My two-for-Tuesday morning train reads:
• Nearing Peak, U.S. Home Price Gains to Slow (Barron’s) see also Housing Bubble? Despite Rising Prices, Most Economists Still Say No (Real Time Economics)
• Here’s a Few Facts and Charts That Gold Bugs Might Not Like: Should you be holding gold? (Bloomberg) see also Hulbert: This bear market in gold still has too many bulls (MarketWatch)
• McDonald’s Global Sales Have Fallen Every Month for the Last Year (Slate)
• What you need to know about the NOAA global warming faux pause paper (Guardian) see also Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus (Science)
• Apple’s WWDC By The Numbers (Buzzfeed) see also Apple Unveils Apple Music, New Software, puts spotlight on music streaming service, news app at its developers conference (WSJ)
Interest rates: natural or artificial?
The debate about who is responsible for the low level of interest rates that has prevailed in most economies over the last years heated up when Ben Bernanke wrote a series of blog posts on what determines interest rates. He argued, once again, that it is the global dynamics of saving and investment …that created a downward trend in interest rates starting in the mid 90s …
…there are two very simple facts that provide strong support to the Bernanke hypothesis on why interest rates are (naturally) low:
1. Interest rates are low everywhere in the world.
2. Inflation remains low everywhere in the world.
These two facts are very difficult to square with a world where the US federal reserve is keeping interest rates artificially low for many years.
Re: NOAA’s faux pause:
I have trained junior engineers for years to “Always trust your data but never trust your data”
Too many people are willing to simply toss inconvenient outliers without much thought. Outliers are often an indicator that there is something you don’t understand about the system or it is more variable than you think. So you have to double-check any outliers that you want to toss from your data set. I generally remove them only if I find that there is actually a real error – otherwise you develop false confidence.
On the other hand, it is important to go through your dataset in general, even the stuff that looks good on the surface, to search for systematic errors and biases since they tend to move the means and therefore your fundamental design parameters. In my field, there are numerous known biases in different types of sampling and testing, so certain types of tests will generally be on either the high or low side – this appears to be the case with the various types of ocean temperature measurements. Similarly, you can have somebody simply collecting the data wrong, but the same way, which can bias or invalidate an entire dataset.
Didn’t the McKinney, Texas, police officer know he was being recorded? http://wapo.st/1dt4tWJ Hope Solo’s half-sister, new documents reveal ugly details of domestic violence incident http://wapo.st/1HYYNfc Goal! she’s no Ray Rice, no camera no cry
I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me (wtvox http://bit.ly/1F6cJC0 ) Leaked Northwestern University Email States Rules For Title IX Investigations (popehat http://bit.ly/1HYZNjn)
Last Time Warriors Was In Finals They Lost Home-Court Advantage to the Ice Follies, Big Bird http://nyti.ms/1Ql9GSq so Steph goes 5 for 20 something, and Riley is a no show at the presser
new cultural wars, don’t tread on me vs don’t hurt my feelings
Re: Drought is bearing fruit for Washington wineries
As somebody who deals with earthwork construction in Upstate NY, I know that summers that are very good for earthwork construction will usually be very good years for Finger Lakes and Niagara Peninsula red wines due to the hot dry summer.
You generally won’t find those very good NY and Ontario reds in the wine stores because they sell out at the wineries, where they don’t have to pay the middleman. Instead, you will find the reislings etc. in the wine stores that are good most years and are bottled in much higher volumes.
Silcon Valley sounds like the NRA.
“…While he acknowledged tech companies’ efforts to protect Americans’ civil liberties, Earnest, responding to a reporter’s question, added that the companies “would not want to be in a position in which their technology is being deployed to aid and abet somebody who’s planning to carry out an act of violence.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/r-exclusive-us-tech-industry-appeals-to-obama-to-keep-hands-off-encryption-2015-6
Silicon Valley doesn’t care about the violence its products might assist. They care about THEIR PROFITS.
and its not like just the government has been ignoring peoples privacy.
Fallacies considered in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (courtesy of thebrowser.com)
In modern fallacy studies it is common to distinguish formal and informal fallacies. Formal fallacies are those readily seen to be instances of identifiable invalid logical forms such as undistributed middle and denying the antecedent. Although many of the informal fallacies are also invalid arguments, it is in generally thought to be more profitable, both from the points of view of recognition and understanding, to bring their weaknesses to light through analyses that do not involve appeal to formal languages. For this reason it has become the practice to eschew the symbolic language of formal logic in the analysis of these fallacies; hence the term ‘informal fallacy’ has gained wide currency. In the following essay, which is in four parts, it is what is considered the informal-fallacy literature that will be reviewed.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fallacies/
Canada has made its long form census voluntary with disastrous results.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/scrapping-of-long-form-census-causing-long-term-issues-for-business-groups/article22846497/
The Republicans are trying to do the same.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/republicans-try-to-rein-in-the-census-bureau/395210/
What is happening to the water in Kansas?
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/08/kansas_governor_sam_brownback_threatens_to_defund_judiciary_if_it_rules.html
Hoping for a shortened election cycle in the USA (like the 6 weeks in Britain)? It’s very unlikely to happen. As this article shows, there are simply too many organizations/industries making money off of political campaigns!
—————
How Do Presidential Candidates Spend $1 Billion?
It involves plenty of ad buys, big payouts to contractors and some help from super PACS.
By Stephanie Stamm
Four years ago, Barack Obama spent $750 million to secure a second term in the White House. For comparison, that’s enough money to send a man to the moon.
As the long march to 2016 begins—14 candidates declared, more coming soon—analysts already expect total fundraising to break records. But how can one campaign possibly spend that much money?
To answer that question, National Journal used data from the Federal Election Commission and The Center For Responsive Politics to break down President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign expenditures.
As it turns out, campaigns spend money on a lot of things: everything from event spaces to travel to consulting—not to mention advertising and video production. Thanks to the Center, we can translate often-fuzzy Federal Election Commission filings into consistent categories to see the bigger picture.
What we found: Elections are all about advertising. A few companies receive the lion’s share of campaign funds. This cycle independent expenditures by super PACs are poised to shoot higher than ever—possibly outspending campaigns.
Most of the money is spent on advertising
….
http://www.nationaljournal.com/2016-elections/how-do-presidential-candidates-spend-1-billion-20150608
The way that parliamentary systems have short election is by having random election dates and by separating the vote from the leader from the vote for the party.
Parliamentary governments like Britain and Canada call elections when the ruling party is comfortable with their poll numbers, they lose a “non-confidence vote” (several votes, like budget votes are automatically non-confidence votes – the budget gets voted down and they call an election), or they reach the end of the maximum period without a vote (usually 5 years). Once Parliament is dissolved, then the election is generally held about 6 weeks later. as a result, there is no fixed calendar that people can plan around a decade in advance – an election can come out of nowhere.
Meanwhile, the party leaderships are held in separate campaigns internal to the parties at a convention without primaries, straw pools, caucuses etc. The conventions rarely line up with the general elections. In the general election, the parties put up their leadership slate to run the party but each of them has to be elected in their own right to a seat (very embarrassing when the leader can’t win a seat, but it happens). The parties with the most seats wins the right to form a government and name the Prime Minister. Under this system, John Boehner would be the Prime Minister for the US (equivalent to President).
an interesting thing about parliamentary systems is that each party that is not in the majority has its won shadow cabinet, where individuals are named to party leadership posts mimicking the ruling Cabinet. As a result, when a different party wins the election, everybody just slides into the Cabinet roles that they have been shadowing – it doesn’t take months of hearings and votes to assemble a cabinet – it is in place the day after the election.
besides it makes it so that they can get the money, and it makes it a lot easier to time your political moves so they coincide with an election
so hospitals can over charge some ? wonder who that would be?
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/06/hospitals-that-charge-1000-more-than-they-should/395099/
Nixon had a “Secret Plan” and Now Jeb has one too.
http://www.chron.com/news/politics/article/Bush-to-call-for-closer-economic-security-ties-6315242.php
Why don’t the GOP tell us their secret plans? It’s so secret.
Is he going to get W to don a flight jacket and lead the Marines in?
dont they all? they just wont say it is till they get elected, but its a hum dinger of a plan
corruption in the us?
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/06/corruption-america-60-minutes-poll
seems kinds of whishy washy
More proof of GOP intransigence.
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2015/06/republican-ex-members-of-congress-still-only-willing-to-complain-about-congress.html.
As if we didn’t know how whacked out they are.