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1kgII

dlakelan, 1 month ago to random

Just had a long talk with my poor overworked wife about my realization that when it comes to research, Universities are just rent-seeking middlemen. There is no reason why researchers should be EMPLOYEES of Universities (other than historical accident). In fact, Universities, which are big capital holders funded by the govt should be employed BY researchers and competing to provide researchers with quality facilities at competitive prices.

dlakelan, 27 days ago to random

While we are talking about bullshit. Let's convert the #stockmarket to once-per-second call auctions. High frequency trading is a huge waste of resources and incentivizes a lot of technological bullshit to get millisecond or even hundred microsecond latency for no worthwhile social purpose. I have yet to hear any convincing argument that a call auction every 1 second would be worse than the bullshit we have now. In fact it would seem to be unambiguously better.

dlakelan, 22 days ago to random

So following on @GhostOnTheHalfShell 's recent post to @economics@a.gup.pe

How is it that the growth of economic sectors gets "funded"? The answer is this: banks create money and give it to whoever they think will return them the interest. This is, almost always, "buddies" of the bankers. If the banks turn out to be wrong, and the banks are small, their assets will be written down in bankruptcy and they'll be bought by bigger banks at a fraction on the dollar.

dlakelan, 4 months ago to random

I should just order a T-shirt that says "chief yak shaver".

dlakelan, 20 days ago to science

Here it is people. A PhD student describing details of what they've come to realize is the completely scientifically bankrupt methodologies their high-powered successful, well funded lab PI demands the lab members do. Everything this person says is basically commonplace in todays labs #science #openscience #statistics #bayesian

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhD/comments/1cksfmd/i_realised_that_my_pi_and_research_group/

dlakelan, 5 months ago to linux

#Linux IT #network engineering types. I've got a moderately complicated home network. It consists of a home VLAN, a guest VLAN, a private VLAN (cameras no internet routing), and VPN connections to 3 other sites (mother, in-laws, and sister). What are some relatively easy to set up tools for monitoring this stuff and getting visibility into things like what machines are on the network, whether a VPN connection is down, how much bandwidth is being used, etc? Must be #IPv6 native!

dlakelan, 10 months ago to random

#quarto hive mind. I'm working on a project where I want to generate graphs in Julia but I don't want to show any of the code that generates the graph. The point of the project is to discuss how to do mathematical models without reference to any particular kind of code, so I want to plot data, but not distract the reader with syntax. Are there options to include "hidden" cells to do the plots, but still show the graphical output?

dlakelan, 2 days ago to random

In this random comment on Gelman's blog I describe how @SaintPeter and I broke into the field of "industrial mathematics" LOL

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/05/23/gpt-today-jokes-and-buffons-needle-in-python-with-plotting/#comment-2372790

dlakelan, 4 days ago to random

I can't emphasis enough the point that exp(t)/(exp(t) + exp((1-epsilon)t)) ~ 1 for large t and any positive epsilon.

This may seem obscure but it's the problem with "capitalism" as we know it. Even in an infinite world where wealth grows exponentially forever, eventually the person with the epsilon larger growth rate than everyone else owns everything.

Add in political power and finite resources and it just happens faster.

dlakelan, 9 months ago to random

In my book I'm writing a chapter on using integration to build models. In that chapter I make an analogy to the split-apply-combine idea in data analysis. For example, you could split up a population of people by age, apply a risk function for cancer to each age, then integrate across age to get a total combined rate of new cancer diagnoses. A lot of models in science are like this, a thing varies a bunch so we split it up, apply some function, and integrate it back together.

dlakelan, 13 days ago to random

If you take the population and divide by the rate of housing starts per year, you get a quantity in dimensions of time and units of years. This quantity roughly speaking is related to the "longevity of a dwelling" you need to have in order for the housing per person that's available not to decline. So if real longevity of houses is more or less a constant, then when this graph is high housing availability is declining, and when it's low it's growing... There's a reason millennials feel cheated

dlakelan, 23 days ago to random

Seriously how profitable are investments in Israel that universities don't want to divest badly enough that they are willing to ghoulishly bring in police to fire baton rounds at peaceful 20 year olds? They will be on the wrong side of history and be eventually immortalized on the walls of the university halls as the people who fucked up... But they'll be responsible for 3% increase of the endowment!

I can't even...