dlakelan

dlakelan, 1 day 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, 1 day 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, 2 days ago to random

I give you civilian labor force with a disability (16yo or older)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01074597

dlakelan, 3 days ago to random

@GhostOnTheHalfShell @economics@a.gup.pe

Here's a post I made this morning at Gelman's blog explaining why much of what's published by Economists in the media is gaslighting because it fundamentally fails to address the question of interest by failing to form an appropriate dimensionless ratio to answer the question: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/05/17/how-to-think-about-the-effect-of-the-economy-on-political-attitudes-and-behavior/#comment-2372708

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, 4 days ago to random

This article describes a day in the life of an average first world person just swatting rent seekers out of the way wholesale while trying to do the very basic everyday stuff... It hits home hard. I boosted the post where i first saw it as well

https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/

dlakelan, 5 days ago to random

Holy shit, if you are following @economics@a.gup.pe you really need to go read https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-bowman-the-10-10-event-origins-of-an-economic-meltdown

I take issue with some of his claims but this is literally the first piece of writing which addresses the concerns I have about our economy in a plausible way going back to about WWII. The real problem is that no one is talking about the problem.

dlakelan, 5 days ago to random

Just put this song on constant repeat until further notice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NXnxTNIWkc

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, 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, 12 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, 12 days ago to Economics

Gelman's blog asked the question "is it really just the economy stupid?"... A long discussion occurred. One economist I respect (Dale Lehman) argued from official statistics that the "real income" of the bottom 10% of nominal income has gone up in recent years. I argued based on a fixed uniform weighted CPI that it had gone down. Further discussion ensued. 1/ #economics @economics@a.gup.pe

dlakelan, 14 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, 15 days ago to Weather

Is there like an open-data peer to peer weather sensor network and an app that I can hook up to it to get local weather conditions? And if not, why the heck not? #weather #opendata #peertopeer #fediverse

dlakelan, 15 days ago to random

The Road The Serfdom, The Road to Freedom, both seem to get it wrong. The reason for fascism is The State. The whole purpose of The State is to put powerful people in charge of everyone else. What kind of economic system you adopt within The State is relevant, but only basically to the taste of the boot.

The Road To Freedom is... eliminating the "big bosses in charge of everything".
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/05/07/1249203297/neoliberal-economics-the-road-to-freedom-or-authoritarianism

dlakelan, 16 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, 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, 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, 19 days ago to random

Wow, I was busy yesterday and so missed Andrew Gelman's post from yesterday, but man is it relevant to the other stuff I've posted this morning:

"
[Scientific Bullshitters are] committed to the entire enterprise, just as politicians that lie are enabled by members of their party who presumably think that their larger causes will suffer if they were to confront the lies. To be upset about the bullshit would require giving up too much.
"

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/05/05/on-lying-politicians-and-bullshitting-scientists/

dlakelan, 19 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, 20 days ago to random

https://www.cjcj.org/reports-publications/report/california-law-enforcement-agencies-are-spending-more-but-solving-fewer-crimes

California police spend about 1.5x as much per capita in constant CPI adjusted dollars as they did in 1990 but they solve only 0.6x the fraction of cases.

Meanwhile on the UCLA campus...

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, 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...

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, 25 days ago to random

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/04/concerning-spread-of-bird-flu-from-cows-to-cats-suspected-in-texas/

This ars technica story sounds horrific. Apparently farm cats who drank H5N1 contaminated raw milk got infections that spread to their brain and died.