Why not to freak out about government debt

Great explanation from a redittor on why sovereign debt is different from household debt - and why not to freak out about the $52,000 per capita debt that the US holds right now. The way a fiat currency is structured, debt is an essential part of the process for creating money. Which is not saying the government should go off and spend money like there is no tomorrow (like certain wars that really were discretionary), but the point essentially is that elimination of debt is not the central goal for the government - a healthy economy that is growing, will necessarily have increasing debt as it grows. The goal of government is to invest in projects that will grow the economy long term.

How research philosophies collide.

 The unseen battle that was taking place among dueling philosophies amongst practitioners of public health and evidence based medicine during the pandemic. 

Couple of writings on AI and AGI

•  Do LLMs reason?
• From Goutham Kurra
• We're all stochastic parrots. What AI can teach us about being human.
• How to master just about anything. Effortless mastery through eastern philosophy, cognitive science, and AI.
• Cory Doctorow: What kind of bubble is AI? Will AI be able to address high risk / low fault tolerant applications or will it be limited to low risk high fault tolerant ones? What happens if it cant?

Jay Kaspian Kang on Asian-ness

 Stream of consciousness writing - but quite captivating.

Pseudoscience, Media and the Republic

This election cycle has been a disaster and there is enough disillusionment to go around but the one that surely stands out is the quackery of Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight.com) and the rest of the pollsters. Their punditry based on false precision and illusion of scientific-ness created complacency on the left and they were left completely blind sided on the momentum of the anti-establishment support.

Taleb has been calling out the stupidity of these idiots for a while, but did anyone in the media pay attention? No. Any critique that requires complex thought and nuanced explanation they have pretty much wiped their hands off of - why bother explaining complex structural problems when its so much easier to write a headline about "Grab them by the p****" and generate tons of shares, likes, and clicks?

What is alarming isn't that they were wrong but that these idiots underestimated their error rate.
Similar to p-valhttps://t.co/NqbKZhqhoG https://t.co/UqjmzraaeV

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 10, 2016

How do you forecast an election (cluelessness of @FiveThirtyEight )
PRELIM DRAFThttps://t.co/8jpBGEa0QJ pic.twitter.com/MdKI0ecrfZ

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 9, 2016

Time to laugh at "Intellectuals".
https://t.co/tQbaCuwLuB

— NassimNicholasTaleb (@nntaleb) November 9, 2016

Focusing Illision

From "Thinking Fast and Slow" :
"Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it."

I lost my mind in San Francisco

Everything we love and hate about the city, profiled in an article about the housing crisis in SF .

Risky Business

The difference between how scientists and the population perceive descriptions of risk - a matter of life and death. A cautionary tale from Italy.

Reflections on minimum wage.

Every couple of years, this drama plays out. There is a call for a hike to the minimum wage, the democrat talking heads posture it as helping the poor, the republicans paint it as a burden on the business. Lost among all the shouting is a serious analysis on what it does. I was on the fence on this, as something that did not make sense, but did not have significantly destructive effects.

Now a report from the CBO makes me reconsider. The current hike is expected to cost the economy half a million jobs through 2016. If the analysis is correct (and it seems to be), then we are at a stage where we should no longer support this nonsensical drama.

From a pure demand/supply point of view, the minimal wage did not made sense and would never be implemented in pure market economies . The government is setting the price for labor, and what that does is push a certain class of jobs out of the economy. If there is a retiree who is willing to work as a librarian for $5/hour, or an out of work individual willing to work in a new field where he would not be productive for $7/hour - these folks would not be allowed to work even if there was an opportunity and they were willing. So those kinds of jobs are lost.

On the benefit side, those that have jobs that pay the minimum wage - everyone across the board gets a raise, regardless of whether they are adding value or not. And if they are not, presumably the business owners would cut those positions as well. Those that get to keep their jobs get a higher salary - and they are net better off, but it is not without a cost to those that are lower on the ladder. The report mentions that a third of the benefits would go to families that earn three time the poverty levels, and only 19% goes to the families that are below the threshold.

This is a perfect example of a blunt instrument - something that is implemented across the board, with uneven benefits and costs,  and leaves the system worse than before. The reason it gets repeated every couple years, is that (1) politicians can point to it and claim that they are helping the poor and (2) it is easy to implement. Another victim of the news cycle that is based on talking points rather than nuanced analysis. 

The fences are for sheep, not for snakes ...

Make no mistake - any competent terrorist will not be using hotmail and skype to broadcast their plans. The surveillance infrastructure is best used for spying on law abiding citizens.

And if you think you are a law abiding citizen who has nothing to fear from surveillance, understand that with the proliferation of legislation that gets enacted without anyone even reading bills, the average US citizen commits three felonies a day. The day you run afoul of the rulers, the all seeing eye will surely focus its gaze on everything stored about you in the massive government data warehouse of warehouses.

Maybe the government is going about doing this the right way, and they have our best interests in mind. But the key issue is that they are not transparent about what they are doing.

Bruce Schneider: "Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state."

The internet is built on American platforms and the country has done extraordinarily well in capitalizing on this - but if the rest of the countries of the world, many of whom have a higher standards for privacy, do not trust the US it will create opportunities for others to provide secure options for communications, and the american economy will pay a price for it (not unlike the $10 we pay for each air ticket to sponsor the security theater that goes on).

As prof Lessig argues in Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace - the internet is not an unregulatable place of freedom, but can be architected to become a place of oppressive control. Unsophisticated governments may resort to such crude tactics as shutting it down, the moderately intelligent but ultimately ignorant ones have more sly tactics work to shape the architecture of cyberspace so that monitoring and control become fully ingrained features, with no option for users to opt out of the constant surveillance.

Lets hold our politicians accountable, if they cannot provide oversight over the executive branch and merely serve as rubber stamps, they do not deserve our trust or our votes. Lets support entities like EFF and ACLU, that fight for our civil liberties and transparency in government. And if nothing else, lets not have this conversation die out when CNN and Foxnews get distracted by the next photogenic american tourist that disappears in a third world country. This is a time to ask questions, and make decisions on how we need to structure our society and technology to protect our civil liberties. 

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."  - Benjamin Franklin.

If you ever wonder what a poker face looks like ...

... observe Chris Moneymaker when he bluffs Sam Farha on the final heads up round.



And for the background story, read the Oral History of the 2003 WSOP - the year that broke open the floodgates for the amateurs behind the guy who had a name so outrageous that folks asked him for ID before believing him. 

How does one profile an enigma? ESPN takes a shot at profiling Lionel Messi

What do you do when your subject is reticent, inarticulate, and inaccessible? You go to places where he spent his formative years, talk to others who are more willing, and come up with some wild conjectures on what it is that drives someone who may lay claim to be the greatest football player of all time. The result is a portrait that feels somewhat incomplete and hollow - but the effort is laudable.

If nothing else, its finally great seeing content on the web break away from the jaded magazine layout and become more dynamic. Not quite as sophisticated as Snowfall by NYTimes, yet a notable step forward. This is how to fight off the Safari reader feature that threatens to strip away anything that is not purely textual content.

A compelling vignette of what is good and bad about America -

- neatly packaged in a story about a kid who wanted to bike to school.

Behind the hits - The NFL players insane injury mentality

There is something so macho, but also delusional, and ultimately tragic in how these modern day gladiators have been conditioned to think about their jobs, their bodies, and their professional colleagues.  Riveting.

Outstanding Infographic: Fatalities vs Miles Driven

NYTimes has a gorgeous graphical display that plots auto fatalities per 100K people against vehicle miles driven per capita - and annotations that tell a story behind the curve shape. Wow - way to move away from the standard time trended line graphs on two axes. 

The Inception of Adaptation

Susan Orlean's piece from the New Yorker that was the basis of the book The Orchid Thief which was the basis of the movie Adaptation which is one of my favorite movies. The site has a number of her other pieces too - stellar writing.

Meeker Report '12

The always informing and entertaining Mary Meeker strikes again - and in her target this time around: Mobile.

Mobile - yet another mountain to climb for publishers.

A ongoing saga of disruptions - first the web, then smartphones, and now tablets. A very typical (and accurate) case.

The Portrait of a Doctor as a Conflicted Immigrant

Under the uber-sensationalist title of "America is Stealing the World's Doctors", a prototypical immigrant story - frustration, opportunity, guilt, rationalization.

Cue ... Action ... Reward! How marketers use purchase data and psychology to "Target" advertisements.

Turns out while Walmart is out there optimizing logistics and cutting costs to the bone, Target has been busy building predictive analytics to figure out when to send you coupons - and hide what they know about you.

This is the new marketing - there are mountains of data and statistical tools out there that allow companies to figure out what you are up to. The new challenge is to how to use that data to drive your purchase decisions without violating your sense of privacy and fairness.