Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (April 26, 2019)
April 26, 2019: Weekly Forecasting Update: The right response to almost all economic data releases is: Nothing has changed—your view of the economic forecast today is different from what it was last week, last month, or three months ago in only minor ways. Specifically, it is still the case that...
For the Weekend: Jessie J: Domino
I would note that when Twitter blocks a Republican politician for being a Nazi, it is not making a mistake: the point of the tweet it blocks is to tiptoe up to the edge of Nazihood while still maintaining a smidgeon of implausible deniability. But algorithms are not good at detecting those speech markers meant to preserve implausible deniability: Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler: [Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too(https://motherboard.vice.com/enus/article/a3xgq5/why-wont-twitter-treat-white-supremacy-like-isis-because-it-would-mean-banning-some-republican-politicians-too)_: "A Twitter employee who works on machine learning believes that a proactive, algorithmic solution to white supremacy would also catch Republican politicians...
Vox Staff: 5 Years Of Vox, Explained by Our Staff
Lauren Williams: Vox Turns 5: "Since its launch in 2014, Vox has gone through countless changes. One thing has stayed the same... a pristine clarity of purpose that’s translated across beats, platforms, and mediums. We explain. We give the context. We go deep. We put our audience first. On Vox’s fifth anniversary, this clarity of purpose is the throughline of our best work...
Ariel Kalil, Catherine E. Born, James Kunz, and Pamela J. Caudill: Life Stressors, Social Support, and Depressive Symptoms Among First-Time Welfare Recipients
Ashley Jardina: White Identity Politics Is About More than Racism: "We can’t mask the fact that we’re also talking about the protection and preservation of whites in the United States at the expense of racial and ethnic minorities.... I make this really crisp distinction between white identity and white racial prejudice.... There are a lot of white people who do have this sense of solidarity but who wouldn’t score particularly high on any social science measure of racial prejudice. For these whites, it’s about protecting their in-group and showing some sense of favoritism.... Most... would absolutely reject any association with white supremacist organizations, and yet in some instances, they do hold a lot of the same beliefs as some of these groups...
Dao Nguyen: Cultural Cartography: "The people doing the something, reading or watching—what are they thinking?... What if, instead of tagging what articles or videos are about, what if we asked: How is it helping our users do a real job in their lives? Last year, we started a project to formally categorize our content in this way. We called it, 'cultural cartography'. It formalized an informal practice that we’ve had for a really long time: don’t just think about the subject matter; think also about, and in fact, primarily about, the job that your content is doing for the reader or the viewer...
This may well be the most insightful thing I have read last year, at least as far as its definition of conservatism is concerned: Frank Wilhoit: The Travesty of Liberalism: "There is no such thing as liberalism—or progressivism, etc. There is only conservatism. No other political philosophy actually exists; by the political analogue of Gresham’s Law, conservatism has driven every other idea out of circulation. There might be, and should be, anti-conservatism; but it does not yet exist. What would it be? In order to answer that question, it is necessary and sufficient to characterize conservatism. Fortunately, this can be done very concisely. Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: "There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"...
Too little. And too late for 2010-2016. Hopefully not too late for the next business cycle: Joseph E. Gagnon and Christopher G. Collins: Changes Are Coming to the Fed's Monetary Policy Strategy | PIIE: "The most likely outcome of the review is that the Fed will commit itself to intentionally overshooting its inflation target after episodes at the zero bound in which it has undershot the target...
Noah Smith's plan for reviving rural and small-city America is to spend a fortune establishing research universities that will attract graduate students from abroad. A good many of them will then settle where they went to school. And they will then figure out how to use local factors of production to generates value in the world economy, and so revive the area. But that would require boosterish elites in the south, in the prairie, and in the midwest. And part of the social pathology fo those regions is that they do not have boosterish elites: Paul Krugman: Getting Real About Rural America: "Nobody knows how to reverse the heartland’s decline.... Rural lives matter—we’re all Americans, and deserve to share in the nation’s wealth.... But it’s also important to get real. There are powerful forces behind the relative and in some cases absolute economic decline of rural America—and the truth is that nobody knows how to reverse those forces. Put it this way: Many of the problems facing America have easy technical solutions; all we lack is the political will. Every other advanced country provides universal health care. Affordable child care is within easy reach. Rebuilding our fraying infrastructure would be expensive, but we can afford it—and it might well pay for itself. But reviving declining regions is really hard. Many countries have tried, but it’s difficult to find any convincing success stories... Southern Italy... the former East Germany.... Maybe we could do better, but history is not on our side...
Nice to see that the very sharp Jared Bernstein of CBPP is recovering from his health misadventure, and is already saying very smart things again: Jared Bernstein: Ch-ch-ch-changes!: "GS fiscal analyst Alec Phillips... worth a close look.... One of the more important policy-driven determinants of near-term US growth is under debate right now: setting discretionary spending levels for 2020/21.... Even were Congress to agree to keep the levels of discretionary spending stable over the next few years, the impact will be a fading of fiscal stimulus on real GDP growth... When it comes to fiscal impulse, it’s not the level that matters. It’s the change. The last deal–the one that determined spending in 2018/19–went both well above the caps but, more important from an impulse perspective, went well above prior agreements.... That’s one reason to expect 2020 growth to be closer to 2 percent than 3 percent...
David Roberts: Barcelona, Spain, Urban Planning: A City’s Vision to Dig Out from Cars: "a four-square-block area, roughly 5,000 square meters, has been pedestrianized, reclaimed from cars and given over to people for a mix of uses. Only residents’ vehicles and delivery vehicles enter, and when they do, they are on the same level of pavement as pedestrians and must match their speed. We have come upon a crosswalk, with a small ramp leading to a painted pathway across the street. At the curb, there’s a trash can on one side and a lamppost on the other. The tableau is, to my eye, entirely unremarkable.... The city attempts to be comprehensible, navigable, and welcoming at a human scale, to people not in cars.... Rueda’s enthusiasm for the fine-grained texture of urban life—the spacing of trees, the height and orientation of signs, the structure of intersections—is infectious. His discourse on crosswalks comes amid a two-hour stroll filled with such details, each one revealing some new facet of the city’s logic and history, like little veils being peeled away.... I can’t help but be struck by a contrast. To one side of us is the superblock, filled with people walking with their shopping bags and small dogs, sitting in clusters, everywhere talking and talking.... Or at least they look like they’re talking. The low buzz of conversation is drowned out by what’s to our other side: cars...
Barry Ritholtz: Is 3 & 30 the new 2 & 20?: "The hedge fund industry... are the latest group to succumb to 'Winner Take All' ethos.... In 2018 'the industry saw its biggest annual loss since 2011, declining 4.1 percent on an a fund-weighted basis'.... For all but the most elite... poor performance has led to pressure from clients. Look no further than the changing nature of those fees.... With a few notable exceptions, 2 & 20 is no more. About those exceptions: the winner takes all ethos applies as much to hedge fund managers as it does to the rest of us.... Bridgewater,... Pure Alpha vehicle generate[d] 14.6 percent in gains in 2018.... D.E. Shaw... is... moving back to a fee structure of 3 percent of assets and 30 percent of profits it used throughout the aughts. Its 14 billion Composite fund, gained 11.2 percent in 2018...
"Yes" for 2000, Alex: Andrew Napolitano: Did President Trump Obstruct Justice?: " Mueller laid out at least a half-dozen crimes of obstruction committed by Trump—from asking former Deputy National Security Adviser K.T. McFarland to write an untruthful letter about the reason for Flynn's chat with Kislyak, to asking Corey Lewandowski and then-former White House Counse lDon McGahn to fire Mueller and McGahn to lie about it, to firing Comey to impede the FBI's investigations, to dangling a pardon in front of Michael Cohen to stay silent, to ordering his aides to hide and delete records.... Barr's view requires that the obstructer has done his obstructing in order to impede the investigation or prosecution of a crime that the obstructer himself has committed. Thus, in this narrow view, because Trump did not commit the crime of conspiracy with the Russians, it was legally impossible for Trump to have obstructed the FBI investigation of that crime. The nearly universal view of law enforcement, however, is that the obstruction statute prohibits all attempted self-serving interference with government investigations or proceedings.... House Democrats... know from history that impeachment only succeeds if there is a broad, national, bipartisan consensus behind it, no matter the weight of the evidence.... They might try to generate that consensus by parading Mueller's witnesses to public hearings.... The president's job is to enforce federal law. If he had ordered its violation to save innocent life or preserve human freedom, he would have a moral defense. But ordering obstruction to save himself from the consequences of his own behavior is unlawful, defenseless and condemnable...
Robert Armstrong, Oliver Ralph and Eric Platt: Warren Buffett: ‘I’m Having More Fun Than Any 88-Year-Old in the World’: "Warren Buffett. Over the past 54 years, shares in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, have outpaced the S&P 500—a broad index of American stocks—by almost 2.5 million percentage points. The degree to which Buffett has outwitted successive generations of Wall Street rivals almost defies comprehension. It is striking, then, that over the past decade Buffett has fallen behind. A dollar invested in Berkshire 10 years ago is worth about 2.40; the same dollar in an S&P 500 tracker fund is worth 3.20. More striking still is what Buffett says about this.... 'I think this: if you want to join something that may have a tiny expectation of better [performance] than the S&P, I think we may be about the safest'.... Every working day, $100m rolls into Berkshire—cash from its subsidiaries, dividends from its shares, interest from its treasuries. Something must be done with it all. The porridge is starting to overrun the house.... If the problem is too much money, a natural response would be to get rid of some. Companies do this all the time: they pay dividends or sell off business units. Why not get smaller, so that Berkshire can get back to producing outsized returns?... The only way Buffett will countenance reducing the company’s massive pile of shareholder equity is to buy back shares when they are selling at a price he thinks is lower than their true value.... But what happens when Berkshire’s shares are trading at a fair price, and companies and stocks look expensive too? 'That’s my nightmare', Buffett says...
Adam Parkhomenko: @AdamParkhomenko: "Is this a joke? We paid North Korea to torture an American to death? Trump paid them to torture an American to death and then 'fell in love' with the monster who sent the bill: Abby D. Phillip: @abbydphillip: 'The US reportedly agreed to pay a $2 million "bill" for the care of Otto Warmbier, who was returned to the US in a coma and later died...
Murray Waas: Mueller Prosecutors: Trump Did Obstruct Justice: "Prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded... that they had sufficient evidence to seek criminal charges against President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice.... The two prosecutors disclosed this information in then-confidential conversations with two other federal law enforcement officials, who subsequently recounted what they were told to me.... Without consulting with Mueller, Attorney General William Barr declared that in the absence of a final judgment by Mueller as to whether or not the president broke the law, he, the attorney general, had taken it upon himself to make that determination.... Many... have questioned the propriety and legitimacy of Barr’s making such a decision...
Charles Gaba: GOP Senator Openly Admits Millions of Americans Are Only Alive Thanks to Democrats, and that Republicans Are Still Trying to Kill Them: "I've included the transcript below, but words can't accurately describe the tone of voice or the body language of Grassley in the actual video, so I'll just urge everyone to watch it.... This is... absolutely stunning. In the space of less than two minutes, Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (1) Admits that the ACA may be repealed due to a lawsuit brought by fellow Republicans, (2) Admits that he personally voted to repeal the ACA seven times, (3) Declares that it's not going to be repealed now even though he just admitted that it could be, (4) Yells at, berates and mocks a woman for wanting to know why he keeps trying to kill her, (5) Openly admits that the only reason she's alive today is because every Democratic Senator (plus 3 Republicans, one of whom is now dead) voted against repeal the last time around, (6) Openly admits that the only thing keeping her alive today is the fact that Democrats retook the House of Representatives, (7) Shrugs her off when she points out that he and his fellow Congressional Republicans are still trying to kill her. I'm not sure what else to say about this, except elections have consequences...
Flavio Copes: The CSS Handbook: "A handy guide to CSS for developers...
Manton Reece: Video hosting in Micro.blog | Micro.blog: Podcasting + Video Hosting
Wikipedia: Tocharian languages
Rotten Tomatoes: Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Wikipedia: Venus Anadyomene
Wikipedia: Isla Mujeres
Berggruen Institute: Nils Gilman: VP for Programs
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