Journal


Posts

18-Mar-2024 United Airlines Problems Not all problems with Boeing airplanes are because of Boeing design and manufacturing problems. Some of them seem to be poor maintenance from United (and some of the airplanes below are from Airbus):

6-Feb-2024 United Flight 1539 (Boeing 737-8) from from Nassau to Newark experienced a stuck rudder pedal during landing.
4-Mar-2024 United Flight 1118 (Boeing 737-900) from from Houston to Florida returned to Houston and made an emergency landing after one of its engines caught fire midair. An investigation found that bubble wrap had been sucked into the engine.
7-Mar-2024 United Flight 35 (Boeing 777-200) from SFO to Osaka diverted to LAX after a tire fell off during takeoff.
8-Mar-2024 United Flight 2477 (737 Max 8) from Memphis to Houston had the airplane roll off the runway after landing at George Bush Intercontinental Airport
8-Mar-2024 United Flight 821 (Airbus 320) from SFO to Mexico City diverted to LAX because of an leak in the aircraft's hydraulic system.
11-Mar-2024 United Flight 830 (Boeing 777-300) from Sydney to SFO returned to Sydney because of a hydrolic issue (initially reported as leaking fuel).
14-Mar-2024 United Flight 1816 (Airbus 320) from Dallas Fort Worth to SFO encountered a hydrolic leak as it neared its destination. It landed safely.
15-Mar-2024 United Flight 433 (Boeing 737-824) from SFO to Rogue Valley International Medford Airport in Oregon was discovered upon arrival to have has the wing-to-body fairing ripped off during the flight.

What may be happening is the following:
  • In an attempt to increase financial results the airlines (and most other companies) look for expenses that aren't providing value. Modern skyscrapers, for example, weigh substantially less per square foot than the Empire State Building. This weight savings can turn into cost savings because modern skyscrapers require less materials. This makes them more affordable.


    Example: The Empire State Building has about 2.7 million square feet of office space and weighs about 365,000 tons. World Trade Center Towers 1 & 2 each weighed about 500,000 tons (so about 37% more) but had around 9 million square feet of office space. Each Twin Tower required about 40% of the raw materials to construct per square foot of office space as the Empire State Building.

  • The only realistic way to determine if an expense is unnecessary is to try reducing or eliminating it.

  • You discover you went too far when things start to break (e.g. things start leaking when they should not or things fall off). Sometimes it is easy to back up (e.g. if a grocery store experiments with thinner checkout bags it can back up a bit once the bags get thin enough that they break too much). Other times it is difficult (e.g. once one has hired a lot of people who are lax about quality it will be difficult to 'turn on' a culture that values quality).

  • The incentives in modern corporations are for management to push the envelope when trying to cut costs. The benefits (the company has more money) are tangible and near term. The costs are less obvious and longer term.

  • In addition, the way modern corporate financial incentives work, the bonus for cost savings arrives NOW. If the costs appear far enough in the future then the managers responsible for the problem will be gone and it will be someone else's problem. Even if the decision, on balance and over time costs the company a lot of money, it can still result in bonus checks for the people responsible.
Alternately, the problem may just be that United fired about 25% of its workforce in the early days of Covid — 96,000 employees in 2019 vs 74,400 in 2020. If the firing was fairly uniform (same percentage of pilots, FAs, baggage handlers and maintenance technicians) then when United tried to ramp back up (92,795 employees in 2022) it may have had to hire a lot of newer and less skilled/experienced maintenance folks.
14-Mar-2024 NFL QB Stories Each NFL off-season has a number of quarterback stories. This is an attempt to provide a quantitative framework to examine them. For the most part the framework shows why each story is the way it is.

The basic idea is to look at a rate statistic and a counting statistic for each QB.

The rate statistic will show how well the QB played when he played. Being injured (or suspended or benched) won't hurt a QB's Passer Rating but the QB isn't contributing to team wins while not playing.

The counting statistic is intended to show how much the QB contributed to total wins. A slighly worse QB who plays an entire season will have better counting stats than a slightly better QB who plays only part of a season. The initial counting statistic is "Average Value."

The last seven seasons look like this for a number of QBs.

Passer Rating (Rate Statistic) AV (Counting Statistic)
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023
DeShaun Watson 103.0 103.1 98.0 112.4 79.1 84.2 7 16 16 16 4 4
Baker Mayfield 93.7 78.8 95.9 83.1 79.0 94.6 10 11 14 10 6 13
Kirk Cousins 93.8 99.7 107.4 105.0 103.1 92.5 103.8 12 12 14 14 13 13 7
Brock Purdy 107.3 113.0 6 18
Lamar Jackson 84.5 113.3 99.3 87.0 91.1 102.7 8 *25 18 11 12 *19
Patrick Mahomes 113.8 105.3 108.2 98.5 105.2 92.6 *2217 17 18 *19 15
Aaron Rodgers 97.2 97.6 95.4 121.5 111.9 91.1 6 13 14 *18 *15 13
Tom Brady 102.8 97.7 88.0 102.2 102.1 90.7 *20 14 12 15 16 10
Kyler Murray 87.4 94.3 100.6 87.2 89.4 14 16 16 8 8
Jalen Hurts 77.6 87.2 101.5 89.1 4 17 20 18
Dak Prescott 86.6 96.9 99.7 99.6 104.2 91.1 105.9 13 14 15 6 14 11 19
Josh Allen 67.9 85.3 107.2 92.2 96.6 92.2 6 11 18 19 20 18
Russell Wilson 95.4 110.9 106.3 105.1 103.1 84.4 98.0 15 14 15 17 12 9 12
We can see many stories confirmed by the statistics:
  • DeShaun Watson was really good from the very beginning (his Passer Rating started high and stayed high for his first four years). He played only about ½ the games his rookie year and provided a lot of value the next three years when he was the starter. He was benched for a year because sexual assault allegations. After he was traded he wasn't very effective (low Passer Rating) and didn't play a lot, contributing to low AV.

  • Lamar Jackson is up and down, but awesome when healthy in the regular season.

  • Dak Prescott is a great regular season quarterback when not hurt.

Russell Wilson was pretty good at Denver in his second year, though.

I hypothesize that a table of one rate and one counting statistic would be good to understand QB performance and stories. Maybe AV could be replaced by something less complicated such as total yards (passing and rushing)?
5-Mar-2024 Caitlyn Clark As Caitlyn Clark closed in on the NCAA D-1 women's basketball career scoring record (held by Kelsey Plum since 2017) a number of people with access to the internet started to argue that Kelsey Plum's record wasn't the one that mattered. The 'real' record was held by Lynette Woodard. Or Pete Maravich. Unsurprisingly, the standards used varied wildly and often seemed arbitrary. Unsurprisingly.

In an attempt to understand the arguments (such as they were) I collected the following sets of player stats:

Pete Maravich (LSU)

Season Games Record Points
1966-67 19/?? games (*) 741
1967-68: 26/26 games (14-12) 1,138
1968-69: 26/26 games (13-13) 1,148
1969-70: 31/32 games (22-10) 1,381
Total: 83/84 games 3,667

Lynette Woodard (Kansas)

Season Games Record Points
1977-78: 33/33 games (22-11) 833
1978-79: 38/38 games (30-8) 1,177
1979-80: 37/37 games (29-8) 881
1980-81: 31/32 games (27-5) 758
Total: 139/140 games 3,649

Kelsey Plum (Washington)

Season Games Record Points
2013-14: 34/34 games (20-14) 712
2014-15: 33/33 games (23-10) 746
2015-16: 37/37 games (26-11) 960
2016-17: 35/35 games (29-6) 1,109
Total: 139/139 games 3,527

Caitlyn Clark (Iowa)

Season Games Record Points
2020-21: 30/30 games (20-10) 799
2021-22: 32/32 games (24-8) 863
2022-23: 38/38 games (31-7) 1,055
2023-24: 30/30 games (26-4) 968
Total: 130 games 3,685

In addition we have:
  • John Pierce who played at David Lipscomb (Tenn.) from 1990-94 with 4,230 points, and
  • Pearl Moore who played at Francis Marion from 1975-979 with 4,061 points
Summarizing:
  • John Pierce is generally considered to have the record for most career points in US college basketball (Pete Maravich's freshman points don't count as points in US college basketball games because ... reasons), but David Lipscomb is an NAIA school, though, so this is not an NCAA record.
  • Pearl Moore has the record for most career points in US college basketball by a woman. She played at Francis Marion, however, which was in the AIAW when she was playing (and is an NCAA D-2 program now). Francis Marion competed in the Division II (Small College) bracket of the AIAW.
  • Lynette Woodard had the college basketball record for career points allowed by a woman at what is now an NCAA D-1 program, but NOT the NCAA D-1 record because Kansas was part of the AIAW when Lynette was playing.
  • Pete Maravich had the NCAA D-1 record for most points in a career. He did this while playing only three seasons (because the NCAA did not allow freshmen to play on college 'varsity' teams then; he scored 741 points as a freshman which give him a four season total of 4,408 points). He also did this in only 83 games (out of 84 possible games — Pete missed one game) and in an era that did not have the three point shot. He played in the SEC, though, at a time when SEC basketball programs mostly did not allow blacks on the teams. His father was the head coach and Pete took over 50% of this team's shots (which might have been more difficult to do if his father was not the head coach; Pete shot a bit under 44% from the field).
  • Caitlyn Clark has the NCAA D-1 career scoring record. She did this in 130+ games and had the advantage of the three point line. She still has a few more games to play so her points total will increase. But there is no question that she has scored more points playing NCAA D-1 basketball than any other player.
4-Mar-2024 English and French Economies
Metric UK France
Population (2023) ~68,000,000 ~65,000,000
GDP (Nominal, 2023) ~$3.3T ~$3.0T
GDP (PPP, 2023) ~$3.9T ~$3.9T
Average working hours per week in a main job (2022) 36.4 36.2
Gini Coefficient (2020) 32.6 30.7

I usually think of France as wealthier than the UK, but maybe I shouldn't.
26-Feb-2024 Fate Of All Modern Programming Languages
Rust developers fear language is getting too complex and prefer bug fixes to new features

Rust developers fear language is getting too complex and prefer bug fixes to new features
I think a huge part of this is that folks are much more willing to rev languages than they were in the past.

I'm thinking that this started with C++ ...

Before this, I think, languages tended to be fairly stable (maybe new version every decade or so ... and often the new version was not large).
25-Feb-2023 Who Can Be Responsible? I present a list of the people holding the Boeing 737 "VP and GM" title with dates and a few other events on the timeline.
2010-???: Beverly Wyse
2011-Aug: Boeing announces 737 MAX
2015-Jan: Scott Campbell replaces Beverly Wyse (who becomes vp and gm of Boeing South Carolina)
2016-Jan: 737 MAX first flight.
2018-Aug: Eric Lindblad replaces Scott Campbell (who early retired at the end of 2018)
2018-Oct: Lion Air Flight 610 flies into ground. Eric has been in charge of 737 for two months
2019-Mar: Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 flies into the ground.
2019-Jul: Mark Jenks replaces Eric Lindblad (who retired)
2020-Mar: Walt Odisho replaces Mark Jenks (who moved to overseeing all Boeing commercial programs)
2021-Mar: Ed Clark replaces Walt Odisho (retired; then went to Amazon USNS operations)
2024-Jan: Door plug falls out of Alaaska Airlines Flight 1282
2024-Feb: Katie Ringgold replaces Ed Clark
The people are:
  • Beverly Wyse (who oversaw 737 MAX development)
  • Scott Campbell (retired)
  • Eric Lindblad (in charge for 1 month when the first 737 crashed). He was let go after the 2nd crash caused by the MCAS (developed when Beverly was running the product)
  • Mark Jenks
  • Walt Odisho
  • Ed Clark
  • Katie Ringgold
So seven people over 14 years. Is the idea to spread out responsibility? And then blame whoever is unlucky enough to be in charge when the results of the terrible decisions from years back finally become visible? Do they teach this in MBA school?

When you take over a project are you supposed to ask about the terrible engineering decisions in the current product that will kill people?
24-Feb-2024 Hanukkah Ham is a Thing The Hanukkah Ham, And Other Morsels Of Religious Ignorance Hanukkah Ham 13-Feb-2024 Is Joe Gibbs the Best NFL Coach Ever? Five NFL head coaches have 3+ Super Bowl wins. Four of them have achieved all their wins with a single starting QB and that starting QB is either in the NFL Hall of Fame or will be in the Hall of Fame. The NFL quarterbacks with 3+ Super Bowl wins are:
Wins Player
7 Tom Brady
4 Terry Bradshaw
4 Joe Montana
3 Patrick Mahomes
3 Troy Aikman

The fifth coach is Joe Gibbs, who won his three Super Bowls with three different QBs, none of whom are in the Hall of Fame (and none of whom are particularly close).

I'm thinking that one could make a credible case that Joe Gibbs is the best modern era NFL head coach based on his ability to win without a Hall of Fame QB.

Wins Coach Quarterback(s)
6 Bill Belichick with Tom Brady
4 Chuck Noll with Terry Bradshaw
3 Bill Walsh with Joe Montana
3 Andy Reid with Patrick Mahomes
3 Joe Gibbs with Joe Theismann, Doug Williams and Mark Rypien

In addition, two of Joe Gibbs' Super Bowl wins came against quarterback who eventually went to the Hall of Fame:
  • 1982 Season (SB XVII): Joe Theismann vs. David Woodley
  • 1987 Season (SB XXII): Doug Williams vs John Elway (HoF 2004)
  • 1991 Season (SB XXVI): Mark Rypien vs Jim Kelly (HoF 2002)
And the career NFL stats:
Name Comp %Yards TDs Ints QB Rating
Joe Theismann: 56.7% 25,000 160 138 77.4
Doug Williams: 49.5% 17,000 100 93 69.4
Mark Rypien: 56.1% 28,500 115 88 78.9
12-Feb-2024 Nottingham is Poor So I tripped over a claim that Nottingham is/was the poorest city in the UK. Moderately interesting because:
  1. I would have guessed that the poorest city would be somewhere in Cornwall, and
  2. Nottingham is the hated rival city to Derby and our extended-extended UK family lives in Derby.
Some digging revealed that it is true. Or as true as any simple claim like this can be.

The BBC had a 2019 article with this:
Nottingham has been named the UK's "poorest city" on a government list - the fifth time in seven years.
     :
According to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Nottingham has the UK's lowest gross disposable household income - or GDHI.

Residents earn, on average, £12,445 a year after tax through jobs or benefits. Only Leicester has finished below Nottingham in recent years, in 2013 and 2014.

Okay, sounds bad. I wonder how other cities stack up.

And I find this list from 2019 (poorest to richest):
  • 1) Nottingham
  • 2) London ← WTF??????
  • 3) Plymouth ← Almost in Cornwall!
  • 4) Manchester
  • :
  • *)Doncaster
  • *)Colchester
If London is the 2nd poorest city after Nottingham I'm wondering what is going on. London is supposed to be the rich part of the UK, right???
7-Feb-2024 Martha's Vineyard is Full of Poor People
WASHINGTON (TND) — The Biden administration, in a push to make electric vehicles (EVs) more practical, is offering a tax credit for car chargers to a portion of Martha's Vineyard by classifying it as a 'low-income community.'

Biden admin extends EV charger tax credit to 'low-income' Martha's Vineyard
6-Feb-2024 A 1980s Detroit Automaker Vibe I think this give off the same 1980s Detroit auto manufacturer vibe.

It is almost as if Boeing looked at the 1980s auto competition between Honda/Toyota and the US Big 3 and decided that the Big 3 were the ones to imitate.

From a recent Barrons article on Boeing:
Boeing has to improve quality, production, profit margins, and repair its reputation. One big step the company could take in addressing all those issues is getting rid of its "shadow factories," where Boeing reworks 737 MAX and 787 jets before final delivery.

Boeing has talked about its shadow factories several times in the past few months, and their wind down will lower costs and help the company end painful past issues.

The 737 MAX was grounded worldwide from March 2019 to November 2020 following two deadly crashes within five months. Boeing built hundreds of 737 MAX jets and parked them during the grounding. All those jets need to be reworked, upgraded, and checked before final delivery. That happens in a shadow factory.

Rework adds costs. Wednesday, on Boeing's fourth-quarter conference call, Chief Financial Officer Brian West didn't quantify the cost specificity, but CEO Dave Calhoun said, "In our shadow factories, we put more hours into those airplanes than we do to produce it in the first place…that's a metric I know everybody understands."

Boeing Wants to Close Its 'Shadow Factories.' It Would Be a Positive Step.
I wlll note that the last aircraft designed by Boeing before the McDonnell Douglas merger, the 777, was not mentioned as needing rework.
1-Feb-2024 Beef Chow Fun Because 'chow' means 'food' in English, Literally translating 'Beef Chow Fun' from English to English renders as 'Fun Beef Food' 29-Jan-2024 East Germany Had a National Airline The name was 'Interflug'. 27-Jan-2024 Wisdom From Seth (Who is Three Years Old) Some random quotes from a three year old I know:
  • "I'm damp because I am wet."

  • "Sharing is Caring is OVER!"
    Seth had a toy and did not wish to share.

  • "I like toys! I like exotic toys."
    According to Seth's parents Missouri seems to have a surprisingly large number of adult stores and not a lot else. Seth and his family were driving through and there's not a lot to look at, so they note the more interesting advertising for him. One barn has XXX on the side, and on top advertises "GIRLS! EXOTIC TOYS!" After reading these out loud, Seth pipes up: "I like toys! I like exotic toys."

25-Jan-2024 The Kitten is Alive
"Marley was dead: to begin with."

— A Christmas Carol, by Dickins
The Kitten Is Not Dead Hydee (a five month old kitten) was alive: to begin with. Things may not look like it, but she is alive!
23-Jan-2024 Patrick Boyle on Bird Bird was an e-scooter rental company.
Who would have thought renting scooters to drunk people for a dollar, who would then throw them in a canal on their way home, would be a money losing business?
19-Jan-2024 NFL Super Bowl Winner Narratives Getting ahead of the pundits.

Except Buffalo?
TeamNarrative
49ers: Brock Purdy (Mr. Irrelevant). How did everyone miss him?
Packers: Jordan Love; 3rd great Packers QB in a row.
Lions: Goff career resurrection
Tampa Bay: Baker Mayfield career resurrection
Houston: CJ Stroud is a ROOKIE QB. Who won the Super Bowl!!!!
Baltimore: Lamar Jackson had NO offers in free agency?????
Chiefs: 3 Super Bowl wins and 4 appearances in 5 years. Mahomes da man.
Buffalo: Josh Allen? Do we have a story?
17-Jan-2024 Airplanes can Leak Oxygen?
After flying from Davos to Zurich on helicopters and boarding the modified Boeing Co. 737, Blinken and his party were informed that the aircraft had been deemed unsafe to fly. An oxygen leak detected previously could not be remedied.

Bloomberg: Blinken's Return From Davos Was Delayed After Plane Broke Down
I'm still quite unclear about the source of the oxygen leak. Perhaps from the "Emergency oxygen system" with the masks that drop down in case of depressurization?
9-Jan-2023 Constellation Brands Owns a Modelo Brewery
As part of AB InBev's acquisition of the 50% of Grupo Modelo it does not already own, AB InBev has agreed to sell Compania Cervecera de Coahuila, Grupo Modelo's state-of-the-art brewery in Piedras Negras, Mexico, and grant perpetual brand licenses to Constellation for USD 2.9 billion, subject to a post-closing adjustment. This price is based on an assumed 2012 EBITDA of USD 310 million earned from manufacturing and licensing the Modelo brands for sale by the Crown joint venture, with an implied multiple of approximately 9 times. The sale of the brewery, which is located near the Texas border, would ensure independence of supply for Crown and provides Constellation with complete control of the production of the Modelo brands for marketing and distribution in the U.S.

https://www.cbrands.com/blogs/news/anheuser-busch-inbev-and-constellation-brands-announce-revised-agreement-for-complete-divestiture-of-u-s-business-of-grupo-modelo
This matters because it means that InBev doesn't benefit from US beer drinkers switching from Bud Light to Modelo. Even though InBev owns Modelo outside the USA it gets nothing from US sales of Modelo.

I don't know how Constellation and InBev keep their beer recipes similar. Maybe they don't.
19-Dec-2024 UK Immigration and Emmigration I watch the Economics Explained Youtube channel (when I remember) and they have a video up on the UK. The video contains the following:
Workers in the UK in high jobs can earn much more in places like the USA, Canada, Australia and even Asian financial hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai. This is causing a weird situation where the UK has a lot of people migrating to the country from undeveloped economies to find a better life with better opportunities and equally a lot of people moving out of the country to find an even better life with even better opportunities.

The net result of this in and out game is clear, however. The UK brings in more people than it loses for now, but it's losing a lot of highly skilled workers and its been losing more and more every year since 2007. If the trend continues the UK will wind up with a declining population that's missing all its most productive workers.

The Economy of the UK Is in Serious Trouble @ ~10:30
I have read that the UK (and Ireland) have problems keeping doctors because the pay is so much better elsewhere. And the UK experienced a "brain drain" in the 1970s. It is easy to imagine that the UK is doing this again. But a situation where you import low-skilled workers and lose high-skilled workers who emmigrate out seems like a slow-motion disaster.
16-Dec-2023 New Kitten: Hydee We have a new 4-month old kitten.
New Kitten

Our previous cat made it to 19 years old, but not to 2024 :-(
From about ten years ago: Old Hidee
12-Dec-2023 Headline Not Quite as Stupid as It Appears Weird Headline
LeBron's son plays for USC and USC is playing the CalState Longbeach 49ers.
9-Dec-2023 Down Year for SEC Football From AggiesWire:
Focusing on the SEC, I guess you can say it's been a down year for the conference. Alabama is the only representative in the College Football Playoffs...
Yes. Only one SEC team making the four team playoffs makes this a down year for the SEC ...

In addition, the SEC is sending only four teams to the six New Year's Six bowl games.

A down year indeed.
4-Dec-2023 Explaining Italy's Low TFR From The Daily Mail: 'Italy's most handsome man' quits modelling to become a priest 2-Dec-2023 True But Harsh Article on the Oregon loss to Washington last night:
Whether it was because of Washington's stout defensive secondary that showed up at a great time, or the fact that Nix was just trying to force the ball more than normal, the end result was arguably the worst game of the season for No. 10 at the worst possible time.
This statement is true. Bo Nix was 21 for 34 (62%) with 3 TDs, 1 interception and 239 yeards.

This works out to a QB Rating of 144.0 ... which is the lowest QB rating for a game this season for Bo Nix.

So, yes, this was the "worst game of the season" for him, but ... man!
26-Nov-2023 Poor Mac Jones For the most recent game "Mac Jones's passer rating is 27.8. If he were 0 for 21 with all 21 passes spiked directly into the ground, it would be 39.6"

He isn't the only QB having a bad season, but ... man.
With the 2023-24 season over we can look at Mac's performance a bit more.

Mac was selected 15th in the 1st round of the 2021 NFL draft. He has now played three seasons in the NFL and his Quarterback Rating has dropped each of his last two seasons: 92.5, 84.8, 77.0.

This game, against the New York Giants, was the last game he played for the 2023-24 season. Mac went 12 of 21 with 89 yards, 0 TDs and 2 interceptions to get the QB Rating of 27.8.

His performance collapse may not be his fault. In the 2021-22 season he played well with Josh McDaniels as the offensive coordinator. After the season McDaniels left to become the Raiders' head coach (and he lasted two season before being fired).

For the 2022-23 season the Patriots had Matt Patricia and Joe Judge as co-offensive coordinators — a job neither had done before.

After the season Patricia went to the Eagles and Joe Judge was moved to assistant head coach.
2023-2024 saw Bill O'brien hired to be the offensive coordinator and things did not improve. Bill is now the head coach of Boston College.

So Mac has seen four offensive coordinators in three seasons and will have yet another new one next season (whichever team he plays for).
1-Nov-2023 Hardback vs Paperback Pricing From the Apple iBooks store:

iBook Flash Sale
Presumably the $3.99 copy of Enquiry by Dick Francis is the hardback version and the $2.99 is paperback.
31-Oct-2023 UAW Strike Resolution So we have some new data on the auto strike resolution:
While full details of the finalized deals are still emerging, they set 25% compounded raises over the 4½-year agreements, including an 11% increase upon ratification; reinstatement of cost-of-living adjustments; increased 401(k) company contributions; and enhanced profit-sharing bonuses.
       :
Deutsche Bank recently estimated the overall cost increase of the agreement at Ford to be $6.2 billion over the term of the agreement, $7.2 billion at GM, and $6.4 billion at Stellantis.

Ford said the UAW deal, if ratified by members, is going to add $850 to $900 in costs per vehicle assembled.

Winners and losers of the UAW talks with GM, Ford and Stellantis
So, a 4.5 year agreement that increases total costs to:
  • Ford of $6.2B works out to ~$1.4B/year
  • GM of ~$1.6B/year
  • Chrysler/Fiat of ~$1.4B/year
This applies to the US UAW not folks in Mexico, so to US sales (not quite right because some US manufactured cars probably exported and some foreign cars get imported, but still ...)
  • Ford: sold 2.3M cars and trucks in 2022 in the USA
  • GM: sold 2.27M cars and trucks in 2022 in the USA
Average new vehicle price in the USA is around $48,000.

I'll note a few things:
  • The $/car increase does not line up with the cars sold combined with cost over the contract for any of the auto makers.

  • The VAST majority of the cost to manufacture a new car does not go to the UAW workers. I think my rough numbers for Ford are that the 'cost of good sold' included around 4.5% UAW salary+benefits before the strike. Maybe it is now 6%. The numbers above support my belief that UAW salary+benefits aren't even close to the biggest cost.

  • An extra $1.5B - $2B per year in costs isn't nothing, but is not huge given the auto maker's recent profits. It is also not obviously unreasonable given that inflation has almost certainly moved UAW salary *down* in real terms over the past few years.

  • I'd love to know why the other ~95% of costs to make a car are considered so tough to move down. If I was trying to save $1B I don't know that I'd look at the salaries of folks making up only %4.5% - 6% of the costs.

    Of course, maybe looking at these costs is what the big-3 have historically done and the result was small cuts in quality that added up?

    Or, most likely, they are always looking at all cost inputs.

    Or the auto CEOs are posturing.
Still, the deal doesn't seem unreasonable to me given:
  • Inflation,
  • Current percent of the cost of a car as UAW pay+benefits, and
  • Big-3 profits.
I'm sure both sides will find a way to tank the companies, though.
28-Oct-2023 Twelve Out of Thirteen
The breadth of the [Michigan Football Sign Stealing] scheme appears to be massive. Stalions purchased tickets to games at 12 of 13 Big Ten schools for a total of 30 games, according to Monday report from ESPN.

Sources: TCU knew of Michigan's sign-stealing scheme prior to CFP game, used 'dummy signals' to dupe Wolverines
So ... one Big10 team's signs weren't worth stealing. The obvious candidate is Northwestern (because Northwestern is terrible) but in 2020 Northwestern finished the season ranked #10.

We are looking for a team that is *consistently* terrible, not just terrible on average.

The team that Michigan skipped should have been either Rutgers or ... Nebraska.
28-Oct-2023 Preseason All-Big 12 Football Team? There is a "2023 Preseason All-Big 12 Football Team" (so based on ... hope?) as well as individual awards such as "Big 12 Preseason Offensive Player of the Year".

One can be voted a "Player of the Year" before a single game has been played.

WTF?????

https://s3.amazonaws.com/big12sports.com/documents/2023/7/5/2023_Big_12_Preseason_Team.pdf
23-Oct-2023 UK High Speed Rail It seems to be going better than California's but that isn't much to be proud about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Speed_2

London to Birmingham for $130B is a good guess for now ... by 2029.
16-Oct-2023 Evergreen: The Miami Marlins are Dysfuntional The Marlins have had a total of six winning seasons not counting covid-shortened 2020 (seven if we count 2020). The Marlins have been around since 1993, so 31 seasons including 2020 and 30 not counting 2020.

The winning seasons are as follows:
  • 1997: 92-70; Won the World Series!
  • 2003: 91-71; Won the World Series again!
  • 2004: 83-79
  • 2005: 83-79
  • 2008: 84-78
  • 2009: 87-75
  • 2020: 31-29; made (16 team) playoffs ...
  • 2023: 84-78; made playoffs!
The current GM was on a three year contract with a fourth year as a mutual option. Miami exercised the option. The GM, Kim Ng, did not (because Miami was going to bring in someone for her to report to besides the owners ... so she was essentially getting a demotion) and Miami is now in need of a new GM.

Because Miami is that dysfunctional :-)
12-Oct-2023 Denver Has Given Up 200 Points Denver is the first NFL team to give up 200 points this season.

Next is Washington with 160 (though Washington has only played five games and Denver has played six).

The 49ers have given up 68 points through five games and lead the league in fewest points allowed per game.

Clearly Denver's problem is Russell Wilson :-)
07-Mar-2024:
Well, the season ended and Denver chose to cut Russell Wilson. They owe him about $89 million (and this shows up for salary cap purposes over the next two seasons), but save the $37 million that they would have also owed him if he were still on the team as of March 17.

Russ finished the 2023 NFL season with the 8th highest passer rating (98.0) of all qualifying QBs. This is in line with his 101.8 passer rating for the 10 years he was at Seattle. Denver's new head coach just wants another QB.
10-Oct-2023 Dak Prescott is Tony Romo Quarterback Rating:
  • 97.1: Tony Romo (career)
  • 97.3: Dak Prescott (career to date)
In playoffs:
  • 93.0: Tony Romo
  • 92.3: Dak Prescott
Both are 2-4 in playoff games, though Dak will likely go to the playoffs again in his career.

Dak Prescott is Tony Romo!
27-Sep-2023 To Form a More Transactional Union I have a hypothesis is that the interactions in the US (probably the world as a whole) has become more transactional and less relational over the past ~40 years.

I *also* believe that this may be correlated to the rise of MBAs as a degree:
  • 1970: ~29,000/year granted in the USA
  • 2011: ~184,000/year granted in the USA
I don't know how to prove/disprove/quantify this.
25-Sep-2023 ChatGPT: An Observation From a source I forget: "Just a reminder, the costs here are ultimately measured in watt hours. They're turning coal into plagiarism at an alarming rate." 22-Sep-2023 Genetics From science.org:
Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives.

Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives
And from 23AndMe:
'Parent / Child' 50% [DNA Shared] (but 47.5% for father-son relationships)
So most people are more closely related to random chimpanzees than they are to their own parents. Or something.

This is feeling a bit like when we conserve momentum in Newtonian physics problems ("yes", for colliding balls; "no" for shooting cannon balls into the air).
17-Sep-2023 Weird QB Rating Property Russell Wilson is playing well (statistically) this year, but Denver is still 0-2 having lost the two games by a total of 3 points.

Sucks for him and for Denver, but at least he is playing well!

VERY interesting, however, is that Russ's *season* QB Rating is higher than *either* of the QB Ratings from the two games that contribute to the season QB rating:

Game Comp % Yards TDs Ints QB Rating
Sep 10 vs Raiders 79.4 % 177 2 0 108.0
Sep 17 vs Washington 56.2 % 308 3 1 107.3
2023 Season Total 68.2 % 485 5 1 108.5

I find this to be a very interesting property of the stat.
16-Sep-2023 Big 3 Posturing During the Strike
  • There are 48,500 UAW workers at GM (round up to 50,000)
  • 2,000 work hours/year
  • 100,000,000 work hour/year/worker
So every $10/hour costs GM $1 billion (except not quite because that comes out of gross rather than net profits).

GM net profits for the past few years seem to be:
  • 2022: $9.7B
  • 2021: $9.9B
  • 2020: $6.3B
  • 2019: $6.7B
  • 2018: $8.1B
The UAW workers seem to average about $28/hour (plus benefits of course ...) so a 40% increase would be around $11/hour. Add in the removal of the two tier pay scale and maybe this becomes $20/hour?

So I'm seeing something like an extra $2B/year for GM.

The auto manufacturers are making noises that the union demands would push per hour all-in labor costs from $60/hour to $150/hour. So they are ... just making bald faced lies? This is plausible. Alternately I've missed something.

Obviously things get worse for the car makers if there is an additional 25% pay increase on top of that to go from a 40 hour to a 32 hour work week, but I'm still not seeing an extra $90/hour for the 100 million hours worked...
27-Aug-2023 Brandon Allen The 49ers have a 3rd quarterback behind Brock Purdy and Sam Darnold: Brandon Allen.

Brandon was drafted in the 6th round by Jacksonville in 2016. His career looks like this:
2016: Jaguars $574,274 did not play (as nearly as I can tell)
2017:
2018:
Rams $728,118 did not play (technically 3 seasons for Rams)
2019: Broncos $766,938 played in three games; QB rating 68.3 (this is bad)
2020:
2021:
2022:
Bengals $3,607,074 played in 12 games over 3 years, QB rating 82.5
So ... a seven season career, played games in only 4 of the 7 seasons, played in 15 games TOTAL over the 7 years. Career earnings of about $5.5 million and NOT because of one big contract ... this was spread out over a number of one year contracts by four different teams!

And he is likely to be the 49ers #3 QB once the final cuts are announced. If not, he'll likely be on the practice squad with a chance to be called up.

I really wonder what the teams see in him that they don't see in maybe 50 other QBs that look pretty similar.
21-Aug-2023 When Your Virtue Burns Up A giant Oregon wildfire shows the limits of carbon offsets in fighting climate change

How do you properly account for carbon offsets in the form of uncut trees when those trees burn to the ground in a forest fire? Are you still virtuous? Are you owed a refund???
12-Aug-2023 Anthony Rendon The Angels signed him to a 7 year $245M contract for the 2020 - 2026 seasons.

So far he has produced as follows:
  • 2020: 2.2 WAR (52 games; Covid shortened season)
  • 2021: 0.0 WAR (58 games)
  • 2022: 0.9 WAR (47 games)
  • 2023: 0.1 WAR (43 games so far)
Ouch.
31-Jul-2023 Customers' Evolving Preferences
Wagner pointed out that Bud Light sales at his store since mid-April plunged 45% from a year ago. The decline can be attributed to the EVOLVING PREFERENCES OF CONSUMERS.

— https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/just-stopped-buying-bud-light-162116088.html
As with Spinal Tap, the consumers are becoming more selective ... and Wagner *almost* said so ... Almost.
18-Jul-2023 A D-List Adult Film Star So I was watching a short video on Zion Williamson.

Who, it seems, recently announced a baby? Or maybe a pregnant girlfriend or wife?

In any event, this pissed off a certain OTHER lady who thought (?) she was Zion's main interest.

So ... the video refers to lady #2 as a:

D-list adult film star

Ouch.
26-Jun-2023 I Invented a Fake Quote I'm quite proud of it!
To discover an American's true opinion of his own country, ask him what he thinks of France.
I think I could attribute this to Mencken or Twain and everyone would find it plausible.
22-Jun-2023 Major Semiconductor Companies
Company Market Cap
Chip Companies
Nvidia $ 1,070B USA
Broadcom $ 347B USA
Samsung Electronics $ 333B Korea
AMD $ 180B USA
Texas Instruments $ 155B USA
Intel $ 134B USA
Qualcomm $ 129B USA
Analog $ 93B USA
Micron $ 72B USA
Infineon $ 53B Europe
NXP $ 51B USA
ST Micro $ 43B Europe
Fabs
TSMC $ 532B Taiwan
GlobalFoundries $ 36B USA
UMC $ 21B Taiwan
Equipment Vendors
ASML $ 282B Europe
Applied Materials $ 116B USA
Lam $ 83B USA
Tokyo Electron $ 65B Japan
KLA $ 64B USA
  • Samsung's fab business is included in Samsung Microelectronics.
  • For those who remember when Intel dominated the chip space, Intel's market cap position is surprising.
  • For those who remember the 1980s when Japan was a major semiconductor player the lack of Japanese companies is surprising.
  • If not for ASML (and maybe privately held ARM), Europe wouldn't matter at all.
11-Jun-2023 "Little Mermaid Box Office The live action The Little Mermaid (2023) opened on Friday, May 26 of 2023, which was the Friday before Memorial Day. The 2019 live action Aladdin opened on May 24 of 2019, also the Friday before Memorial Day. We can compare the domestic box office cumulative numbers for the two releases:

DayLittle MermaidAladdin
1 $38,149,001 $31,358,935
2 $68,268,528 $61,372,230
3 $95,578,040 $91,500,929
4$118,818,903$116,805,962
5$130,284,561$128,820,944
6$138,583,114$136,276,649
7$145,607,067$142,697,174
8$157,460,537$154,553,014
9$173,726,333$171,807,702
10$186,992,778$185,537,718
11$191,560,625$190,237,136
12$197,630,827$198,035,063
13$201,931,560$203,136,661
14$206,020,339$207,885,926
15$212,836,339$214,861,744
16$221,631,339$224,618,530
17$228,810,339$232,566,894

The domestic box office for Aladdin finished at around $356 million. The Little Mermaid is trending a bit lower, but a good guess for the final domestic box office take for The Little Mermaid is around $350 million.

Where the two movies diverge is in international box office. Aladdin finished with almost 2× as much box office business as it saw domestically ($695 million vs $350 million), while The Little Mermaid is seeing about 0.8× as much international box office business.

Further, Aladdin was produced on a $183 million budget while The Litte Mermaid took around $250 million to produce. We can thus create the following projected finacial comparison:

Box Office
MovieBudgetDomesticInternationalTotalBox Office/Budget
Aladdin $183M $356M $695M$1,051M5.7×
The Little Mermaid~$250M~$350M~$280M~$630M~2.5×

Grossing ~2.5× of the production budget means that The Little Mermaid probably broke even or made a little bit of money for Disney. If the production budget had been held to the $183 million that Aladdin managed, the box office to budget ratio would be a solid, if not spectacular for Disney, 3.4× and the movie would be solidly profitable.

Interestingly, the same basic conclusion — excess production budget turned what could have been a solidly profitable movie into something financially worse — could be made for (Lady) Ghostbusters (the 2016 remake) when compared to the 2021 Ghostbusters "sequel" Afterlife:

MovieBudgetBox OfficeBox Office/Budget
Ghostbusters (2016) $144M $229M1.6×
Afterlife (2021) 75M $204M2.7×

The 2016 movie is considered a bomb with loss estimates ranging from $25 million to $50 million. The planned sequel was cancelled. When Sony released a "Ghostbusters Ultimate Collection" set of DVDs in 2021 the 2016 movie was omitted

The 2021 Afterlife had a lower box office gross ($204M vs $229M), but controlled costs better, was profitable, and has a sequel scheduled to be released in last 2023.
25-Mar-2023 The Big 1 Swiss Banks? In 1980 five large Swiss banks towered above all the others. Realistically, there were three that were bigger "big" banks with two smaller "big" banks and the 3+2 formed the "big 5" of Swiss banks. These banks were:
  • Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS)
  • Credit Suisse
  • Swiss Bank Corporation (SBC)
and:
  • Swiss Volksbank
  • Bank Leu
Over time these "big 5" have combined into the "big 1":
  • 1990: CS buys Bank Leu
  • 1993: CS buys Swiss Volksbank
  • 1998: UBS merges with Swiss Bank Corp (merged bank named the United Bank of Switzerland)
  • 2023: UBS takes over Credit Suisse

The list of top Swiss banks by assets is now something like this:

BankAssets
UBS 1,571B €
Raiffelsen 284B €
Zurcher Kantonalbank 202B €

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/europes-50-largest-banks-by-assets-2023
22-Mar-2023 UCSB Freshmen From UCSB (University of California at Santa Barbara) for the Fall 2019 freshmen class:

GPA and test scores of middle 25%-75% students
High School GPA 4.04 - 4.28
ACT Composite Score 26 - 31
ACT English Language Arts 27 - 34
SAT Evidence Based Reading & Writing630 - 730
SAT Mathematics 650 - 790
SAT Essay 15 - 18

75% of UCSB freshmen seem to have a 4.04 GPA or better and a SAT score of ~1280 or better.
22-Mar-2023 Virginia Postrel on ChatGPT From Virginia Postrel's substack:
Using ChatGPT, I got a bunch of potentially useful data on the percentage of various national populations over 80 from 1920 to the present. But I can't be sure the AI isn't making stuff up and by the time I find the numbers on the cited sources I haven't saved any time. ChatGPT has an enormous advantage at rummaging through databases but that isn't any good if I can't trust it. And it looks like it was wrong.
22-Mar-2023 Lamar Jackson's Contract Lamar Jackson, quarterback for Baltimore, has recently been franchise tagged. He wants a multi-year contract with lots of money guaranteed at signing. A summary of his NFL career statistics is this:

Games Yards QB Rate QBR
SeasonPlayedStarted PassingRushing RankValue RankValue
201816/167/16 1201695 84.5 42.6
201915/1615/1631271206 3113.3183.0
202015/1615/1627571005 1199.3767.3
202112/1712/172882767 2387.01750.7
202212/1712/172242764 1791.1959.0

Lamar Jackson was the single best quarterback of the 2019 season. He was the unanimous league MVP that year. His 2020 season was also good, but not "unanimous league MVP" good. Which isn't a surprise. Then, for each of the past two seasons he has played 12 of the 17 regular season games and in the games he did play was roughly the 10th -15th best quarterback in the league, so still above average but not MVP or even top-5 level of play.

Recent large and insane (?) NFL QB contracts that he seems to be looking to as comparables include:

Start Contract Details
YearPlayer YrsFully GTDGTD/Year
2022Deshaun Watson5$230,000,000$46,000,000
2022Russell Wilson5$124,000,000$24,800,000
2022Kyler Murray 5$103,300,000$20,600,000
  • Deshaun Watson was held out of all games in the 2021 season by the Houston Texans, traded to Cleveland in the offseason and then suspended for the first 11 games of the 2022 season by the league. His QB Rate for the six games he played in 2022 was 79.1 and his QBR was 38.3.

  • Russell Watson had the worst season of his career after Denver gave him a new contract and finished the 2022 season ranked 27th and 28th at QB Rate and QBR respectively.

  • Kyler Murray's statistics for the past two years have been similar to Lamar's, having a better 2021 season than Lamar and a worse 2022 season. Kyler Murray's contract extension came with a clause requiring 'four hours of independent study' per game week because the Arizona Cardinals did not believe he was studying game film on his own prior to the games.
ESPN claims that Baltimore made a contract offer to Lamar before the 2022 season was under way. That offer was a six year deal (the 2022 season for $23.02 million plus five additional seasons) with $133 million guaranteed at signing. Since Lamar was already guaranteed to make $23 million in 2022 this was roughly equivalent to a five year contract with $110 million guaranteed, though obviously not identical if Lamar was injured during the 2022 season. In many respects, the Baltimore offer seems similar to the contract Kyler Murray signed with Kyler and Lamar performing similarly over the past two seasons.

Lamar declined the Baltimore offer and was recently franchised tagged for the 2023 season. This makes Lamar's earnings for 2022-3 $55 million. If he plays under a 2nd franchise tag for the 2024 season his earnings for the two seasons after 2022 will be $71 million compared to the $110 million guaranteed for five seasons by the Baltimore offer. His last season and the next two (assuming no injury and no long-term contract) look like this:
  • 2022: $23.0 million
  • 2023: $32.4 million (franchise tag)
  • 2024: $38.9 million (estimated hypothetical 2nd franchise tag)
If he plays through the 2025 season he will likely make around $110 million for the 2023 - 25 seasons — a number in line with the guaranteed at signing money offered by Baltimore but Lamar might be a free agent rather than playing out the last two years of a 5-year contract.

Since only about ⅓ of five year NFL contracts see the player still getting paid in years four and five it is reasonable to focus on the "guaranted at signing" number rather than the overall total — a 5-year, $200 million contract might see the player only getting paid $120 million to $160 million.

Short term contracts give a quarterback the highest potential pay, but come with the risk that an injury or serious decline in performance will result in a huge drop in pay.

It isn't obvious that the ESPN reported Baltimore offer (effectively an additional $110 million fully guaranteed over an additional five years) was particularly high given that Lamar may well earn $30 - $40+ million per year over the next five years if he remains health and will be in a position to earn $70 million over the next two years baring injury or a huge drop-off in performance. Nor does it seem obviously given Lamar's latest two seasons. If one expects Lamar to revert to his 2019 MVP performance then the Baltimore offer is low.
So Jalen Hurts recently signed a five year contract with the Eagles. This contract was for a total of $255,000,000 with $110,000,000 guaranteed at signing (and $179 million "guaranteed"). The contract also included a no-trade clause and was structured so that most of the salary cap hit is in the later years (which makes it easier for the Eagles to assemble a good team around Hurts).

A bit after this, Lamar Jackson agreed to terms with the Baltimore Ravens: 5 years, $260,000,000 total with $112,500,000 guaranteed at signing ($185 million "guaranteed"). An updated quarterback salary table looks like this:
Start Contract Details
YearPlayer YrsFully GTDGTD/Year
2022Deshaun Watson5$230,000,000$46,000,000
2022Russell Wilson5$124,000,000$24,800,000
2023Lamar Jackson 5$112,500,000$22,500,000
2023Jalen Hurts 5$110,000,000$22,000,000
2022Kyler Murray 5$103,300,000$20,600,000
2023Josh Allen 6$100,000,000$16,700,000

Lamar got $500,000/year guaranteed more than Jalen Hurts' contract and $2M/year more if he stays for the full five years. Both Jalen Hurts and Lamar got no-trade clauses.
12-Mar-2023 NFL Contract Guarantees NFL contracts don't work the way they are presented.

When an MLB player signs a contract for five years and $50 million he will be paid $50 million over five years unless he retires (or is suspended for cause).

When an NBA player signs a contract for five years and $50 million he will be paid $50 million over five years unless he retires (or is suspended for cause).

When an NHL player signs a contract for five years and $50 million he will be paid $50 million over five years unless he retires (or is suspended for cause).

When an NFL player signs a contract for five years and $50 million he will be paid some percentage of $50 million, but rarely the entire $50 million.

NFL contracts come with salary guarantees, though, so the $50 million contract might have $20 million guaranteed. The player often won't get paid the entire $20 million guaranteed, either. This recently happened:
Bobby Wagner joined the Los Angeles Rams after spending a decade playing for the Seattle Seahawks. His Rams tenure ended up being quite a bit shorter.

Wagner and the Rams mutually agreed to part ways on Thursday, according to ESPN's Adam Schefter, one season into the five-year, $50 million contract he signed to join the team.
His contract was:
  • 5 years for $50 million total
  • $20 million guaranteed ($10 million guaranteed at signing)
He was paid a total of $12.5 million out of the $50 million.

The magic phrase for NFL contract is "guaranteed at signing" or "fully guaranteed."

The way a "5 year, $50 million" NFL contract would be described were it an MLB contract is usually closer to "1 year, $10 million contract with four team option years." This article explains in more detail what typically happens.
...
The Ringer studied every multiyear free-agent contract in Spotrac's database signed from 2011, the start of the most recent collective bargaining agreement, to 2015—a total of 663 deals. This data focuses solely on contracts signed during free agency, so it doesn't account for rookie contracts, contract extensions, or players who re-signed with their team before becoming unrestricted free agents. It also excludes one-year free-agent deals.

The results were staggering: A player who signs a five-year deal has better odds of lasting one year (14.7 percent) than he does of lasting five years (13.7 percent). Players who sign four-year contracts in free agency have the exact same odds of lasting one year on the deal (23.1 percent) as lasting four years. Players on three-year contracts have roughly the same odds of the deal ending in one full season or less (34.3 percent) as they do of lasting the full term (36.2 percent). Less than half of players who sign two-year deals last two years (45.8 percent), and one-sixth don't even make it through the first year. If time is money, in the NFL both are relative.

From CBS on 29-Feb-2024:
Mattison took over last season for Dalvin Cook and ran for 700 yards and caught 30 passes. Now he becomes a free agent again, LIKE LAST YEAR WHEN HE SIGNED A TWO-YEAR DEAL WITH MINNESOTA.
1-Mar-2023 Statistics: How Not to Do Sampling
What running does to the knees, according to a large survey of marathon runners
Many doctors see osteoarthritis as a “wear-and-tear” condition, but a large survey among long-distance runners found no increased knee or hip risks.

Runners often hear the warning “Keep pounding the pavement and you'll destroy your knees.” A new study found that runners were not more likely to develop hip or knee osteoarthritis the longer, faster and more frequently they ran.
...
The new research surveyed 3,804 recreational runners who participated in the Chicago Marathon in 2019 or 2021 with questions from how many years they’d been running and their average running paces to whether they had family histories of arthritis.
...
On average, runners who responded to the survey were just shy of 44 years old and ran 27.9 miles per week at 8 minutes and 52 seconds per mile. They’d typically been running for close to 15 years, although that number ranged from 1 to 67 years. Many respondents were running their first marathon while a select few had run dozens. Most fell somewhere in between.

Thanks to the broad nature of the group surveyed — a departure from historical research focused on elite-level Olympians — the Northwestern researchers could analyze how runners' arthritis risk changed according to their running pace, intensity and cumulative running history.

Surprisingly, they found no association between an increased risk for knee or hip arthritis and the number of years someone had been running, the number of marathons completed, their weekly running mileage, nor their running pace.

What running does to the knee
So, among runners capable of running a marathon, there was no increased risk for knee or hip arthritis based on the amount of running done.
11-Mar-2023 Useful non-Metric Units: The Belgium There is this YouTube channel I enjoy, Caspian Report, where the guy covers Russia sporadically. One of his videos was on Russian history (specifically, Russian territorial expansion) and it contained this awesome line:
Consequently, in the first centuries of its existence, Russia expanded at a rate of one Belgium per year.
Belgium is almost 12,000 square miles.

Interestingly, US territorial growth was similar to Russian territorial growth!
  • US Land area 1783: ~800,000 square miles
  • US Land area 2022: ~3.8M square miles
Land area growth: ~3M square miles
Years: 239

Area growth per year: ~12,500 square miles ...

So ... in the first centuries of its existence, the USA also expanded at a rate of one Belgium per year.

Then, on November-11-2022 we got another use of Belgium as a unit of area, this time from al Jazeera:
The Belgium-sized Kherson province was seized within days after the February 24 invasion began, becoming Russia's largest and most strategic gain.

Russia's Kherson retreat marks tectonic shift in Ukraine war
For future reference, I present this helpful table of Belgium equivalents:

Football field: 1/500 a Belgium
Connecticut: ½ a Belgium
Belgium: 1 Belgium (canonically)
Maryland: 1 Belgium
West Virginia: 2 Begiums
Greece: 4 Belgiums
Poland: 10 Belgiums
New Mexico: 10 Belgiums
France: 18 Belgiums
India: 100 Belgiums
Australia: 250 Belgiums

22-Jun-2023:
We can see a failure to properly use Belgium as a unit in this Yahoo news article:
Authorities are hoping underwater sounds might help narrow their search, whose coverage area has been expanded to thousands of miles — twice the size of Connecticut...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/rescuers-last-desperate-push-final-040243936.html
A clearer explanation would have been, "has been expanded to thousands of miles — about the size of Belgium..."
11-Mar-2023 Technically Correct Headlines As Silicon Valley Bank was collapsing we got some headlines about a recent stock sale by the CEO:

Source Headline
Fortune: Silicon Valley Bank's CEO sold $3.6 million of stock in potentially 'problematic' transaction days before historic bank failure
Forbes: SVB Financial CEO Sold $3.6 Million In Stock Before Bank's Collapse
Bloomberg: SVB CEO Sold $3.6 Million in Stock Days Before Bank's Failure
Barrons: SVB Financial CEO Greg Becker Sold $3.6 Million in Stock Nearly Two Weeks Ago
Marketwatch: Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker cashed out $2 million just before the collapse
New York Post: Silicon Valley Bank CEO sold $3.5M in shares just two weeks before collapse
WSJ: Silicon Valley Bank CEO Sold $3.6 Million In Shares Days Before Fatal Loss Disclosed

Many other sites (e.g. Yahoo News) ran one of more of these headlines and stories so the coverage was not limited to the financial press.

The headlines are true, but misleading because the obvious implication in each of these headlines was that the CEO, Greg Becker, knew (or suspected) that Silicon Valley Bank was going out of business and sold stock before the stock market found out and the share price crashed. This is possible, but unlikely. A more complete look at Becker's stock ownership, previous selling behavior, and stock option expiration dates leads to the more likely conclusion that Becker was exercising in-the-money stock options before they expired and then selling the stock for cash to maintain a constant stock ownership position in Silicon Valley Bank.

Barrons headline wasn't much better than the others, but Barrons did have the best article content:
Roughly two weeks before SVB stock collapsed and its Silicon Valley Bank unit was closed by regulators, its top executive sold millions of dollars of shares.

SVB President and CEO Greg Becker sold 12,451 shares on Feb. 27 for $3.6 million, an average price of $287.42 each. That day he also acquired the same number of shares using stock options priced at $105.18 each, according to a form he filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The options exercise paired with the stock sale meant that Becker's stock ownership in SVB remained unchanged.

Both transactions were made through a trust that he controls, using a trading plan that he had set up on Jan. 26, according to the filing. The options had been set to expire May 2.
SEC disclosure forms indicate that Becker's "unchanged stock ownership" consisted of 92,552 shares in a revocable trust and 6,315 shares in a retirement account (either 401(k) or ESOP). In total, he owned 98,867 shares of Silicon Valley Bank when it was taken over. At the roughly $287/share price he sold his stock from his exercised options, the 98,867 shares would have been worth roughly $28 million before the FDIC takeover of the bank. Those shares are now, for all practical purposes, worthless.

This block of expiring options was not the first set of options Becker received nor was this the first time he has sold stock in Silicon Valley Bank.

The Wall Street Journal's covereage included commentary that was exceptionally bad:
On Feb. 27, the trust sold $3.6 million worth of shares while acquiring options worth $1.3 million. The trades were scheduled on Jan. 26 through an SEC rule that allows insiders to schedule sales ahead of time to allay suspicions of trading on insider information.

...

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has highlighted 10b5-1 plans as having been potentially abused by executives and the agency has proposed new rules for the program.

The sales executed by Mr. Becker's trust would not have been possible under the proposed rules, which stipulate among other things that 10b5-1 sellers must wait 90 days between filing the trades and executing them.
Since his option exercise date would not change under the new 10b5-1 rules, the declaration of intent to sell would simply have been made 60 days earlier than it was, so intead of declaring an intention to sell on January 26th and selling on February 27th, the declaration of intent to sell would have been made on November 26th of 2022 and the sale on February 27th would have happened anyway.
20-Feb-2023 Top Grossing Movies: 2022 Hollywood is going to continue to produce sequels and 'cinematic universe' movies as long as people keep coming to the threaters to watch them. Top domestic grossing movies for 2022 (note: some of these movies continues to make money well into 2023, but this just shows the 2022 domestic gross):

Title 2022 GrossDerivative?
Top Gun: Maverick $718,732,821Sequel
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever $436,499,646Marvel
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness$411,331,607Marvel
Avatar: The Way of Water $401,007,908Sequel
Jurassic World: Dominion $376,851,080Sequel
Minions: The Rise of Gru $369,695,210Sequel
The Batman $369,345,583DC
Thor: Love and Thunder $343,256,830Marvel
Spider-Man: No Way Home $231,808,708Marvel
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 $190,872,904Sequel
Black Adam $168,054,237DC
Elvis $151,040,048
Uncharted $148,649,929
Nope $123,277,080
Lightyear $118,307,188Sequel
Smile $105,935,048
The Lost City $105,344,029
Bullet Train $103,368,602
The Bad Guys $97,233,630
Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore $95,850,844Sequel

The 1977 table (as far back as boxofficemojo goes) looks like this:

Title 1977 GrossDerivative?
Star Wars $195,666,111
The Deep $47,346,365
The Spy Who Loved Me $45,313,255James Bond
Oh, God! $41,687,243
Exorcist II: The Heretic $30,749,142Sequel
The Turning Point $25,815,410
Looking for Mr. Goodbar $22,512,655
Saturday Night Fever $18,234,852
Close Encounters of the Third Kind $16,172,445

9-Mar-2023: And old (2017 London Comic Con?) Anthony Mackie (the actor behind Marvel's "Falcon") fan Q&A session contains this:
There are no movie stars anymore. Like, Anthony Mackie isn't a movie star. The Falcon is a movie star. And that's what's weird. It used to be with Tom Cruise and Will Smith and Stallone and Schwarzenegger, when you went to the movies, you went to see the Stallone movie ... Now you go to see ... X-Men. So the evolution of the superhero has meant the death of the movie star. It's just a different time now.
This makes sense when people are going to the movies to see the next installment of a series or a franchise rather then the most recent movie by their favorite movie star.

The yearly worldwide box office leading movies since 2000 (from https://www.boxofficemojo.com/) looks like this:

Year Title
2022: Avatar: The Way of Water
2021: Spider-Man: No Way Home
2020: The Eight Hundred
2019: Avengers: Endgame
2018: Avengers: Infinity War
2017: Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
2016: Captain America: Civil War
2015: Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
2014: Transformers: Age of Extinction
2013: Frozen
2012: The Avengers
2011: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
2010: Toy Story 3
2009: Avatar
2008: The Dark Knight
2007: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
2005: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
2004: Shrek 2
2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
2001: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
2000: Mission: Impossible II
1999: Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
1998: Armageddon
1997: Titanic
1996: Independence Day
1995: Toy Story
1994: The Lion King
1993: Jurassic Park
1992: Aladdin
1991: Beauty and the Beast
1990: Home Alone
1989: Batman
1988: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
1987: Three Men and a Baby
1986: Top Gun
1985: Out of Africa
1984: Beverly Hills Cop
1983: Return of the Jedi
1982: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1981: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark
1980: The Empire Strikes Back
1979: Kramer vs. Kramer
1978: Grease
1977: Star Wars

Derivative movies (sequels or followup movies in a cinematic universe (e.g. MCD) are marked in color. I'm scoring the Lord of the Rings trilogy as a single (very long) movie released in three parts and so am not considering the two entries derivative.

Notice that the Avatar sequel is the #1 worldwide grossing 2022 movie, but only #4 domesticly.

2020 was a weird year because of Covid. The Eight Hundred led the worldwide box office list for 2020, but 99% of the ticket sales were in China so outside of China almost no one is aware of the movie. #2 for 2020 was "Demon Slayer the Movie: Mugen Train." Neither were derivative nor was the #1 movie at the US box office — Bad Boys for Life.

11-Mar-2023: This Sept. 25, 2015 article claims that "Non-original films are expected to account for 44% of 2015's worldwide box-office revenue" The article goes on to say this:
Dergarabedian noted that when Hollywood takes chances on new, fresh and interesting ideas, the payoff typically isn't there. He pointed to M. Night Shyamalan's $60 million domestic gross for Sony's "After Earth" and the $47 million draw for the Wachowski siblings' "Jupiter Ascending," from Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros.

"When that happens, studios go back to what's proven," Dergarabedian said. "Discovering something new and falling love with a film is one of the experiences you can have in theaters, but that really only happens in the indie world.

"No matter how much people complain about the number of sequels and franchises in Hollywood, it's because they typically don't show up and support new ideas in film."
11-Feb-2023 Trouble In Space: Roscosmos The Russian space program seems to be deteriorating.

WhenEvent
Aug-20182 mm hole discovered drilled in Soyuz MS-09.
Oct-2018Soyuz MS-10 mission aborted due to booster failure.
Jul-2021Russian Nauka module unexpectedly fires thrusters while docked to ISS, tumbling ISS.
Sep-2021Kosmos-2551 spy satellite failed shortly after launch. Crashed in October.
Oct-2021Soyuz capsule thruster test contined after expected test end while docked to ISS, tumbling ISS.
Dec-2021Angara A5 upper stage booster failed to perform second burn. Upper stage crashes in January.
Aug-2022Oleg Artemyev experiences EVA suit malfunction during ISS space walk.
Aug-2022GLONASS satellite positioning system suffers disruption for several hours.
Dec-2022Soyuz MS-22 experiences coolant leak while docked to ISS. Unsafe to return people to Earth.
Feb-2023Progress MS-21 experiences coolant leak while docked to ISS.

29-Feb-2024: Air is leaking from a Russian ISS module, but 'no impact to crew,' NASA says
4-Feb-2023 Portland Homicides Portland, Oregon has experienced quite a surge in homicides beginning, not in 2020, but in 2019:

YearTotal
20221014 police shootings. New homicide record.
2021 904 police shootings. New homicide record. Previous record was 70 in 1987.
2020 550 police shootings. Highest total since 55 in 1994
2019 395 police shootings. Highest total since 48 in 1997.
2018 333 police shootings.
2017 272 police shootings.
2016 201 police shooting.
2015 343 police shootings.
2014 262 police shootings.
2013 162 police shootings. Lowest total since 15 in 1971
2012 292 police shootings.
2011 241 police shooting.
2010 294 police shootings.
2009 21
2008 27
2007 30
2006 28
2005 22
2004 29
2003 28
2002 20
2001 22
2000 18
1999 36
1998 28
1997 48
1996 46
1995 45
1994 50
1993 54
1992 46
1991 50
1990 29
1989 38
  • 60 or more
  • 31 - 60
  • 30 or fewer

01-May-2023: Portland has seen 28 homicides thorough April-30 of 2023. Tripling this would be 84 homicides for all of 2023.
2-Feb-2023 Veblen Goods: Scents The Qualia Research Institute has a scents page for people with a lot of money who have already purchased enough bottled or canned rainwater and luxury ice cubes.
Explore the State-Space of Olfaction with the Qualia Research Institute
...
The Magical Creatures line of scents from QRI is a collection designed to highlight the complex and irregular nature of the state-space of olfaction. We believe that the space of olfaction is not well-described by a simple Euclidean space, but is instead a complex ecosystem with hidden interstitial gems and exotic creatures. The scents in the line are designed to showcase "special effects" found in this space.

The Cutting-Edge (Preorder)
Includes one additional Mystical Type Magical Creature. This scent has special effects that have the capacity to expand the mind and activate new modes of experience that foreshadow the radical phase transitions of consciousness native to the Post-Darwinian evolutionary era.

Comes with a set of 50ml bottles of Open Fearless, Dust Devil, Glacial Gumdrop, Frisson, Eau de Cologne Vide, and Hedonium Shockwave + scent exploration accessories.

Also Includes:
  • Feature on Our Donors (optional)
  • Invitation to observe a QRI research retreat
  • Personalized scent exploration

31-Jan-2023 The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect and Peter Zeihan Peter Zeihan has produced numerous geopolitical videos since the Ukrainian war with Russia began. Maybe he had been producing them for a long time, but he gained a lot of attention once the war began. He sounds knowledgeable and he is certainly confident. The good news is that he finally talked a bit about a field that in which I have some expertise so I have the ability to calibrate his knowledge. This is the important bit:
There's dozens of different types [of semiconductors], but you can kind of put them in three big buckets.

Your top tier, the best ones, these are 10 nm and smaller. This is typically what's in your cell phone or even high end computers and servers. Those, about 80% of them, are actually fabricated in Taiwan with another 20% in South Korea.

But, again, you need the whole ecosystem to make it work. Remove one country, the whole thing falls apart.

In the middle, you've got everything that goes from climate control systems to automotive to aerospace to machinery. Those are made in a host of places: the United States, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, China, the Netherlands ... a little bit in Germany as well. This still requires the ecosystem but you could probably lose one player. Probably not more than one player.

And then you've got your low end. 90 nm and up. These are chips that are basically analog processors. They can do one little yes/no equation, not much more than that. This is the Internet of Things.
So ... let's see:
  • Intel has been shipping 10nm chips in volume since 2020 (here is an example laptop chip) and has been shipping more 10 nm parts than 14 nm parts since the middle of 2021. The middle of 2021 is 18 months ago and Peter doesn't mention Intel as a top tier player, mentioning only TSMC and Samsung.

  • AMD has been shipping TSMC manufactured 7 nm chips since the Zen 2 x86 micro-architecture. Both server and consumer (Ryzen brand) Zen 2 parts were available in late 2019. Even non-high-end "computers and servers" have been on what Zeihan describes as a high end process since early 2020, so two full years.

  • 10 nm sounds like a size, but semiconductor device "size" values have not corresponded to actual measurable size for quite a while. At the 90 nm node (around 2004) a 90 nm transistor had a half-pitch of 90 nm. Earlier nodes (e.g. 130 nm, 180 nm, ...) were also named after the measurable half-pitch of the transistors being built. But by 2009, the 32 nm node had a half-pitch of 52 nm. Today the gap between the size used in the node name and the physical size of the transistors is even more extreme.

    This discrepency gives vendors the ability to name their nodes with more leeway. Intel 10 nm (once Intel worked out the bugs) is roughly equivalent to TSMC 7 nm. Again, I see no evidence that Zeihan knows this.

  • 90 nm does not mean 'basically analog.' Zeihan seems to be using the word 'analog' as a synonym for 'not very advanced.' That isn't what analog means.

  • Analog is not yes/no ... yes/no would be digital. I wonder whether Zeihan knows the difference. I suspect not.
I was kinda expecting this level of low-level wrongness, though without any clear idea of when Peter would discuss something that I already understood. And his very high level conclusion matches mine: China cannot build state-of-the-art semiconductor chips without western (America, Japan, Netherlands) semiconductor equipment. But his description of the field is quite wrong and I think he overstates things — I expect China can manufacture chps quite a bit more advanced than the 90 nm that Peter thinks it will be restricted to.

Peter is so confident about so many things. But ... how much competence/knowledge should I assume for Peter Zeihan in areas I don't know given his poor knowledge in one area I can gauge?
16-Jan-2023 Instant Oatmeal and a Coke This observation is not original with me:
Two packets of Quaker's Instant Maple and Brown Sugar Oatmeal is nutritionally roughly comparable to two packets of Quaker's Instant Regular Oatmeal plus a 9 oz. Coke:
Maple (×2)Original (×2)
+ 9 oz. Coke
Original (x2)9 Oz. Coke
Calories: 320316200116
Fat (g): 4440
Sodium (mg): 52018315033
Carbohydrates (g): 66653629
    Fibre (g): 6660
    Sugars (g): 2429029
    Protein (g): 8880
13-Jan-2023 Why Public School Enrollment Is Down From a recent Axios interview:
NIALA: During the pandemic enrollment in public schools went down by more than a million students. That's according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
...
So I think the obvious first question is if students are leaving public schools, where are they going?

ERICA: So they're going to private schools, they're going to charter schools, and the homeschooling population of students in the U.S. has actually doubled during the pandemic from around 2.5 million to around 5 million.

Why America's public school enrollment is down
So ... to summarize:
  • Public schools lost over 1 million students during the recent pandemic.
  • 2.5 million of those 1M+ lost students became home schooled.
  • The rest went to private and charter schools.
Um ...
4-Jan-2023 Tesla's Earnings Have Caught Up With Ford Both trailing 12 month earnings are in the $11B - $12B range (Tesla is the $12B).

This is compared to June when Ford was as $11B and Tesla was at $8B.

Ford sold a lot more individual cars of course ...
31-Dec-2022 Michigan Football Under Jim Harbaugh This was Harbaugh's 8th season at Michigan.

Realistically, he is doing well. Michigan won the Big10 the past two years and beat both Ohio State and Penn State the past two years. In addition, Michigan went to the playoffs the past two years.

So ... Jim is doing a good job by any reasonable metric.

However ... Michigan has also gone to 7 bowl games since Harbaugh took over. Michigan is 1-6 in those, winning only in Harbaugh's first season. By season:

2015:Wvs Florida41-7
2016:Lto Florida State33-32
2017:Lto South Carolina26-19
2018:Lto Florida41-15
2019:Lto Alabama35-16
2020:
2021:Lto Georgia34-11
2022:Lto TCU51-45

I'm not seeing Ohio State getting back to dominance, so I can see Jim staying at Michigan for a while, but I expect folks to soon start wondering if he can "win it all."
26-Dec-2022 Economics Causality Fail Headline: McDonald's unveiled an automated store. Some consumers aren't loving it.

From the article itself:
But not all customers are loving it.
...
"I'm not giving my money to robots," another commenter wrote. "Raise the minimum wage!"
Because, presumably, higher wages cause employers to favor employees over automation ...
9-Dec-2022 Brittney Griner Attended Baylor I recently read this as a defense of Brittney Griner: "She's not stupid. She went to Baylor." 30-Nov-2022 Death Raises Concern About Safety From UPI: Deaths raise concerns about safety of experimental Alzheimer's drug 24-Nov-2022 Wins Help Yahoo helping the readers understand how wins and losses effect rankings: "The Trojans have a shot at the College Football Playoff, and only a win will help that chance."

Technically there can be times when a tie helps. But since D1 college football games are now played until there is a winner, the choices for a given game are 'win' or 'lose.' I can't think of a time when losing a regular season college football game would incrase a team's chances to make the playoffs.
17-Nov-2022 Lead Me Not Into Temptation The Lord's Prayer goes something like this (Baltimore Catechism, 1885 version):
Our Father who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come;
Thy will be done on Earth
as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Underlining added by me.

The point to the underlined bit is a response to the observation that people are more likely to sin when given the opportunity. It is harder to drink excessively if there is no liquor in the house. Most people don't get the opportunity to embezzle millions of dollars and so, by necessity, don't.

Which leads us to Temar Boggs.

In 2013, when Temar was 15 years old, he and a friend noticed a five year old girl being kidnapped from a porch. Stranger kidnappings in the US are rare, but not unheard of.

Temar and his friend jumped on their bicycles and followed the car with the kidnapped little girl. After quite a car chase on the bicycles the kidnapper gave up trying to elude Temar and his friend and let the child go free before driving away. Temar (and his friend) were heroes. The kidnapper, Harold Leroy Herr, was eventually found and was sentenced to a long term in prison.

Three years later, in 2016, the same Temar Boggs went to prison for an armed robbery he committed with an accomplice.

This is the same kid, but clearly in very different circumstances and quite possibly with a different set of friends.

It is easy to imagine an alternate 2016 where Temar was hanging out with different friends and he doesn't commit the robbery and go to jail. He'd still be the same person, and no one would have reason to believe that he would ever rob a local market.
9-Nov-2022 Raptor 2 and BE-4 Engine Production Rates
"SpaceX has moved very quickly on development," Kirasich said about Raptor. "We've seen them manufacture what was called Raptor 1.0. They have since upgraded to Raptor 2.0 that first of all increases performance and thrust and secondly reduces the amount of parts, reducing the amount of time to manufacture and test. They build these things very fast. Their goal was seven engines a week, and they hit that about a quarter ago. So they are now building seven engines a week."

— 2022: SpaceX is now building a Raptor engine a day, NASA says
Once the BE-4 production line is stabilized, Huntsville staff will be trained in Kent and then return to ramp up engine production in Huntsville. Ultimately the factory will be able to produce 42 engines a year, split roughly evenly between the BE-4 and the BE-3U engine that will power the upper stage of New Glenn. The company expects to take two to three years to reach that production rate.

— 2020: Blue Origin opens rocket engine factory
28-Oct-2022 Skewed NBA Payrolls The NBA has 30 teams and thus, with equal distributions of talent and salaries we'd expect to see each team have one of the top-30 paid players. This is not how things work, however, and five teams have 15 of the top 30 paid players. The results of these teams are not similar, however, and about one week into the NBA season we see the following results for these five teams:

TeamRecord Highest Paid Players (Rank) Combined Salary
Bucks 3-0 Giannis Antetokounmpo (7), Khris Middleton (13), Jrue Holiday (25) $117M
Warriors 3-2 Steph Curry (1), Klay Thompson (10), Andrew Wiggins (27) $122M

Nets 1-4 Kevin Durant (4), Kyrie Irving (19), Ben Simmons (21) $116M
76ers 1-4 Tobias Harris (15), Joel Embiid (26), James Harden (30) $104M
Lakers 0-4 Russell Westbook (2), Lebron James (3), Anthony Davis (12) $129M
23-Oct-2022 Illustrating Statistical Errors: Assuming Independence A resonable demographic estimate for world wide childbirths is that about 17% of the children born in 2022 will be Indian.

How many children must a given woman give birth to to have a 50% chance of having at least one Indian child?

One approach is to compute the chance that ALL children are non-Indian and one then gets the following table:
ChildrenAll non-IndianAt least one Indian
183%17%
269%31%
353%47%
447%53%
From this one could conclude, incorrectly, that any woman who chooses to have four children has a 50% chance of having at least one Indian child. The catch, of course, is that if a woman's first child is not Indian then there is NOT a 17% chance that the second child will be Indian ... because these probabilities are not independent ...
18-Oct-2022 Trivially Meaningless or Wrong II
Under coach Nick Saban, the Alabama Crimson Tide does not lose often, but when they do, they probably have a pretty good idea of who they will play in their next game.

Coming off tough road losses last weekend, No. 6 Alabama and No. 24 Mississippi State will meet in a Southeastern Conference contest Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, Ala

https://sports.yahoo.com/no-6-alabama-no-24-182332538.html
Well, yes. Because scheduling isn't done week-to-week? Whether Alabama knows who they will play in their next game is an empirical question, however and we can provide a quantitative answer. By season, we can look at the losses and whether the next opponent was known:

YearRecord Opponents Known After LossOpponents Unknown After Loss
2007(7-6) 5games 4, 5, 9-11 1Bowl opponent after game 12 loss
2008(12-2) 1Bowl game 1Bowl opponent after SEC Championship loss
2009(14-0) 0 0
2010(10-3) 2games 6 & 9 1Bowl opponent after game 12 loss
2011(12-1) 1game 9 0
2012(13-1) 1game 10 0
2013(11-2) 1bowl game 1Bowl opponent after game 12 loss
2014(12-2) 2game 5. BCS Championship 0
2015(14-1) 1game 3 0
2016(14-1) 1BCS Championship 0
2017(14-1) 0 1Bowl opponent after game 12 loss
2018(14-1) 1BCS Championship 0
2019(11-2) 1game 9 1Bowl opponent after game 12 loss
2020(13-0) 0 0
2021(13-2) 2game 6. BCS Championship 0
2022(6-1) 1game 7 0
Total 20 6

What is interesting is that it does seem that Alabama knows their next opponent after a loss about 80% of the time ... but 80% is actually pretty low!

We have about 130 BCS teams in ten conferences. A few teams are independent, but not very many.

They will, collectively, lose ½ their regular season games. For every regular season game except the last one the next opponent will be known.

The next opponent will be known if a team:
  • Loses any regular season game except for the last one, or
  • Loses a bowl game (because season schedules are set more than six months in advance)
The next opponent will not be known if a team:
  • Loses the last game of the regular season but will go to a bowl game or at conference championship
So ... roughly 65 losses per week and the next opponent is known for all of them except in the final week:

Known: 65 × 11

There are 65 losses for the 'last' regular season game. About ½ the teams won't be bowl eligible so they'll know their next opponent. About ½ will be and won't.

Known: 65 × ½
Unknown: 65 × ½

The folks that lose their conference championship game won't know, so:

Unknown: 10 × 1

The folks that lose their bowl game (or BCS playoff or championship game) will know:

Known: 65 × ½

So ... in total we expect roughly this many losses to have a known next opponent:

Known: 65 × 11 + 65 × ½ + 65 × ½ ≈ 780

And this many losses to not be followed by a known opponent:

Unknown: 65 × ½ + 10 × 1 ≈ 43

A "typical" loss is in a game where the next opponent is known about 95% of the time. On only about 5% of losses is the next opponent unknown. Alabama's 80% "known next opponent after a loss" is VERY low.

The source is "Field Level Media". Field Level Media claims that their articles are written by humans. I'm wondering if they are experimenting with adding bots...

Alternately, the human writing the article wanted some babbling filler ... maybe to hit a word count target?

Previous entry: Trivially Meaningless or Wrong
6-Oct-2022 Binomial NFL The NFL this seasons is showing slightly MORE PARITY than if the teams were all equally good!

We can make a binomial expansion of what we should expect if each game was a true coin-flip. The standings are actually more compressed than this with the tails smaller (no team is 0-4, for example) and the middle at 2-2 fatter than expected.

The various records, # teams with that record, expected # of teams with that record (assuming a binomial distribution) [and some team info to make things checkable]. Two teams with a tie are excluded so there are only 30 win-loss results. Because of this the binomial expansion results are a bit below the 2-8-12-8-2 distribution for 32 team results:

# Teams
Record Actual BinomialDiffWho
4-0 1 2 -1 Philly
3-1 7 Cowboys, Giants, Vikings, Packers, Miami, Buffalo, Kansas City
2-2 15 11¼ +4 8 AFC, 7 NFC
1-3 7 7.½ Raiders, Steelers, Pats, Washington, Detroit, Carolina, NOLA
0-4 0 2 -2

This does seem to be what one would expect if the games were a coin flip on average, but the home team had an advantage. That advantage would push the records away from the extremes and towards 0.500.

Through week 4 the home team has a 33-31 record, so a coin flip where the home team had a ~52% chance of winning would explain the win-loss results. This isn't enough of an advantage for the home team to expain the lack of teams that are 4-0 and 0-4. In fact, we'd need the home team to have about a 75% chance to win (and every team to have played two home games) for tighten up using a weighted coin flip — and this still isn't enough to match the 2-2 records as well as the edges! With a 75% chance of winning at home the expected number of teams with each record (assuming 32 teams) is:

1⅛, 7½, 14¾, 7½, 1⅛

For context we can look at the distribution from previous seasons. As with 2022, teams with a tie are excluded. In addition, teams with a bye week (which typically begin with week 4) get their 4th game from the next week. Because of this exclusion, there may be a net gain or loss of wins (e.g. excluding two 1-2-1 teams will result in more wins than losses for the remaining teams). After four weeks of games, the distribution from previous seasons (excluding 2020 because of Covid) is this:

Record
Year 4-0 3-1 2-21-30-4Comment
Expected 2 8 12 8 2(With all team records counting)
2022 1 7 15 7 0Excluding Colts and Houston due to tie
2021 1 12 7 10 2No ties
2019 3 7 13 5 2Excluding Detroit and Arizona due to tie
2018 2 8 8 9 14 teams excluded due to tie
2017 1 9 15 3 4No ties

The 2019 season pretty much follows a binomial distribution through the first four games.

2022 is quite unusual, however, in that it has only 1 team total at 4-0 and 0-4. The other four examined seasons have 3+ teams there. Examining just the 4-0 and 0-4 records by season we get this:

# of Teams
Year 4-00-4 ± vs binomial
2022 10 ---
2021 12 -
2019 32 +
2018 21 -
2017 14 +
2016 21 -
2015 51 ++
2014 02 --
2013 53 ++++
2012 32 +
2011 24 ++
2010 04
2009 55 ++++++
2008 34 +++
2007 43 +++
2006 34 +++
2005 32 +
2004 44 ++++
2003 53 ++++
2002 23 +
2001 12 -
2000 34 +++++

The number of NFL teams with extreme good and extreme bad records after four games played is the lowest in 20 years at ... one, which is three below the expected four.
10-Oct-2022: After five weeks worth of games, the NFL's per-team win results vs binomial (assigning ties as 1/2 a game of win and 1/2 a game of loss) looks like this:
Wins
Wins 5 4 3 2 1 0
Expected # of Teams 1 5 10 10 5 1
Actual 2022 After 5 Games 1 5  8½ 12 0

This is basically a binomial distribution!
3-Oct-2022 Tampa Bay Rushing Offense Tampa Bay rushing yards by game for 2022 season:

Game 1152 yards33 rushes
Game 2 72 yards30 rushes
Game 3 34 yards14 rushes
Game 4 3 yards6 rushes

Three rushing yards in an NFL game is ... low?

StatMuse reports that 32 NFL games (dating back to 1940) have had a team with two or fewer rushing yards. The 'winner' is the 1943 Detroit Lions with -53 yards against the Chicago Cardinals. Other teams that make appearances in the 32 games include the Brooklyn Dodgers, Boston Yanks and Card-Pitt Combine.

The most recent game with a team having two or fewer yards of rushing offense was the 2013 Miami Dolphins against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In that game the QB, Ryan Tannehill had two yards rushing on one attempt, Lamar Miller had two yards on seven rushes, Charles Clay had zero yards on two rushes and Daniel Thomas was -2 yards on four rushes.

Brady is playing fine: 68% completion percentage, 260 passing yards/game, 6 TDs, 1 Int). but having NO run game makes everything much more difficult for the offense. They have one back responsible for 72% of their rushes and 85% of their rushing yards. That seems ... pretty skewed?
11-Oct-2022: Game five rushing was 69 total yards on 23 carries, so a lot like game 2. After five games, the Bucs are 2nd worst in the NFL for team rushing (but also 3-2 and leading the NFC South by one game). The bottom teams in the NFL for rushing so far are these:

Team Rushing Yards Yards per Carry
Steelers 4433.9
Dolphins 4143.9
Buccaneers 3303.1
Rams 3123.2

The Buccaneers are the NFL worst in yards-per-carry and 2nd worst in total rushing yards. The total being low makes sense if the yards-per-carry is poor ... rushing a lot when averaging a bit over three yards per rush isn't going to win games.
2-Oct-2022 Wisdom From Our Elders Speaking of the Russian war in Ukraine (but quite relevant with no context whatsoever:
Everything would be fine if it wasn't so bad.

— Ramzan Kadyrov (Chechen Warlord, age 46)
18-Sep-2022 HIT Training HUMBLE-BRAG ALERT! I guess?

Notice the single 'I'. I am going to discuss HIT (High Intensity Training) rather than HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training).

So I've been watching exercise videos on Youtube. (These are separate from the music videos I tend to watch when I'm working out). Because I'm trying to incorporate more core exercises and also a bit of strength exercises.

And I tripped over one with the nice title of "The Worst Cardio Mistakes Everyone Makes For Fat Loss (Avoid These)" which isn't totally relevant because I figure weight loss is mostly from burning more calories than you consume, but still ... "Worst Cardio Mistakes" sounds like a good thing to know to avoid.

Item #3 was "Falling into the High Intensity Trap." Lord knows I don't want to do that!

So ... cardio seems to come in two flavors (or states):
  1. Low Intensity Steady State
  2. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
The presenter doesn't have a problem with HIIT, but he does think that the benefits are overstated.

This is fine with me, since I pretty much do the Steady State flavor: Get on a machine (stair master, elliptical, whatever) and settle in at a reasonable and sustainable 70% - 85% of my "max heart rate." I try not to exceed 85% of 'max heart rate' for very long because the goal is to be healthy, not to damage my heart and I don't have any specific goal in mind that would make me want to go to 90% or higher.

And then I noticed that my steady state for the ~1 hour cardio session is the "High Intensity" part of the HIIT mix of 20-30 seconds of high intensity followed by a few minutes to recover. After one hour on an elliptical machine my readouts look like this (usually a bit lower, but 800 calories/hour or more is pretty common):
Photo of Elliptical Machine Console
85% of my max heartrate is 140 beats/minute. 131 means an average of 79% of max heartrate (with, obviously, some time higher and some lower).WTF?

I thought that my steady state was the 'baseline' bit and the high intensity bit would be pushing very hard for 20-30 seconds. Which I didn't want to do because I didn't want my heart rate up that high.

My wife apparently knew all this and just didn't see any particular reason to tell me that I was pretty much doing the 'HI' part for 60 minutes at a time ...

Yay, stairs ?!?!? Also, yay being clueless?

NOTE:
What is crazy, but typical, of exercise advice is that what heart rate you want to hit during the High Intensity part of HIIT is not consistent between folks writing about this (though 80% - 95% is pretty common while the American Heart Association specifies a max of 85%).

The American Heart Association says this:
Target heart rate during moderate intensity activities is about 50-70% of maximum heart rate, while during vigorous physical activity it's about 70-85% of maximum....

If you're just starting out, aim for the lower range of your target zone (50 percent) and gradually build up. In time, you'll be able to exercise comfortably at up to 85 percent of your maximum heart rate. Woo hoo!
Meanwhile, some quotes from sites near the top of a Google search for "hiit heart rate":
As an alternative to moderate-intensity training, the concept of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is increasing in popularity, Dr. Tyree said. This involves exercise at high exertional levels, from 80 to 95% of maximal heart rate for short periods, followed by a recovery period that is usually 40 to 50% of maximal heart rate.
and:
A good guideline is to strive for 70 to 90 percent of your maximal heart rate during the high-intensity sessions, and 55 to 65 percent during recovery, according to Len Kravitz, PhD, coordinator of exercise science at the University of Mexico and author of HIIT Your Limit.
and:
The target heart rate zone of a HIIT workout is 80 to 95 percent of your maximum heart rate.
and:
During your high-intensity work, you want to be working at 80 to 95 percent of your maximal heart rate...

19-Jan-2023:
I'm now sustaining a heart rate closer to 135-6 beats/minute over the hour. Today I spent 62:10 on the elliptical to burn ~900 calories with an average heart rate of 136. I am now also aware of cardiac drift. Today, at the 10 minute mark I had burned 160 calories (960 calories/hour). At the 30 minute mark I had burned ~455 calories (~910 calories/hour). At 60 minutes I had burned around 870 calories. I was keeping my heart rate fairly constant ...

24-Jan-2023:
I paid more attention to hydration. It seems to help :-)

13-Feb-2023:
Well, now I've read up on "Zone 2" training and the Karvonen Formula for heart rate zones. Example, here: https://www.omnicalculator.com/sports/heart-rate-zone


I eventually wrote up what I think is going on here: Exercise Not Training

Calories
DateAvg HRDurationOverall10 min30 min40 minbeats/cal
18-Sep-2022 13160:01837 9.39
19-Jan-2023 13662:10900160455 9.39
24-Jan-2023 13560:50900 455605 9.13
31-Jan-2023 13161:50900165447595 9.00
16-Feb-2023 13260:16900 8.84
19-Feb-2023 13460:00904462609 8.89
24-Feb-2023 13860:00931160479633 9.20
8-Mar-2023 12862:539001524395808.94
12-Mar-2023 13060:009141634726198.53
16-Mar-2023 13560:009121514656128.88
4-Apr-2023 10760:02780 8.24
25-Apr-2023 11460:00781 8.76
27-Apr-2023 11360:00782 8.67
7-May-2023 11360:007751363935198.75
12-May-2023 11560:00799136405 8.64
12-May-2023 11160:00770131390 8.65
9-Jul-2023 12960:008651494435858.90
30-Jul-2023 10260:007401243745948.27
3-Aug-2023 10760:00758129 8.47
18-Aug-2023 10760:03770130 8.34
5-Sep-2023 13860:009171614696199.03
24-Sep-2023 12660:00870148 8.69
22-Oct-2023 11060:00769 8.58
26-Oct-2023 11460:00818 8.36
24-Dec-2023 13560:009021594616098.98
28-Dec-2023 13560:009331634796258.68
9-Jan-2023 13760:009411674886418.74
12-Jan-2023 13160:00909160460 8.65
11-Feb-2023 13760:009261654796308.88
10-Mar-2023 13445:00694 8.69
14-Sep-2022 When Money Isn't On The Line ESPN has a computer and has used that computer to release predictions for the upcoming 2022-23 NBA season. The computer's predictions for the regular season final standings and expected wins for teams in the NBA West do *not* quite match the NBA general manager's expectations about who will win the championship or the Las Vegas betting line for who will win. This is not entirely silly ... one might believe that a team would finish the regular season somewhere other than in 1st place but still believe that this team has the best chance to win the finals. Still:

WestSource
PositionESPNLas VegasNBA GM's
Boston (+550) Milwaukee (43%)
Milwaukee (+600)
1Phoenix (49.0) Golden State (+650) Golden State (25%)
2Denver (47.9) LA Clippers (+700) LA Clippers (21%)
Brooklyn (+800)
3New Orleans (47.6) Phoenix (+1000)
Philadelphia (+1400)
4Memphis (46.1) LA Lakers (+1800)
Miami (+1800)
5Minnesota (45.7) Denver (+2000)
6LA Clippers (43.6) Dallas (+2200)
7Dallas (43.1) Memphis (+2500)
Cleveland (+3000)
8Golden State (41.9) Minnesota (+3000)
Toronto (+4000)
9LA Lakers (36.8) New Orleans (+4000)
Atlanta (+5000)
Chicago (+6000)
10Portland (36.6) Portland (+10000)
Charlotte (+15000)
NY Knicks (+20000)
Washington (+20000)
11Sacramento (36.5) Sacramento (+25000)
Detroit (+50000)
Indiana (+50000)
Orlando (+50000)
12Utah (34.9) Utah (+50000)
13San Antonio (31.2) San Antonio (+50000)
14Oklahoma City (26.9) Oklahoma City (+50000)
15Houston (26.7) Houston (+50000)

So the NBA general managers believe that Golden State and the LA Clippers are the two NBA West teams most likely to win the 2022-23 championship as do the folks who bet on sports. ESPN thinks these two teams are #6 and #8 in the West!

Note that it is VERY rare for a team seeded any lower than 4th to win the championship, though, so Las Vegas and the GMs expecting Golden State and the LA Clippers to have good odds to win is not consistent with these two teams finishing 6th and 8th in the West.

Another way to look at this is that the ESPN computer sees only about 7 wins separating the projected #1 seed in the West, Phoenix, from the #8 seed, Golden State. In the 2021-22 season the difference between the best regular season team, Phoenix, and the #8 regular season team, New Orleans, was 28 games.

In other words, the 'expected wins' for each team should probably come with a ±15 range ... which makes the expected number of wins and the rank ordering meaningless!
14-May-2023:
Well, the Clippers finished in 5th place in the West and the Warriors finished in 6th place so the ESPN computer did pretty well there (though the basic point about the rank ordering range still holds).

The overall west rank ordering wasn't too bad, either. The actual top-10 teams were predicted by the ESPN computer to have order of:
4, 1, 9, 2, 8, 5, 11, 6, 7, 12
The magnitude of the rank order difference for each was thus:
3, 1, 6, 2, 5, 1, 4, 2, 2, 2
And the average error for each rank order was almost 3. So a prediction of coming in 5th place should be treated as "somewhere between 2nd place and 8th place."

Going into the conference finals, the betting line for each surviving team to win the NBA championship are:
Team Line
Boston +105
Denver +230
Lakers +330
Miami +1,400
10-Sep-2022 When You Don't Follow the Other Games At 4:00pm Nick Bromberg, a Yahoo Sports columnist, posted an article that began like this:
Appalachian State delivered the first shocking result of the 2022 college football season.
Appalachian State did beat Texas A&M 17-14, but one hour earlier Notre Dame lost to Marshall 26-21 at South Bend.

Notre Dame isn't supposed to lose to Marshall. Marshall was paid $1.25 million to come play Notre Dame in South Bend. Marshall plays in Conference USA the Sun Belt conference and was 7-6 in 2021, 7-3 in 2020 and 8-5 in 2019. Marshall lost bowl games in all three previous seasons.
11-Sep-2022: The lede has been changed (with no indication that it was every any different. Even the posted time for the article is unchanged):
Shortly after Marshall delivered the first shocking result of the 2022 college football season, Appalachian State followed suit with its own massive upset.
9-Sep-2022 California K-12 Public Education Enrollment California has seen a dramatic dropoff in public K-12 education enrollment starting with Covid and the response to Covid in 2020. This table shows that dropoff using California Department of Education numbers. A longer baseline is provided by the US NCES, though, interestingly, those numbers don't quite match the California DOE values. Still, here we are:

Fall NCES Cal DOE
Fall Count Count Change
1996 5,612,965
1997 5,727,303 +114,338
1998 5,844,111 +116,808
1999 6,038,589 5,951,612 +107,501
2000 6,140,814 6,050,895 +99,283
2001 6,247,726 6,147,375 +96,480
2002 6,353,667 6,244,732 +77,357
2003 6,413,867 6,298,783 +54,051
2004 6,441,557 6,322,141 +23,358
2005 6,437,202 6,312,436 -9,705
2006 6,406,750 6,286,943 -25,493
2007 6,343,471 6,275,469 -11,474
2008 6,322,528 6,252,029 -23,440
2009 6,263,438 6,192,121 -59,908
2010 6,289,578 6,217,002 +24,881
2011 6,287,834 6,220,993 +3,991
2012 6,299,451 6,226,989 +5,996
2013 6,312,623 6,236,672 +9,683
2014 6,312,161 6,235,520 -1,152
2015 6,305,347 6,226,737 -8,783
2016 6,309,138 6,228,235 +1,498
2017 6,304,266 6,220,413 -7,822
2018 6,186,278 -34,135
2019 6,163,001 -23,277
2020 6,002,523 -160,478
2021 5,892,240 -110,283

From Fall 2019, the year before Covid, to Fall 2021 California saw a public school K-12 enrollment dropoff of 270,000. This is unprecedented. The previous largest 2-year dropoff was between Fall 2005 and Fall 2007 of about 90,000.

Sources:
  • CDE numbers:
    https://edsource.org/2022/california-k-12-enrollment-plunges-again-falls-below-6-million/670111
    https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/ps/cefprivinstr.asp
    https://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/dqcensus/EnrAgeGrd.aspx?cds=00&agglevel=state&year=20XX-YY

  • NCES numbers sources:
    https://nces.ed.gov/programs/quarterly/Vol_3/3_2/q2-6.asp
    https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.20.asp
    https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018019.pdf
    https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017094.pdf
    https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2021/2021009.pdf

2022-23 DoE enrollment: 5,852,544
24-Jul-2022 Veblen Goods: Rainwater Along with raw water and luxury ice cubes there seems to be such a thing a bottled (or canned) rainwater: 26-Jun-2022 Get Woke, Go Broke: Kelloggs Edition "Kellogg goes woke, gets broken up"

The headline is true, but the implied causality isn't. Kelloggs is doing fine financially:

YearProfits
2018$1.3B
2019$0.9B
2020$1.3B
2021$1.5B

Covid can be clearly seen in 2019, but profits are growing. What isn't growing is cereal sales. From the linked post:
A year ago, Kellogg cereal teamed up with the Gay Mafia — GLAAD — to introduce a new product aimed at grooming kids at breakfast. As Tony the Tiger now says, "They're gaaaaaaaaaaaay!"

They called it Together.

A year later, Kellogg is falling apart after 128 years in business.

Kellogg will spin off its North American cereal division, which was its only product when the company began in 1894.

Cereal sales have stagnated for Kellogg, hence the Hail Mary gay promotion. (I always had my suspicions about Froot Loops.) Less than 20% of its revenues come from North American cereal.

(underlining added by me)
Except Kelloggs isn't "falling apart" in the sense that there is anything financially wrong with the company. Profits are up! What is happening is that the company is spinning off its breakfast cereal division (and its fake meat division, too — the corporate breakup is into three pieces). But as with Gillette the sequence is:
  • Become sad with financials
  • Run an overtly political ad campaign
  • Accept reality
Rather than:
  • Things are going fine
  • Run an overtly political ad campaign
  • Ooops
Previous "Get Woke, Go Broke" entries:
21-Jun-2022 Web 3.0 Münecat Edition Münecat is not impressed. From Münecat's Vlog:
The year is 2063.

The global currency is Moosecoin.

You're refused entry into the Metaverse's Lambo club because your Twitter profile picture is not enclosed in an icosahedron.

In a desperate bid to hold onto a square of pixels, or "land", you bought in "Elontopia", you must pay rent to Paris Hilton, who bought $17 billion worth of "real estate" with a picture of a monkey in 2033, and in a bid to become immortal, has since replaced all of her organs with bionic hardware, each limb operated by its own separate smart contract.

Citizens who hold 'Sliving' tokens now have voting rights on her every move - from cooking mediocre lasagnes to overthrowing what is left of democracy.

Jobs are obsolete and by the time you get to the MetaWalmart, Moosecoin has crashed

Web3.0: A Libertarian Dystopia
17-Jun-2022 Navy Captains The US Navy has about 3,000 officers with a rank of captain (O-6) and around 300 active ships. On October 2, 2021 the USS Connecticut, a Seawolf class attack submarine (unit cost: ~$3B) ran into an under water mountain. The commanding officer at the time was not a captain (O-6), but a commander (O-5). With about 10× as many captains as ships the US Navy had a commander in charge of a vessel whose cost was only exceeded by each of the 11 aircraft carriers that the Navy owns. What do the captains do if they aren't commanding ships?

Captains seem to be assigned to do one of the following:
  • Command a Navy cruiser or larger ship
  • Command a ballistic missile submarine, or a squadron of attack submarines
  • Command a Naval Air Wing based on an Aircraft Carrier or amphibious assault vessel
  • Command a shore-based installation such as a base or Naval school, be in a senior staff leadership positions in some context
We can add up some of these:
  • 21 cruisers (all Ticonderogas, I think)
    11 aircraft carriers
  • 7 Wasp class amphibious assault ships
    2 America class amphibious assault ships
  • 18 Ohio class ballistic missile submarines
  • 14 attack submarine squadrons
  • 9 carrier based air wings [Yes, more carriers than air wings!]
I also count 24 Navy schools, each of which, presumably, has a captain in charge.

The Navy has 40+ shore bases.

Navy SEALs are organized into four groups (2 - 4 teams each) and each group has a Navy captain in charge.

This works out to about 150 slots.

The rest seem to be things such as running logistics organizations, overseeing new weapons programs being developed, cyber war and staff positions (e.g. assistant to an admiral).

So the average Navy captain might spend 1 - 2 years actually commanding a ship.
11-Jun-2022 Ford Stock Ford has a P/E of around 4. Huh?

Ford has a stock calculator that takes into account dividends if desired. Here:
     https://shareholder.ford.com/investors/stock-information/default.aspx

From Jun 11, 2002 through today (20 years) the total return of Ford was ... 33%. Or 1.44% per year. Nominal.

If we roll this back to Jun 11, 1992 (so 30 years) then the total nominal return over the 30 years is ... -50%. After accounting for dividends.

From Jun 11, 1982 ... also -50%. Again, accounting for dividends. In real terms we should account for 3x inflation so the -50% turns into a -83% in real terms. After dividends.

Ford has done some stock buybacks, but not many. And mostly to counteract stock *issuance*. I can't find any spinoffs, though Ford has sold divisions/brands for cash ... but that cash would show up in Ford's performance.

So ... iconic American company has lost 50% of its nominal value over the past 40 years. And is roughly flat over the past 20 years.
11-Jun-2022 Firehydrant Ooops View from my local coffee shop this mornting

Crash
9-Jun-2022 Disaggregating Entertainment There is a Swedish musician who goes by the stage name of E-Type. He is very poppy and his career took off (for a pop career) in the mid-1990s when he started working with some of the folks who dominate the pop song industry (Denniz Pop, Max Martin).

In any event, this is mostly backstory.

The interesting part is that E-Type worked with a female vocalist, Nana Hedin, a lot from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s.

She sings well (according to folks who have opinions) but is kinda ... heavy. So not quite the "look" one hopes for in a pop female vocalist — this isn't opera.

The solution was to bring in a lithe younger lady who's job was to wear little clothing and gyrate on stage. While lip-syncing.

So far no huge surprise.

The neat thing, though, was that no one pretended otherwise. The songs credited the lady doing the vocals and E-type didn't hide that the dancer was lip syncing.

Nana Hedin Dee Demirbag (right)
Nana Hedin E-Type with Demi

Kinda neat, I think, to realize that for the performance you need the singing and you "need" the minimal clothes dancing but they DON'T NEED TO BE THE SAME PERSON AND YOU DON'T EVEN NEED TO PRETEND.

Now I'm wondering if this is unusual (the not pretending) or is fairly common ...
8-Jun-2022 Good News From the World Bank
In the United States, the World Bank downgraded growth prospects for 2022 to 2.6% from the 3.8% it expected in its January forecast.
Meanwhile, the BEA from Apr 28:
Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022.
Applying a little algebra:

     (-1.4 * 3x)/4 = 2.6; x ~= 4%

The World Bank expects US Apr-Dec GDP growth of almost 4% annualized.

This is good to know!
Well, 2022 GDP numbers for America are in and the quarterly (annualized) growth values were: -1.6%, -0.6%, +3.2%, +2.6% for an overall annual GDP growth of a bit under +1%. Not quite the +2.6% (or +3.8%) that was expected by the World Bank.

Note that the NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) decided that the US was not in a recession after the first half of 2022.

2023 began with annualized quarterly GDP growth of: +2% and +2.4%.
5-Jun-2022 Sukhoi's Bad Timing From a 31-Jan-2022 article:
Russia wants to win over its foreign customers not just when it comes to next-generation fighter jets, like the infamous Checkmate, but also when it comes to commercial airliners. The future Sukhoi Superjet (SSJ)-New will boast more than 90% Russian-made parts, including the PD-8 engine, and will also come with an advanced system of logistical support, hoping to achieve record-breaking sales on foreign markets.
I'm thinking that those hoped for "record-breaking sales on foreign markets" are going to take longer than desired given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and poor reactions to the invasion in the wealthy (European, American, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, ...) markets.
5-Jun-2022 Ford and Tesla I find it interesting that Tesla is catching up (for some value of 'catching up') to Ford in revenue. Tesla is now roughly ½ of Ford by revenue (and we need to keep in mind that Tesla also includes roof solar and batteries — Ford seems a bit more car-centric).

Tesla:
  • Revenue: $62B
  • Income: $8B
  • Cash: $17B
  • Liabilities: $31B (short: $20B, long: $11B)
  • Market Cap: $700B
  • Vehicles sold: ~0.9M (worldwide)
Ford:
  • Revenue: $134B
  • Income: $11B
  • Cash: $50B
  • Liabilities: $208B (short: $91B, long $117B)
  • Market Cap: $50B
  • Vehicles sold: ~3.9M (worldwide)
Tesla has increased worldwide sales about 2.5x in the past 4 years (I think). Ford is actually down (because of Covid and the supply chain nonsense). It seems quite possible that Tesla catches up to Ford in worldwide revenue in five years or so. And may not plateau even then. I dunno?
31-May-2022 225 Flights of Stairs I did 225 flights of stairs today on a Stair Stepper.
It took me 73 minutes.

[Life Fitness PowerMill Climber: 16.25 steps/flight, 7.5" step height (so ~10' per floor)]
DateFlightsTimeCaloriesAverage heart rateComment
31-May-2022: 22573:00Baseline!
18-Dec-2022: 22562:06~920136 beats/minute.
8-Jan-2023: 21060:15~860139 beats/minute.
30-Jan-2023: 22561:40~924136 beats/minute. 902 calories @ 60:00 mark!
5-Feb-2023: 21861:41~900138 beats/minute.
19-Mar-2023: 21260:00~874136 beats/minute.
02-Jul-2023: 22560:00900134 beats/minute.I weigh less than in January
13-Jul-2023: 22860:00912142 beats/minute.Worse than 02-July & HR too high
18-Jul-2023: 15140:00~600134 beats/minute.Hills: all at level 6
25-Jul-2023: 24060:25955136 beats/minute.Hills: ½ @ level 6, ½ @ level 7
14-Dec-2023: 21060:00865130 beats/minute.Level: 40m @ level 6, 20m @ level 5
26-May-2022 538 and the Warriors After the Warriors won the NBA Western Championship (4 games to 1 over the Dallas Mavericks), 538 gave them a >99% chance of making the NBA Finals. Silly 538 26-May-2022 Bay Area Real Estate Madness Zillow shows a house with the following:
  • Rent Estimate: $4,800 (per month, I presume)
  • Refi Estimate: $12,466/month
Renting out the house loses almost $8,000 per month without even taking into account property tax (~$20,000/year) or insurance.

A rental market where the landlord expects to lose $100,000+ per year?
14-May-2022 Market Analytics
This is according to analysts at Mercury Research, which said on Wednesday that AMD's x86 market share reached 27.7 percent against Intel in the first quarter of 2022.
...
In servers, AMD's share grew 2.7 points year-over-year to 11.6 percent
...
For laptops, AMD's share leaped 4.4 points year-over-year to 22.5 percent.
...
AMD's desktop share was 18.3 percent..."

    — https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/13/amd_intel_x86/
Your mission is to solve these equations:

    a*11.6 + b*22.5 + c*18.3 = 27.7

    a + b + c = 1.0; a <= 0, b <= 0, b <= 0

Which will show how market shares of 11.6%, 22.5% and 18.3% can somehow work out to an overall market share of 27.7%.
30-Apr-2022 Reinforcing Stereotypes When you do a Google search Google will show results but ALSO show some alternate popular searches. Presumably popular searches "near" to yours.

Well ... Naomi Judd just died and Google provides this helpful "People also ask" suggestion:

    What did Naomi Judd dye from?

Sigh.

Lets all play to the stereotypes, people!
30-Apr-2022 Apple is Not a Tech Company The S&P 500 Peak seems to be 4,818. Friday close was 4,132.

So 14% down from the peak.

The S&P 500 opened the year at 4,797 so the decline from peak and the yearly loss are basically the same.

The Dow Jones average is basically 37,000 -> 33,000, so ~11% down from peak.

Nasdaq is down more :-) 16,200 -> 12,330, so down around 24%.

Peak Curret
AAPL183 158 -14%
MSFT349 277 -21%
GOOG3,0422,300-25%
KLAC457 319 -30%
AMZN3,7732,485-35%
FB 384 200 -48%
NFLX700 190 -73%

I'm going to float the idea that Apple is not a "tech" company in the way that Google, Facebook, Amazon and KLA are. It certainly moves differently. And, realistically, is more a lifestyle/consumer-electronics company than the others. The fact that it has a pretty good operating system, an awesome CPU/GPU design team and fantastic hardware is kinda a minor detail.
28-Apr-2022 Get Woke, Go Broke: NFL Edition It is popular amongst folks who disapprove of Colin Kaepernick's kneeling for the national anthem before NFL football games to believe that this action cost the league revenue and because the NFL salary cap is based on league revenue that it also cost his fellow NFL players money.

Salary cap data (which is basically 47% - 48% of league revenue divided up evenly between the 32 NFL teams) is:

YearCapComment
2011$120MKaepernick's 1st NFL season
2012$120M
2013$123M
2014$133M
2015$143M
2016$155MKaepernick's last NFL season
2017$167M
2018$177M
2019$188M
2020$198M
2021$182MCovid related drop
2022$208M

The salary cap is set yearly based on the previous year's revenue (e.g. the 2022 cap was set in March of 2022 though the NFL 2022 season won't begin until the fall of 2022). The 2011 cap was set just before Kaepernick entered the league and the 2017 cap was set after Kaepernick's last (kneeling) season.

From 2011 - 2017 the cap went up from $120M to $167M, a gain of 40% over six years. This works out to about a 5% - 6% annualized increase over those years.

From 2017 - 2022 the cap went up from $167M to $208, a gain of 25% over five years. This works out to about a 4% - 5% annualized increase over those five years.

It is going to be difficult to convince anyone that the NFL salary cap would have gone up by one percentage point more if only Kaepernick hadn't knelt during the national anthem. Partially because the year-to-year variation is much higher than 1% but primarily because the difference seems to be that in the three years leading up to the Covid drop in 2021 the cap was adding about $10M per year ($167M → $177M → $198M), but in the two years after that the cap went up only $10M total rather than $10M per year.

If the 2022 cap was $10M higher, which is seems likely without Covid, then the five years after Kaepernick would see the cap increase from $167M to $218M for a gain of 30% over five years which works out to about a 5% - 6% annualized increase — pretty much the same as the pre-kneeling years.

Previous "Get Woke, Go Broke" entries: (NFL Salary Cap by season from sportac: https://www.spotrac.com/nfl/cba/)
27-Apr-2022 Vodka is Marketing As with bottled water, which is often from some local municipal water source before being put into a plastic bottle and sold for $1/bottle and up ...
In the United States, many vodkas are made from 95% pure grain alcohol produced in large quantities by agricultural-industrial giants Archer Daniels Midland, Grain Processing Corporation, and Midwest Grain Products (MGP). Bottlers purchase the base spirits in bulk, then filter, dilute, distribute and market the end product under a variety of vodka brand names.
From Wikipedia.

Sigh.

Much of the bottled water is from the tap.

Many of the designer shirts are produced for $2/each or less and the value is in the logo.

And now this ...

Clearly for a number of products the VALUE isn't in the product itself but in the advertising campaign.

Not really news, but ... sigh.
20-Apr-2022 Egypt: Designed for Famine With the Russia-Ukraine war dragging on it has been noted that Russia and Urkraine are large net food exporters and that some poor countries such as Egypt are large net food importers.

Egypt is an especially clear case of a poor country overrunning its ability to feed itself.

In Roman times Egypt is estimated to have had a population of between 4 and 8 million and Egypt was a net exporter of food, specifically grain, to Rome. Today Egypt is a net importer of food and will starve without lots of imports.

The reason is that Egypt is a fairly large country but has very little arable land and the population has grown substantially since Roman times.

Egypt's arable land is almost entirely within the delta region where the Nile flows out to the Mediterranean Sea and a few miles on each side of the Nile. The delta region is about 8,000 square miles and the Nile from Aswan to the Mediterranean is about 1,000 miles so 2 miles on each side adds 4,000 more square miles of arable land.

This gives a total of 12,000 miles of arable land, which is pretty comparable to what was present in Roman times.

The "catch" is that because the Nile floods every year (and this flooding is now controlled by the Aswan dam) the fertility of the land has been high for millenia — modern agricultural practices can improve things, but not as much as they improve things in most other farming areas.

The Egyptian population in 2022 is about 100,000,000, up about 16× from Roman times. The arable land hasn't grown so Egypt is now trying to feed 16× the population on the same land.

If we consider population size together with the arable land area we get
  • 12,000 square miles of arable land in Egypt, about ⅓ more than the total land area of Vermont (9,000 square miles).

  • 100 million Egyptians to feed.

  • Which works out to about 8,300 Egyptians to feed per square mile of arable land.

  • Which works out to about 13 Egyptians to feed per acre of arable land.

  • Iowa has about 26 million acres of farmland. Feeding 13 people per acre would be equivalent to Iowa providing enough food to feed the entire United States.
The Egyptian population in 2000 was around 70 million. In 1980 around 43 million. In 1960 around 27 million.

In 1960 Egypt was food sufficient.
18-Apr-2022 Illustrating Logical Fallacy: The False Dictomy "Boxers or Briefs" is an example of a false dictomy because it omits the option to "go commando". 17-Apr-2022 Baarle-Nassau Line Throw-away geography example from on-line video ...
In the town of Baarle-Nassau there is a line on the floor. If you're on one side of this line you're in the Netherlands with its fancy windmills. If you're on the other you're in Belgium with its convenient access to German armies ...
17-Apr-2022 Currency Crisis: Roman Edition
The researchers found before 90 BCE the denarius was composed of pure silver, but that dropped 10 percent only five years later.

"The denarius first dropped to under 95 percent fine, and then it fell again to 90 percent, with some coins as low as 86 percent, suggesting a severe currency crisis," concludes University of Liverpool archeologist Matthew Ponting.

An Ancient Financial Crisis Has Been Discovered... in Roman Coins
So in the ancient world 11% inflation over five years (so about 2% per year) suggested a "sever currency crisis". Today this is what the US and European central bank are hoping to achieve :
The Federal Reserve adopted average inflation targeting as part of its long-run monetary strategy framework in 2020. This strategy allows inflation to rise and fall such that it averages 2% over time.

Average Inflation Targeting in the Financial Crisis Recovery
3-Apr-2022 Superstars Stay Healthy From Twitter: "Anthony Davis: What could have been if I was healthy all year with LeBron and Kendrick Nunn?"

Last four seasons AD games played:
  • 2018-19: 56 out of 82 games (68%)
  • 2019-20: 62 out of 71 games (87%)
  • 2020-21: 36 out of 72 games (50%)
  • 2021-22: 38 out of 78 games (49%) -- 4 games left
Dude, you've played more than 70% of your team's games only once in the past four years -- and that was the first Covid year where you got a rest break toward the end of the season! You've played 50% of your team's games the past two years!

I do wonder whether the LA Lakers thought about AD's injury potential when they signed him.
27-Feb-2022 Four Types of Countries
There are four kinds of countries in the world:
  • developed countries,
  • undeveloped countries,
  • Japan and
  • Argentina
    —Simon Kuznets (maybe, but who cares!)
3-Mar-2022 In Case of Nuclear War, Covid Edition The US Government has updated its Disasters and Emergency preparation instructions for the current Covid epidemic:
Nuclear explosions can cause significant damage and casualties from blast, heat, and radiation but you can keep your family safe by knowing what to do and being prepared if it occurs.

A nuclear weapon is a device that uses a nuclear reaction to create an explosion.

Nuclear devices range from a small portable device carried by an individual to a weapon carried by a missile.

A nuclear explosion may occur with or without a few minutes warning.

Fallout is most dangerous in the first few hours after the detonation when it is giving off the highest levels of radiation. It takes time for fallout to arrive back to ground level, often more than 15 minutes for areas outside of the immediate blast damage zones. This is enough time for you to be able to prevent significant radiation exposure by following these simple steps:

GET INSIDE
Get inside the nearest building to avoid radiation. Brick or concrete are best.

Remove contaminated clothing and wipe off or wash unprotected skin if you were outside after the fallout arrived. Hand sanitizer does not protect against fall out. Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth, if possible. Do not use disinfectant wipes on your skin.

Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.

    —https://www.ready.gov/nuclear-explosion
(Underlining added by me)
02-Feb-2022 Venezuelan Bolivar Stabilizes Venezuelan Bolivar Stabilizes after losing 99.99% of its value 22-Jan-2022 Sucking Them In To Overconfidence When my dad's favorite football team, the SF 49ers, started a game poorly my dad used to say some variation of:
The 49ers are just sucking them in. Now <opponent> is overconfident.
In the NFC divisional round the 49ers did just that against Green Bay. At the end of the 1st quarter the 49ers:
  • Had run nine plays in three series (three 3-and-out series)
  • For a total of -7 yards
  • With two sacks
  • ... three incomplete passes
  • ... and four rushes for seven yards total
Amazingly, the 49ers were only down 7-0.

More amazingly, the 49ers won 13-10.
12-Jan-2022 Technical E-Mails Inspiring Confidence Most of an e-mail I received today from an engineer working on a bug:
"... [I] will attempt to reproduce this on my end. The fix was to enable AMP with multisession. The setting of mixed_precision policy was the one causing the trouble. By Moving it within unet_inference() fn which gets threaded through workerpool implementation , the issue was gone for multisession. We are yet to validate the correctness of this approach."
11-Jan-2022 Balance in College Football (2) The SEC has, once again, in a display of public-spirited-ness, increased the distinct number of teams that have won National Championships in football [starting with the two-game national championship game].

Prior to last night there had been 12 teams that had won the whole thing over 23 years. Now there are 13 teams over 24 years.

In addition, the SEC has had more distinct schools win the whole thing than any other conference:
  • Alabama
  • Auburn
  • Florida
  • Georgia
  • LSU
  • Tennessee
What the other conferences are complaining about is a mystery.
6-Jan-2022 Balance in College Football We all know that Alabama kinda dominates the SEC, but I was wondering how balanced the other Power5 conferences are.

I looked at the winners of each of the Power5 conferences over the past 12 years to see how concentrated the winners were. The Power5 conferences are listed below, with a histogram of the number of times each team has won (ranked most to least and with zero omitted).

Conf A: 7311
Conf B: 7221
Conf C: 72111
Conf D: 6321
Conf E: 6321

Because the histograms are VERY similar and the SEC doesn't stand out in any way, it isn't obvious which conference is the SEC.

We can also look at the National Champion by conference to see which conference are the most lopsided. I'll go back to when the BCS started (conference letters here do NOT correspond to conference letters above):

Conf a: 63211
Conf b: 221
Conf c: 11
Conf d: 2
Conf e: 2

I'll note that the SEC is the most *balanced* conference as no other conference has more than three national champions. The SEC has five! [Okay, maybe this isn't the right way to do things ...]

BEFORE the BCS and then the playoffs, the champions for the previous ten years included:
  • Michigan
  • Nebraska x3
  • Florida
  • Florida State
  • Alabama
  • Washington
  • Miami (FL) x2
  • Notre Dame
  • Colorado
  • Georgia Tech
I know things are different now, but it appears that the playoff format actually encourages/creates dominance [which is opposite to how things seem to work for professional sports ...]

Prior to the playoffs, two really good teams might not meet at all — which would give voters the chance to vote more highly for the weaker team. The playoffs basically don't give those teams anywhere to hide.

Without the playoffs, Michigan would have faced Utah in the Rose Bowl and Alabama would have faced Baylor. If Michigan (#2) had blown out Utah and Alabama (#1) had beaten Baylor by only a little bit, some votes might well have gone to Michigan. As things stand, Michigan had to play an SEC team and there was no ambiguity ...

I expect that the SEC would continue to be ranked highly as a whole, which would give the SEC champion an edge in the rankings, but the playoffs really don't seem to be helping the other conferences ...

To restore "balance" we must eliminate the college playoffs!!!!!!!!!!!!
30-Dec-2021 Box Office Winners World wide movie box office winners by year explains why Hollywood produces so many sequels:

2021: Spider-Man: No Way Home sequel
2020: Demon Slayer: Mugen Train
2019: Avengers: Endgame sequel (MCU)
2018: Avengers: Infinity War sequel (MCU)
2017: Star Wars: The Last Jedi sequel
2016: Captain America: Civil War sequel (MCU)
2015: Star Wars: The Force Awakens sequel
2014: Transformers: Age of Extinction sequel
2013: Frozen
2012: The Avengers sequel (MCU)
2011: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2) sequel
2010: Toy Story 3 sequel
2009: Avatar
2008: The Dark Knight sequel (DCU)
2007: Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End sequel
2006: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest sequel
2005: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sequel
2004: Shrek 2 sequel
2003: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King sequel
2002: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers sequel
2001: Harry Potter and the Philosher's Stone

A grand total of four non-sequels:
  • Three animated movies (Demon Slayer: Mugen Train, Frozen, Avatar)
  • One live-action movie (Harry Potter)
8-Dec-2021 Overvaluing Quantifiable Things People (at least American people, but I suspect that this generalizes more than to just Americans) tend to focus on optimizing things that can be quantified.

So ... salary or savings have numbers attached to them, but we don't numerically keep track of things such as "our spare time" or "time spent with spouse" or "time spent with kids."

I expect that the tradeoff of time/effort spent acquiring money vs time/effort spent with growing children would be clearer if people tracked the time/effort spent on/with kids. And bragged about it. And got clear status benefit from it in a way that one gets clear status benefit from driving a nicer car.

But we DON'T quantify the value of time spent maintaining/growing social bonds while we DO quantify the value of time spent working because that time results in dollars.

This doesn't mean, though, that the time/effort that we don't track as carefully and that we can't brag about isn't valuable. It just means that seeing the tradeoff with money is harder.
26-Nov-2021 Nebraska Football Coach
Athletic director Trev Alberts said he has seen enough progress in the once-proud program to merit bringing back Frost, who goes into next year with four straight losing seasons at his alma mater. The Cornhuskers are 15-27 and have never finished higher than fifth in the Big Ten West under Frost. The Huskers are 3-7 overall and 1-6 in Big Ten games this season but haven't lost by more than nine points with one of the toughest schedules in the country.

From 2008-2014 Nebraska was coached by Bo Pelini. Over those seven seasons Nebraska went 67-27 and never went worse than 9-4 (never worse than 5-3 in Big 10 play).

Pelini was fired for not winning the "games that mattered" (and never winning in a Big 10 conference championship ...).

His replacement lasted three years and went 6-7, 9-4 and 4-8.

It will be interesting to watch Nebraska football next season.

Nebraska managed to go 3-9 in 2021. So after four seasons the current coach's results and salary have been:

2018:4-8$5 million
2019:5-7$5 million
2020:3-5$5 million
2021:3-9$5 million

Nebraska did manage a streak of losing by 9 points or fewer (8 points or fewer when not playing Ohio State) for the entire year. Their losses were by:

8, 7, 3, 3, 7, 5, 9, 7, 7

So we are looking at a lot of consistency here.

One interesting factoid about his contract is that it was initially 7 years @ $5 million year fully guaranteed.

If Nebraska fired him after this season, they'd still have owed him $15 million.

The restructure is that he gets paid $4 million in 2022 (down from the original $5 million) AND if he fails to meet certain metrics then Nebraska can fire him and only be on the hook for $7.5 million. Another bad season with the current coach saves Nebraska $3.5 million ($1 million this year and a buyout of $7.5 million vs $10 million) plus not needing to pay a second coaches salary for that year, so maybe $10 million total? I don't know if this amount of money is important to Nebraska football boosters.

The team released a number of offensive coaches. The catch is that Nebraska is 4th in the Big-10 by points scored per game, but 8th in points allowed so I'm not sure how this is going to be the key.

Another way to look at things, though, is that Nebraska scored 30 points or more in only two games: against Fordham (FCS) and Northwestern (3-8). So maybe Nebraska is going to need to be able to score 30+ points at least OCCASIONALLY if they want to win in the Big-10.

Nebraska never got blown out. They gave up more than 30 points only once and that was 35 ... and the defense gave up only 28 because 7 points were scored on a kickoff return plus extra point.
11-Sep-2022: Well, three games into the 2022 season and Mr. Frost is unemployed. Nebraska continued where it left off in the previous season by losing to Northwestern by three points, beating FCS North Dakota, and then losing by three points to Georgia Southern.

It seems that consistently losing by a single score wasn't enough this year.

18-Sep-2022: The offensive coaches released before this season included:
  • Matt Lubick, offensive coordinator/wide receivers coach
  • Greg Austin, offensive line coach/run game coordinator
  • Ryan Held, running backs coach
  • Mario Verduzco, quarterbacks coach
Erik Chinander, defensive coordinator, was fired after Nebraska was blown out by Oklahoma 49-14. Nebraska's defense has performed like this in 2022:

OpponentYards AllowedPoints Allowed
Northwestern 52831
North Dakota (FCS)43717
Georgia Southern 57545
Oklahoma 58049

Last season the defense never gave up more than 28 points. This season the defense has given up 30+ points to every FBS opponent Nebraska has faced.

Only three FBS teams have given up more yards per game: Bowling Green, Akron and Charlotte.

Only 18 FBS teams have given up more points per game. Only two of those 18 teams are in Power-5 conferences: Colorado and North Carolina State.
26-Nov-2021 Self Awareness Failure Comment at Ars on Black Friday not being very environmentally friendly:
"Not all of us chase the latest and greatest though. I kept my last tv for 6 years."
25-Nov-2021 We Come In Peace "We come in peace" seems like a strange way to introduce one's self. I imagine viewing it from the other side a bit like this:
[The Enterprise has encountered an unknown, but extremely large and powerful alien starship.]
Uhura:The alien is hailing us, sir. They have some sort of universal translator.
Kirk: Lieutenant Uhura, put them on screen.
Alien:Greetings from the Exoliath Protectorate. We do not wish to burn your planet to ash, kill all the adult males, take your adult females as our own and use your non-adults for food.
Kirk: Uhura? Is that an accurate translation, do you think?
Uhura:I think so sir. They also sent a version in their language. We would translate the last part as: "We come in peace."
16-Nov-2021 Worst Handgun Ever Candidate Setup ...
There have been many poorly designed weapons, but none of them reached production levels of the Nambu Type 94, produced in 1935-1945. It was a truly terrible pistol and yet it was widely used by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War. But why? And what exactly qualifies the Nambu Type 94 as one of the worst handguns in the history of the world?
Payoff (different site) ...
[Downed Japanese] Airman First Class Shigenori Nishikaichi was able to take hostages and briefly gain control of the island. But the expected Japanese submarine rescue never materialized, and after Nishikaichi threatened to shoot the hostages, one of the Hawaiians, Benehakaka Kanahele, lunged at him. The pilot shot Kanahele 3 times with his sidearm, angering him ...
5-Nov-2021 Today's Military Organization Question The US Navy seems to have about 3,000 officers with a rank of Captain (O-6 ... navy equivalent of colonel for the army).

The US Navy also has about 250 ships:
  • 11 aircraft carriers
  • 68 submarines
  • 31 amphibious warfare ships
  • :

And a few weeks back a $3B Seawolf class submarine seems to have run into an undersea mountain. Bad for the submarine and the commanding officer has been relieved of command.

The odd bit to me is that the CO was *not* a captain. His rank was commander (O-5).

The Seaworld submarines are the most expensive US Navy ships after the aircraft carriers.

So you have your 12th most expensive piece of equipment being commanded by a guy who is outranked by over 3,000 captain ranked folks (and some admirals, too, but admirals don't command individual ships ...)

So: Huh?

You don't have all your ships at sea at once, so the navy has fewer than 10 ships costing $3B or more operating at any one time. And you give command to a guy who hasn't made captain when you have about 3,000 captains available ...

Why? What are the captains doing that is more important than commanding a ship? I suspect that a similar question could be asked for the Army. What do the colonels do that isn't commanding regiments (or regiment sized units)?
4-Nov-2021 Uber Accounting and the Financial Press
"The company [Uber] reported its first adjusted EBITDA profit of $8 million for the quarter.
:
The company's net loss of $2.4 billion was..."
So profitable if we exclude $2.4B in losses!
26-Oct-2021 Spacecraft Volume Comparisons Also, two non-spacecraft to provide reference sizes (updates after 26-Oct in light grey).

CraftVolumeNotes
Mercury: 1.7 m3Passenger Volume
Gemini: 2.6 m3Passenger Volume
Honda Civic: 2.7 m3Passenger Volume
Apollo: 6.2 m3Pressurized Volume
Orion: 9.0 m3Habitable volume
SpaceX Crew Dragon: 9.3 m3Pressurized Volume
Boeing Starliner: 11   m3
Boeing 7871: 343   m3Passenger volume
Skylab: 352   m3
Mir: 350   m3
ISS: 388   m3Habitable volume
2,000 ft2 House: 445   m38 foot ceilings
Orbital Reef: 830   m3
SpaceX Starship: 1,100   m3
Bigelow BA2100: 2,100   m3
  1. 2.3m high × 5.5m wide × 43m long: 343m3
13-Oct-2021 I Did Not Write This From a Vox article:
Generally, I don’t think it’s terrible for the kids. It’s just a model of parenting that a) is insane and b) cannot conceivably be emulated by most of the population.
The topic and context are irrelevant. To me this just sounds a bit like me on various topics
30-Sep-2021 Actual Conversation
Friend's Wife: There is that ranch up in Gualala, near the sea. What is it's name?
Me: ...
Me: Sea Ranch?
This was the name she was trying to remember. She did not hit me.
6-Sep-2021 Making the World a Better Place Comment exchange on Astral Codex Ten:
Commenter #1:xxx is (wittingly or not) guilty of the classic issue of overinterpreting change-in-rate stats It's like when shark attack deaths increase from 2 to 8 in a given year and the newspapers say "SHARK KILLINGS INCREASE 400%!"

Me:When, of course, the accurate headline would be: SHARK KILLINGS INCREASE 300%!

Commenter #1:f*cking chr*st

I promise I know the difference between 300% and 400% :(

Me:100%, right??????? :-)

Commenter #2:I was fine right up till this one and now I long for death
30-Sep-2021 The New Statesman Is A British Magazine
Petersen, who now works full-time writing a paid subscription newsletter for the online platform Substack, spoke to me over Zoom from a small island off the coast of Washington State, west of her home in Missoula, Montana.
The Pacific Ocean is about 500 miles west of Missoula ... :-)

I think a European equivalent would be:
"... spoke to me over Zoom from the Orkney Islands, north of her home in London."
27-Aug-2021 Economics, Rent Moratoriums and Incentives Random twitter rant:
My son is looking for a studio apartment around USC, and one that he applied for a couple days ago told us that the owner wanted 6 months rent up front (after he and I both paid app fees). No wonder people fucking hate landlords and the management companies that facilitate them
Amazing!

When the landlords expect the government to permit renters to not pay a monthly rent then the landlords insist on getting paid up front.
11-Aug-2021 Broad AirPro Masks I saw someone wearing this outdoors today: Woman wearing Broad AirPro Mask

Our air quality is "good" today, though at the high end of good. I can't tell if the mask was for smoke from the fires (maybe the person is extra sensitive) or for Covid.
8-Aug-2021 Modern "Text Editors"
Editor/IDESizeComment



Atom 658 MBJavaScript/Electron
Visual Studio Code 290 MBJavaScript/Electron
Eclipse 277 MBJava
jEdit 34 MBJava
TextEdit 5 ½ MBObjective-C
vim 2 MBC?
vi (80386) ⅙ MBC; http://ex-vi.sourceforge.net/

I will concede that VSCode does more than Vi, Vim and even TextEdit. And the "sizes" here may contain support files (e.g. help), but still ...

JEdit is written in Java (and probably ships a JRE). VSCode is about 8x *that* size and even larger than Eclipse!

I'm wondering how long before we have a commonly used text editor that takes up 1 GB. Containerizing will probably help :-)
Atom row added 28-Jun-2022.
18-Jul-2021 Coway AirMega Just ordered two of these ahead of California fire season:
Coway AirMega air purifier
It seems ridiculous that California can't prevent the state from buring to the ground each autumn and creating air quality issues, but that seems to be the case. At least we can keep the indoor air quality acceptable until we move (if we move).
18-Jul-2021 Jurassic Sand For when you have too much money and don't want to splurge on raw water: Jurassic Sand.
Jurassic Sands was founded in 1991 with a simple goal. Even 27 years later we still continue to provide only all-natural play sands that are the safest, cleanest, and purest sands on the market. Our sands have won 3 National Awards: the Early Childhood 'Director's Choice Award, the Hobby industry's Best New Product Award and our sandbox was voted 'Most Fun Hands-Activity' by 40,000 attendees at The Kids Fair.

Our specialty's include play sand for sensory bins, sand and water tables, sand boxes, therapy sand trays, making Native American rock art and sand paintings, and substrates for aquariums and reptiles like bearded dragons and geckos.

Our sands were present when dinosaurs walked the Earth, helped Native Americans tell stories, and can now be experienced by all. We never rush mother nature, all our sands are formed from natural errosion and are never crushed or pulverized. Jurassic Sands was created and continues to operate because we truly believe in the developmental, sensory, and social sand play benefits for children.
One quart of the sandbox sand goes for $9.95. 50 pounds goes for $69.95.

Home Depot sells 50 pounds of play sand ("great for children's sand boxes") from Pavestone for $3.48.

Home Depot also sells 50 pounds of play sand ("ideal for sandboxes") from Sakrete for $5.67.

If these seems unacceptable then Home Depot also has 50 pounds of Baha play sand for $52.26. The Baha play sand is supposed to be better for building sand castles.
25-Jun-2021 BE-4 Engine Technical Challenges
The GAO report noted the 'technical challenges' [in the Blue Origin supplied BE-4 rocket engine] were related to 'the igniter and booster capabilities required'...
So the BE-4 rocket engine is having problems turning on and running ...
25-May-2021 Rocket Launches from Super Earths
Chemical rocket launches are still plausible for Super-Earths <=10M, but become unrealistic for more massive planets. On worlds with a surface gravity of > 10 Earth gravities, a sizable fraction of the planet would need to be used up as chemical fuel per launch, limiting the total number of flights.

Spaceflight from Super Earths is Difficult
20-May-2021 Roman View of the World Stolen ...

Roman View of the World Map
29-Apr-2021 Almost Always a Bad Headline "Gravediggers work around the clock" 04-Apr-2021 The SEC Bowl My wife refers to the NCAA football national championship as the SEC Bowl because it seems to always include an SEC team. In some sense, this is just an updated version of the Sugar Bowl — one SEC team and one at-large team. The update being that the two teams are playing for the national championship almost every year.

It has not always been this way.

The first BCS national championship game was played in January of 1999 between Tennessee (SEC) and Florida State (ACC). The four games between 2000 and 2003, however, included no SEC teams. In 2004, LSU (SEC) made an appearance, coached by Nick Saban, but then the SEC was missing again until 2007 when Florida made an appearance. All three SEC teams won their games, but the conference itself appeared in "only" three of nine championship games from 1999 to 2007.

2007 was a watershed year, however. The SEC went on to appear in the BCS championship game and subsequent national championship game of the BCS in all but one year following 2007:
YearSEC TeamResult
2007Florida (SEC East) Florida beat Ohio State (Big-10)
2008LSU (SEC West) LSU beat Ohio State (Big-10)
2009Florida (SEC East) Florida beat Oklahoma (Big-12)
2010Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat Texas (Big-12)
2011Auburn (SEC West) Auburn beat Oregon (Pac-10)
2012Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat LSU (SEC West)
2013Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat Notre Dame (Independent)
2014Auburn (SEC West) Auburn LOST to Florida State (ACC)
2015 Ohio State (Big-10) beat Oregon (Pac-12)
2016Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat Clemson (ACC)
2017Alabama (SEC West) Alabama lost to Clemson (ACC)
2018Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat Georgia (SEC East)
2019Alabama (SEC West) Alabama lost to Clemson (ACC)
2020LSU (SEC West) LSU beat Clemson (ACC)
2021Alabama (SEC West) Alabama beat Ohio State (Big-10)
Results by Conference:
ConferenceAppearancesRecord
SEC West 13 9-4
ACC 5 3-2
SEC East 3 2-1
Big-10 4 1-3
Big-12 2 0-2
Pac-12 2 0-2
Notre Dame 1 0-1


Nick Saban became Alabama's head coach in the 2007 season (Jan 2008 championship). Two years later Alabama won the national championship, beating Texas. Alabama has been in eight of 12 NCAA national championship games starting in 2010.
20-Feb-2021 California Deaths by Year
YearDeaths Difference
1999229,380
2000229,551 +171
2001234,044 +4,493
2002234,565 +521
2003239,371 +4,806
2004232,525 -6,846
2005237,037 +4,512
2006237,126 +89
2007233,720 -3,406
2008234,766 +1,046
2009232,736 -2,030
2010234,012 +1,276
2011239,942 +5,930
2012242,554 +2,612
2013248,359 +5,805
2014245,929 -2,430
2015259.206 +13,277
2016262,240 +3,034
2017269,409 +7,169
2018270,129 +720
2019270,952 +823
2020310,701 +39,749
Average +2,078
Std Dev +4,368
Data from:
  • wonder.cdc.gov
  • https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/27/40000-excess-deaths-in-2020-and-other-things-we-learned-from-california-death-data/
A "typical" year sees California's death count go up by a bit more than 2,000. This makes sense as California's population is increasing. Additionally, the increase is sometimes higher than average, sometimes lower and sometimes a decrease rather than an increase. The standard deviation of the year-on-year increase, however, is about 4,500. A year-on-year increase of almost 40,000 is thus about 38,000 higher than the average yearly increase. And an eight standard deviation event.
20-Oct-2020 Evergreen State College Enrollment Dropoff Evergreen State College experienced protests and riots in Spring 2017. During these events one of the Evergreen professors, Bret Weinstein, was told by campus police that they could not protect him from the protesters. The campus was shut down for a few days. This became national news. There is some evidence that these events led to a drop in enrollment.

Or, more accurately, these events accelerated the ongoing drop in enrollment.

YearFall enrollment
2004:4,138
2005:4,171 +0.8%
2006:4,124 -1.1%
2007:4,282 +3.8%
2008:4,364 +1.9%
2009:4,551 +4.3%
2010:4,489 -1.4%
2011:4,467 -0.5%
2012:4,193 -6.1%
2013:4,087 -2.5%
2014:3,878 -5.1%
2015:3,872 -0.1%
2016:3,787-2.2%
2017:3,610 -4.7%
2018:3,018-16.4%← Dropoff of almost 600
2019:2,576-14.7%← Another Dropoff of close to 450
2020:2,297-10.2%← Coronavirus pandemic

The 2021 school year saw enrollment drop further to 2,116 — 46% of the enrollment in the peak enrollment year of 2009 and 59% of the enrollment in 2017, the year before the protests and riots.
11-Oct-2020 Excerpt from Oral history of Robert P. Colwell This is from an interview with Robert P. Colwell. Colwell is an electrical engineer who worked at Intel as chief architect of the x86 line of CPUs from 1992 to 2000:
:

Bob: Yeah, that was back in around 1962 or 3 somewhere around there and I made some, what were for me, fundamental realizations. So remind me of that story because I want to tell you another one and I'll forget if you don't.

I was in my uncle's, same uncle, and I was in his backyard and he was playing with these two new walkie talkies he had just bought. I'd never heard of a walkie talkie. Back in 1962 transistors were only three years old, so these were brand new things and so we were playing with them, and I would grab one and my sister would grab one, and we'd be talking to each other and then I realized, as soon as she was far enough away to where I couldn't hear her without the walkie talkie, I couldn't hear her with it either. The range was such that they were the same range.

So I thought, well that's not fair, this things not doing anything, it's a sham. This walkie talkie doesn't work, and yet somebody sold it, right, so I'm thinking well how can that be, how can you go into business selling things that don't actually do what they're supposed to do, and as a little kid I was just shocked by that, like is this possible. So the next thing I think, like for first communion, (Catholic church, first communion), people come over and they give you presents. And 1962, I think, is when I had my first communion and I got a walkie talkie, I got a radio, and I forget how many transistors it was, but all my friends at school, well they were doing the same thing. They got radios and we compared notes, and one of us had an 8 transistor and one had a 10, one had 12, one had a 6 and I thought, well that's weird, they don't sound any different, they sound the same, it’s not like one's higher quality that I could tell, so I started wondering "well, what's the difference? What are those transistors doing if they don't result in any palpable improvement?"

So I took the backs off and I wanted to see if I could spot the difference. I counted the transistors (I knew that they were the little silver cans), they were easy to spot, and so I verified that they had as many as they said that they would have, but I also noticed the printed circuit wiring that was on the side of the board that was facing me when I took the back off, because I could see it and I looked at it and I realized those transistors didn't go anywhere. Only six of them were connected to the circuit.

Interviewer: They were just stuck into the board with, by soldering.

Bob: Yeah they were just stuck in. And I was puzzling over this for the longest time thinking, my understanding limited though that I knew it was, was that those wires on the board were carrying electrical currents of some sort and that's how these transistors work, so if there's no wires, how could they do anything, and I finally asked my uncle, "I give up I don't know what's happening here, why would they put transistors in there, how are they participating in the radio's function without those wires?" He says "they're not" and I said "well what are they doing in the circuit?" He said "they're not in the circuit, they're just in the product", "What?". He said, "in fact, I bet you that if we test them we'll discover that they don't even work, they're probably the broken ones that were on the floor and they just stuck them in there, so that they could call it a, you know, more of a transistor radio so that people would pay more for it".

I said "that can't be legal." He goes "sure it is", and I suddenly realize my gosh the world is a stranger place than I ever thought.
Oral history of Robert P. Colwell
31-Sep-2020 Missing the Point of an MBA I feel that Andrew Karas has missed one of the major lessons he was supposed to learn as part of his Wharton MBA education.
Andrew Karas is one the respondents who agreed. Last month he began the second year of his MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, via Zoom from the Philadelphia apartment he leased for the two-year duration. Wharton ranked sixth in the 2019-20 U.S. rankings.

In a follow-up interview by Zoom, clad in a Wharton T-shirt and with a city of Chicago flag on his wall, Karas said he feels the value of the program is diminished by being online, he doesn't understand why Wharton doesn't behave like any other business whose services changed, and the school should offer a partial refund.

"It's disturbing to me that they feel entitled to ask us to pay the whole full freight of tuition. It shows a lack of recognition of the massive resources that they have that alumni have contributed," said Karas, who wants to pursue a career in real estate development, creating places for people to live in urban centers.

Students at the Costliest MBA Programs Have Buyer’s Remorse
I feel that a paraphrase and re-write of the article might look like this:
"I am unhappy at an MBA program would charge what the market will bear," says an MBA student who missed the point in his classes on 'setting prices.' "I mean, I'll write Wharton the check, of course, but I don't understand why they won't charge me less than I'm willing to pay!"

An Associate Professor at Wharton, who preferred to speak off the record, commented, "We get a few of these every year. We explain that the habit of thinking in terms of 'price fairness' and leaving money on the table for strangers is pretty much what we are trying to get them to stop doing. Most of the students learn it eventually. Some do not. The one's who don't can use their $200,000 Wharton education to land a job paying $40,000 per year at some non-profit for blind ducks. Lord knows, the ones who don't get it won't be leading the alumni contribution fund raisers."

Ed Finney, Wharton class of 93 and partner at McKinsey, was asked about this. Should Wharton reduce their tuition?

"I'm not seeing that," he said. "You might drop the price a bit for the first years if you were worried about filling the class. It would probably be cheaper to just run an advertising campaign if you were worried, but you could war-game it. The second year students are pretty stuck, though. It isn't like attending Wharton for one year and not graduating is particularly valuable. I'd consider adding a 50% surcharge for those students because of the extra effort in delivering the classes remotely."

...
29-Jul-2020 Internet Wisdom, Episode 5: Ishness From a blog comment:
A hammer's ability to drive nails determines the hammerness, not it's price.
29-Jul-2020 Memory Memory is less reliable than we expect. I remember reading this passage from Samuel R. Delany's "The Motion of Light in Water" when I was away attending college.
My father had been sick for almost a year. Already he'd had one lung removed. But after a time home — which he spent mostly in bed, listening to programs of eclectic classical music (Penderecki, Kodaly's Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello) on WBAI-FM ... — he began to grow weaker.

For most of my life, if it came up, I would tell you: "My father died of lung cancer in 1958 when I was seventeen."

... if I was born in 1942, in 1958 I could not possibly have been seventeen... WBAI-FM did not begin to broadcast til 1960. There were no Penderecki recordings available in 1958. Various researches followed

Finally, in an old Harlem newspaper, a small article was unearthed that confirmed it: my father died in the early days of October 1960.

I was eighteen.
— The Motion of Light in Water (1988), by Samuel R. DeLaney
Fortunatly for me, the book came out when I was still at college. It would have only illustrated (again) the fragility of memory if I had gotten that detail wrong.
13-Apr-2020 Technically Correct Technically correct, though mis-leading enough to be almost dishonest...

From the New York Times:
If hydroxychloroquine becomes an accepted treatment, several pharmaceutical companies stand to profit, including shareholders and senior executives with connections to the president. Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine.
Underlining added by me.

Trump's "small personal financial interest" seems to be at most $3,000 of shares held through indirectly through a mutual fund:
President Trump — increasingly a booster of hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus — has a "small personal financial interest" in Sanofi, a French drugmaker that produces a brand-name version of the drug - though it's a tiny investment for the billionaire.
  • Sanofi produces Plaquenil, the brand-name form of hydroxychloroquine, the New York Times reported; the drug is typically used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and malaria.
  • Trump's three family trusts have investments in a Dodge & Cox mutual fund, with Sanofi as the largest holding, according to the Times.
  • Forbes estimates the value of Trump's Sanofi holdings to be less than $3,000; for context, Forbes estimates Trump's total net worth at $2.1 billion
And ...
First Bank Collapses Amid Coronavirus Woes: More in Store?

The FDIC noted "The First State Bank has experienced longstanding capital and asset quality issues, operating with financial difficulties since 2015." Moreover, the bank’s capital levels as of Dec 31, 2019 were too low for legally staying operational.

Therefore, all four branches of The First State Bank, along with its deposits and certain assets were immediately acquired by MVB Bank Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of MVB Financial Corp. MVBF. As of Dec 31, 2019, it had nearly $139.5 million of total deposits and $152.4 million in total assets.

While the bank’s failure was not a result of coronavirus woes...
The bank did collapse. The collapse was in the middle of the Coronavirus outbreak. But the bank was so small that this would not be news otherwise. And the collapse had nothing to do with the Coronavirus outbreak.
21-Mar-2020 Coronavirus: Not Hoarding! We aren't in any danger of running out of food, but if someone wants to bake bread she wants bread flour. Flour is in short supply. Except that Smart & Final has bread flour.

In 25 pound bags.

And if you are buying 25 pounds of bread flour, you'll want to purchase a large plastic tub to store it:
Bread Flour
The plastic container cost twice what the flour did. Sigh.

I swear we are not hoarding ...
20-Mar-2020 Trivially Meaningless or Wrong From the Dallas News we get this:
Quarterbacks don’t usually get [franchise tagged], although it happened with Drew Brees and Peyton Manning at different points in their Hall of Fame careers.

This is an interesting sentence because it is either:
  • trivially true and meaningless, or
  • wrong
Getting actual numbers for how many players have had the NFL franchise tag applied to them and which players/positions is difficult. Wikipedia has a list for recent years and the list is likely fairly complete. One can also find sporadic information on earlier years, especially 1993, the first year in which the franchise tag existed. The data looks like this:
Year# TagsQuarterbacks
202015 Dak Prescott Wikipedia
20196 Wikipedia
20185 Wikipedia
20175 Kirk Cousins Wikipedia
20169 Kirk Cousins Wikipedia
20156 Wikipedia
20146 Wikipedia
20138 Wikipedia
201219 Drew Brees Wikipedia
201113 Michael Vick, Peyton Manning Wikipedia
20106 Wikipedia
200915 Matt Cassel Wikipedia
200812 Wikipedia
20077 Wikipedia
:
2005? Drew Brees
2004? Peyton Manning
:
199310 Steve Young "Too Deep Zone: The First Franchise Player"

If we add up the total number of franchise tags applied from 2007 — 2020 we find that 132 tags have been applied in those 14 seasons. Seven of these tags were applied to quarterbacks (with two of the tags being applied to Kirk Cousins in back-to-back years).

Approximately 10 tags are applied in the average year.

So ... a quarterback gets tagged about every second year. If this is what the author means by "quarterbacks don't usually get [franchise tagged]" then the statement is true, but also meaningless. No individual position gets tagged with any regularity.

And quarterbacks aren't even tagged at a rate lower than one would expect. The offense and defense have 22 starting position players between them and kickers are also a skill position that gets tagged, so if the tag was applied uniformly across starters we would expect approximately six tags to have been applied to quarterbacks from 2007 ‐ 2020 (132 ÷ 23 = 6). The actual number was seven, so quarterbacks get tagged a tiny bit more often than one might expect just based on the number of starters available to be tagged.

So the basic claim is either
  • Trivially true, but meaningless: It is "unusual" to tag any specific position other than punter, or
  • Wrong: quarterbacks actually get tagged about as often as one should expect
8-Mar-2020 World War 2 Atrocities During WW2 the Nazis busily exterminated ~6M Jews and about 6M other "undesirables". Meanwhile, on the other side of the world the Japanese were massacring Chinese in Nanking. In both instances, officials from other Axis powers intervened to reduce the slaughter.

1937: John Rabe

During the Rape of Nanking, John Rabe, Nazi Party member, represented Germany in the setting up of the Nanking Safety Zone, which offered shelter to ~200,000 Chinese. The Japanese respected the Safety Zone.

Meanwhile, a few years later ...

1940: Chiune Sugihara

In mid-1940 Germany, Chiune Sugihara was vice-consul of the Japanese Consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. He began issuing visas to refugees allowing the refugees into Japan. This was against explicit orders from Japan that no visas were to be issued unless the person being issued the visa had permission to travel to a final destination. The Japanese government did not want refugees stuck in Japan.

He left the consulate upon its closure in September.

In spite of his disobedience, the Japanese government honored the visas and estimates of saved refugees range from 2,000 - 6,000.
8-Mar-2020 I Understood There Would Be No Math 7-Mar-2020: CNN Gets confused about the difference between ounces and grams and ... other things. This CNN article explains that "According to the CACFP, facilities cannot serve breakfast cereals that contain more than 21.2 grams of sugar per 100 grams of dry cereal. That value is calculated by dividing the cereal's grams of sugar per serving by the serving size in grams." We then get the following graphic (mixing grams and ounces):

Cherrios
eventually concluding with this (mixing grams and 100 ounces):

Capn Crunch
3-Mar-2020: Mekita Rivas divides 500 million by 1 million and gets, not 500, but about 330 million — the population of the United States.

Bloomberg Millions
Brian Williams and NYT editor Mara Gay go on to discuss this tweet on MSNBC, not to criticize the innumeracy, but with wonder that Mike Bloomberg could have made every American a millionaire, but chose not to do so.

20-Jan-2020: Amy Harmon divides 5,600 by 100 and gets 70:
"Collectively, the 101 black teens participating in the study reported more than 5,600 experiences of racial discrimination over two weeks… That’s more than 70 [per individual] over two weeks."
  • Mekita Rivas is a young, freelance writer.
  • Brian Williams is a journalist at NBC and has worked at NBC since 1993.
  • Mara Gay has a degree from the University of Michigan and is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
  • Amy Harmon has a BA from the University of Michigan and has worked for the New York Times since 1997. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 while at the New York Times for covering "the impact of science and technology on everyday life."

22-Sep-2022: More from CNN:
"The recent Ukrainian offensive, which has seen Kyiv recapture thousands of square meters of territory, has taken a significant toll."
8-Dec-2022: Fox News wants to participate:
"Russia's Wagner Group fighters burn through 2,000 rounds of ammo per day fighting determined Ukrainian army"
20-Feb-2020 Slanting News Coverage When the New Hampshire presidential primary was over, the vote totals looked like this (99% reported):

Republican
Trump 124,394
William Weld 13,207
write-in votes 3,603
Democrat
Bernie Sanders 75,264
Buttigieg 71,294
Amy Klobuchar 57,833
Warren 27,024
Biden 24,496
Steyer 10,432
Tulsi Gabbard 9,554
Yang 8,215
write-in votes 3,927
Patrick 1,249
Bennet 947

The Week headlined their reporting with:
Trump's GOP challenger Bill Weld did surprisingly well in New Hampshire primary

With 85% of the precincts reporting, Trump has 85.7% of the vote, and Weld has 9.2% of the vote.
Fox reported:
Trump doubles Obama's 2012 vote total in New Hampshire, signaling fired up base
and Fox had a graphic (with the results at that time):

Incumbent Voting in New Hampshire
2012 2004 1996
Trump Obama Bush Clinton
120,47649,08053,96276,797
Both reports were accurate.

Incumbents rarely have large vote totals in the primaries because many people don't bother to vote in the primary election for the party with the incumbent. Trump's 120,000 is very high for an incumbent president in a primary without a serious challenger. The 1980 Democrat presidential primaries would be an example of an incumbent facing a serious challenge.

It is also true that the votes NOT for the incumbent tend to be split among many challenger candidates. 10% of the primary vote going to a single challenger is unusual. The incumbent getting only 80%-85% is not unusual. In 2012, Obama got just 80% of the Democrat primary votes in New Hampshire. Bush got 80% of the Republican primary votes in 2004 in New Hampshire. Bill Clinton got 85% of the Democrat primary votes in New Hampshire in 1996.

One need not even believe this difference in focus is intentional or politically motivated. Different editors find different facts to be more interesting and headline those. A more complete report would include both and include the relevant comparison data from previous elections. But that is more work and takes longer.
20-Feb-2020 Midwest Farming Rig or No Man's Sky Vehicle? Is this a screenshot from the galaxy exploration game No Man's Sky (images here) or the view from a midwestern farmer's farming rig?

Farming Rig
20-Feb-2020 One of These Things is Not Like the Others
Long associated with glamour, money and cultural influence, the rise of the luxury city has foundered on the rocks of inequality and, increasingly, diminished upward mobility. Indeed, according to Pew research, the greatest inequality now exists in superstar cities such as San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and San Jose.

Underlining added by me.
8-Feb-2020 Causality Fail From the New York Times:
... Now, there is evidence that simply being exposed to the arts may help people live longer.

... The chances of living longer only went up the more frequently people engaged with the arts, according to the study, which was published this month in The BMJ, formerly The British Medical Journal. People who went to a museum or the theater once a month or even every few months had a 31 percent reduced risk of dying in that period, according to the study.

The study controlled for socioeconomic factors like a participant's income, education level and mobility, said Andrew Steptoe, a co-author of the study and the head of University College London's research department of behavioral science and health.

But Professor Steptoe said researchers theorized that people who expose themselves to the arts are likely to be more engaged in the world.

So ... does going to museums cause one to be more engaged in the world? Or are folks who are more engaged in the world more likely to go to museums?
6-Feb-2020 Financial Sophistication: Uber Edition
The ride-hailing service said it lost $1.1 billion, or 64 cents per share, ... With its latest money-losing quarter, Uber has lost approximately $8.5 billion since its May 2019 initial public offering, but offered proof that an aggressive austerity program is making progress. (In the same quarter a year ago, Uber lost $887 million, or $1.97 a share.)

Losses have increased from $887M to $1,100M in equivalent quarters. This is proof that the Uber austerity program is making progress.

Meanwhile, the Uber shares outstanding have increased from about ½ billion in 2018 to about 1.7 billion in 2019. This allows the per-share loss to decrease [from $1.97/share to $0.64/share] while the overall losses increase [from $887M to $1,100M]. The 2019 shareholders now own about ⅓ of Uber, the company, that they did in 2018 while the overall losses have increased. This is progress.

Uber Profit/Loss by Quarter
QuarterProfit or (Loss)Shares Outstandingsource
Oct-Dec, 2019 ($1,096,000,000)1,710,260,000 Source
Jul-Sep, 2019 ($1,162,000,000)1,700,213,000 Source
Apr-Jun, 2019 ($5,236,000,000)1,110,704,000 Source
Jan-Mar, 2019 ($1,012,000,000)453,543,000 Source
Oct-Dec, 2018 ($887,000,000) 449,501,000 Source
Jul-Sep, 2018 ($986,000,000) 445,783,000 Source
Apr-Jun, 2018 ($878,000,000) 440,958,000 Source

The $5B loss in Apr-Jun is related to the IPO and reflects the increase in shares outstanding. It is an accounting artifact.

Uber showed a profit in the Jan-Mar 2018 quarter because it sold off some foreign subsidiaries to Yandex (in Russia) and Grab (in Southeast Asia).
The Coronavirus epidemic disrupted Uber's fairly consistent pattern of losing of around $1 billion per quarter. Uber management does seem to be getting the company back to their old, fairly consistent, level, however.

The $2.9B loss in Jan-Mar 2020 would have been around $1.1 billion without a bunch of writedowns.

As of 27-Oct-2020 Uber had a market cap of around $60 billion with a share price of about $35/share.

Uber Profit/Loss by Quarter
QuarterProfit or (Loss)Shares Outstandingsource
Apr-Jun, 2020 ($1,800,000,000)1,731,632,000 Source
Jan-Mar, 2020 ($2,900,000,000)1,724,367,000 Source
Oct-Dec, 2019 ($1,096,000,000)1,710,260,000 Source
4-Feb-2020 Sunset at Seascape I saw this sunset at the end of the day at an off-site meeting: Pretty Sunset Picture 20-Jan-2020 Quirks in Murder Statistics One might naively expect all "murders" to be included in a city's count of "Murder and Non-negl. Manslaughter" felony offenses. One might be wrong. The New York City Police Department has a document providing the number of "Seven Major Felony Offenses." The 1st is murder, etc. A table of these counts is:

NYC Murder and Non-Negligent Homicides
YearNumberComment
2018295
2017292
2016335
2015352
2014333
2013335
2012419
2011515
2010536
2009471
2008523
2007496
2006596
2005539
2004570
2003597
2002587
2001649 ~2,600 people killed in World Trade Center Attack
2000673

The interesting bit is that for these statistical purposes, the 9/11 attack victims are not counted as murders or non-negligent homicides, though most folks would consider them to be (I think?).

I can see arguments for excluding the 9/11 attack casualties. But I can also see how doing so is misleading. Possibly NYC is very safe except for every few decades it is very unsafe for 10 minutes?

Europe has much lower HISTORICAL murder and homicide rates than the US. If one excludes the holocaust.

The FBI seems to omit the 9/11 attacks as well. The reported national trend numbers by year are:

YearCountSource
200216,204Crime in the United States 2002, Section 2
200116,037Crime in the United States 2002, Section 2
15,980Crime in the United States 2001, Section 1
200015,586Crime in the United States 2001, Section 1

The FBI numbers can change a bit year-to-year because reporting is voluntary and only about 50% of the population is in regions that report. NYC does report. And, it seems unlikely that there would have been a drop of 3,000 if the 9/11 attacks had not happened. They just aren't counted.

The Pulse Nightclub shooting deaths in Orlando in 2016 are counted. The 2016 count for Orlando is 84 and includes a footnote that "The 2016 murder offenses include those victims of the Pulse Nightclub incident; therefore, figures are not comparable to previous years' data."
19-Jan-2020 Horrible, But Funny Some events are sorta horrible, but are also funny if:
  1. You didn't do it
  2. You weren't supposed to prevent it
  3. You don't know anyone involved
  4. You laughing at the event won't make things worse or anyone feel badly
So:
Former Delta Force commander dies in lawnmower accident at Alabama home

https://www.al.com/news/2019/05/former-delta-force-commander-dies-in-lawnmower-accident-at-alabama-home.html
7-Jan-2020 Lamborghini Tractors Are A Thing Lamborghini Tractor
Lamborghini Tractors

Who knew?
6-Jan-2020 Late Victorian Era Job: Time-Inspector Railroads used to depend on schedules and fairly accurate time synchronization between trains to avoid crashes while still achieving efficient use of tracks and trains. Without radios there weren't many other options.

Critical to this was that the watches used by the engineers and conductors running the trains be accurate and after a train collision in 1891 the railroads involved created the post of Chief Time Inspector and assigned Webb C. Ball to the job.

The "time-inspector" was responsible for ensuring that the watches used by the train engineers and conductors were approved for railroad use and that the watches were keeping time accurately. Individual watches were inspected bi-weekly and the watch was cleaned as needed, the variation from the "true" time noted (and, presumably corrected), etc.
6-Jan-2020 Clinton Foundation Revenue By Year These can be a bit difficult to compare because year-on-year various pieces got spun out or combined, so be a bit wary about drawing precise conclusions. The post-2016 donation drop seems to be real.

YearContributionsGrantsTotal
2001$9,885,816 $9.9M source
2002$25,115,196 $25.1M source
2003$44,529,126 $44.5M source
2004$57,747,324 $57.7M source
2005$79,495,333 $79.5M source
2006$109,730,002 $109.7M source
2007$81,229,000$41,556,000 $122.8M source
2008$88,320,000$143,275,000 $231.6M source
2009$90,617,000$150,724,000 $241.3M source
2010$161,939,000$142,428,000 $304.3M source
2011$107,949,000$134,333,000 $242.3M source
2012$113,119,518$114,546,567 $227.6M source
2013$198,824,477$92,923,660 $291.7M source
2014$217,832,954$113,957,283 $331.8M source
2015$182,501,954$109,918,387 $292.4M source
2016$135,445,489$72,422,962 $207.8M source
2017$22,843,211$3,695,764 $26.5M source, source
2018$21,305,219$2,939,718 $24.2M source

YearContributionsGrantsTotal
2019$18,864,072 $10,043,918 $28.9M
2020$13,185,009 $4,077,758 $17.3M
2021Not Broken Out $16.1M
5-Jan-2020 BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine Isetta
BMW Isetta (1955 - 1962)
5-Jan-2020 Wisdom of Co-Workers This is from a few decades back.

One co-worker was developing a GUI library that another co-worker was using to build a GUI for our product. Co-worker #2 was taking advantage of the fact that they were on the same team and provided feedback for desired changes to the library.

When Co-worker #1 delivered those changes, it turned out that the GUI code being written by Co-worker #2 needed to be modified to work with the new changes. Co-worker #2 was sad.
"He wants improvement, but not change," explained co-worker #1.

26-Dec-2019 College & Success, 1923 Edition
The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to collge. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the world in Latin, that neither the world nor the graduate can read, that he has successfully completed the work required. If the man is successful, it is because he has the qualities for success in him; the college "education" has merely, speaking in terms of horticulture, forced those qualities and given him certain intellectual tools with which to work — tools which he could have got without going to college, but not nearly so quickly. So far as anything practical is concerned, a college is simply an intellectual hothouse. For four years the mind of the undergraduate is put "under glass," and a very warm and constant sunshine is poured down upon it. The result is, of course, that his mind blooms earlier than it would in the much cooler intellectual atmosphere of the business world.

— Percy Marks, "Under Glass," Scribner's Magazine Vol 73 1923, p47
26-Dec-2019 WW 2 Average Bomber Life In March, 1942, the British were considering using strategic bombing of German cities to attempt to break the German morale.

A memorandum from the analysis contains this throwaway observation:
We know from out experience that we can count on nearly fourteen operational sorties per bomber produced.
This works out to about a 6% chance of losing the bomber (and, often, the crew) on each mission.

As a point of comparison, the Allied (primarily US, British, and Canadian) D-Day fatalities were about 4,500 with maybe 2× or 3× as many wounded. The total invasion force was about 150,000 men.

A random bomber mission was more dangerous than being a random soldier assigned to D-Day (though not as dangerous as a soldier assigned to the 1st wave at Omaha beach).

A British "tour" of duty in a bomber consisted of 30 missions.

The good news for the (British and American) bomber crews was that the odds of survival got better as the war progressed. But the losses were still pretty bad.
26-Dec-2019 Marshall McLuhan on Newspaper Ads
Further proof, as if any were needed, of Marshall McLuhan's prescience. On 1964 he wrote:

"The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold."

— Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (ARK edition, 1987, p207)
Craigslist was founded in 1995. It incorporated in 1999 and has a website targeting the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2000 it served nine cities (regions). 13 cities in 2001. 17 cities in 2002 and 31 in 2003. As of 2017 it employs about 50 people.

The US employment in the newspaper industry looks like this:

US Newspaper Employment
19-Dec-2019 Baseball Pitching Turnover Madison Bumgarner recently signed a 5-year contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks. With his departure from the San Francisco Giants, every pitcher from the 2014 team that won the World Series is gone.

A table showing the pitchers for the 2014 team, the number of innings they pitched for the team and their current status is:

Player Name 2014 IP Status
Madison Bumgarner 217 Playing 2020: Arizona Diamondbacks
Tim Hudson 189 Unsigned 2015: Most recent MLB game
Ryan Vogelsong 184 Retired in 2017
Tim Lincecom 155 Unsigned 2016: Most recent MLB game
Yusmeiro Petit 117 Playing 2020: Oakland Athletics
Matt Cain 90 Retired after 2017 season
Jake Peavy 78 Retired in 2019
Jean Machi 66 Unsigned 2017: Most recent MLB game
J.C. Gutierrez 63 Unsigned 2014: Most recent MLB game
Sergio Romo 58 Playing 2020: Minnesota Twins
Santiago Casilla 58 Unsigned 2018: Most recent MLB game
Jeremy Affeldt 55 Retired after 2015 season
Javier Lopez 37 Retired after 2016 season
George Kontos 32 Unsigned 2018: Most recent MLB game
David Huff 20 Unsigned 2016: Most recent MLB game
Hunter Strickland 7 Playing 2020: Washington Nationals
Erik Cordier 6 Unsigned 2015: Most recent MLB game
Chris Heston 5 Unsigned 2017: Most recent MLB game
Brett Bochy 3 Retired after 2015 season
Mike Kickham 2 Unsigned 2014: Most recent MLB game
Jake Dunning Unsigned 2014: Most recent MLB game

Only four of the pitchers from the 2014 Giants are still playing in the MLB: Madison, Petit, Hunter Strickland and Sergio Romo.
10-Dec-2019 Underbussing I have recently learned that the order in which co-workers are to be thrown under the bus is not clearly understood. The correct sequence is:
  1. Recently fired/departed co-workers:
    Whatever has gone wrong is their fault!

  2. Contractors

  3. Folks in Other Departments/Divisions

  4. Interns (in Your Own Group)

  5. Regular Employees in Your Own Group

29-Nov-2019 Journalistic Pairings Yahoo Money Headlines:
More shoppers plan to take out loan to finance the holidays

— Denitsa Tsekova Yahoo Money November 27, 2019
Most millennial renters can't afford to buy a home

— Dhara Singh, Yahoo Money Wed, Nov 27 12:20 PM PST
27-Nov-2019 When Computers Pick Front Page Stories SF Gate Front Page
On the left:
Despite rain, Bay Area
airports off to a pretty
good start.
On the right:
Power at Oakland Airport being restored
after outage causes holiday travel nightmare
 
21-Nov-2019 Playing With Statistics College football creates interesting problems in ranking teams because there aren't enough head-to-head matchups to be confident of the results. Still, folks try to create formulas to rank the teams and the formulas tend to produce at least plausible results. Occasionally, however, we get some very odd results.

ESPN has something called the " Football Power Index." At this point in the 2019 NCAA season it has the following team rankings:

TeamFPIResults
WinsLosses
1 Ohio State10-0 33.7 Wisconsin (13)
2 Clemson 11-0 30.7
3 Alabama 9-1 29.8 Texas A&M (15)LSU (4)
4 LSU 10-0 26.1 Alabama (3), Florida (9), Auburn (11), Texas (23)
5 Georgia 9-1 24.7 Florida (9), Auburn (11), Notre Dame (14)South Carolina (36)
6 Penn State 9-1 22.9 Michigan (10), Iowa (16)Minnesota (17)
7 Oregon 9-1 22.4 Washington (18), Washington State (24) Auburn (11)
8 Oklahoma 9-1 21.6 Baylor (21), Texas (23) Kansas State (37)
9 Florida 9-2 21.6 Auburn (11) LSU (4), Georgia (5)
10 Michigan 8-2 20.9 Notre Dame (14) Penn State (6), Wisconsin (13)
11 Auburn 8-2 20.9 Oregon (7), Texas A&M (15)LSU (4), Georgia (5), Florida (9)
12 Utah 9-1 20.0 Washington (18), Washington State (24) USC (22)
13 Wisconsin 8-2 20.0 Michigan (10), Iowa (16) Ohio State (1), Illinois (60)

The interesting bit is Alabama compared to LSU. Alabama has played two teams in the top-25 of the FPI rankings, beaten one (Texas A&M, ranked #15) and lost to the other (LSU, ranked #4). LSU is undefeated having played four teams in the FPI top-25 and beaten them all (#3, #9, #11, and #23), including Alabama.

Alabama still has a higher FPI score than LSU and it isn't particularly close. It all comes down to the model.
12-Nov-2019 Bad Form
The next primary election is about six months away, in April, and Baltimore voters will get to choose a mayor. We will either keep the current one or choose from other candidates.
From a 12-Nov-2019 Baltimore Sun opinion piece.

The Baltimore mayoral election will be held on November 3, 2020, the same day as the general election. Isn’t it bad form to publicly acknowledge that the general election doesn’t matter?
8-Nov-2019 When Catapults Are Outlawed ... Only Outlaws Will Have Catapults This is awesome:

IN TERMS OF SECTION 14 (1) OF PUBUC ORDER AND SECURITY ACT [CHAPTER 11:17], I CHIEF SUPERINTENDENT NEWBERT SAUNYAMA BEING THE OFFICER COMMANDING POLICE HARARE CENTRAL DISTRICT AND THEREFORE THE REGULATING AUTHORITY OF THE AREA BOUNDED BY REKAYI TANGWENA, COVENTRY ROAD, ROTTEN ROW THE NATIONAL RAILWAYS OF ZIMBABWE LINE UP TO THE MUKUVISI RIVER, ENTERPRISE ROAD, CHURCHILL ROAD, SWAN DRIVE, CORK ROAD, SANDRINGHAM DRIVE, DRUMMOND CHAPLIN STREET AND BISHOP GAUL AVENUE, BELIEVES ON REASONABLE GROUNDS THAT, THE CARRYING IN PUBLIC WHETHER OPENLY OR BY CONCEALMENT IN A PUBLIC PLACE OR PUBLIC THOROUGHFARE OR PUBLIC DISPLAY OF ANY OF THE FOLLOWING WEAPONS OR ITEMS CAPABLE OF USE AS WEAPONS:
  1. CATAPULTS, MACHETES, AXES, KNOBKERRIES, SWORDS, KNIVES OR DAGGERS,
  2. ANY TRADTTTONAL WEAPON WHATSOEVER IS LIKELY TO OCCASION PUBLIC DISORDER OR A BREACH OF THE PEACE.
HEREBY ISSUE AN ORDER PROHIBITING THE CARRYING OF SUCH WEAPONS IN THE AREA OR ANY PART THEREOF FOR A PERIOD NOT EXCEEDING THREE MONTHS, THAT IS FROM 2ND SEPTEMBER 2016 TO 2ND DECEMBER 2016.

Emphasis Added
The Zimbabwean: Carrying of weapons in Harare now prohibited

Better, yet, someone actually got arrested for selling catapults:

A Harare man appeared in court last week after he was arrested for selling a catapult in defiance of a police order banning the sale of such weapons in the city. The Zimbabwe Republic Police recently issued a statement banning weapons such as catapults and axes, which they deemed a threat to peace, security and order. Zebediah Mambondiani appeared before Harare magistrate Ms Barbra Chimboza.

He was charged with contravening the temporary prohibition of possession of certain weapons within police districts and was remanded out of custody to tomorrow.

Zimbabwe: Catapults Vendor in Court

Sadly, the folks in Zimbabwe use the word 'catapult' where we would use the word 'slingshot', so this isn't quite as Monty Python-esque as one would hope.
2-Nov-2019 Web Development A friend saw this on twitter:

I saw a guy building a website today.
No React.
No Vue.
No Ember.
He just sat there.
Writing HTML.
Like a Psychopath.


My friend thought of me. Because I do this. And he wondered if the Twitter poster hung out in the same coffeeshops I patronize.
3-November-2019:

And this morning my wife pointed out that this was a variant of an existing meme:

I saw a guy at Starbucks today.
No smartphone.
No tablet.
No laptop.
He just sat there drinking his coffee.
Like a psychopath.
30-Oct-2019 Interesting Hospital Factoid The US commerce department tracks lots of aspects of the US economy. In 1949, we got a document, Historical Statistics of the United States 1789-1945, with lots of interesting bits of information. One table that I find VERY interesting contains this excerpt:

Series C 92-103 — Health — Hospital Facilities By Type of Service: 1909 to 1945

Year Total General MentalTuberculosis Other
HospitalsBeds HospitalsBeds HospitalsBeds HospitalsBeds HospitalsBeds
1945 6,5111,738,944 4,744922,549 563657,393 44978,774 75580,228
1940 6,2911,226,245 4,432462,360 602621,284 47978,246 77864,355
1935 6,2461,075,139 4,257306,174 592529,311 49670,373 90169,281
1930 6,719955,869 4,302371,609 561437,919 51565,940 1,34180,401
1925 6,896802,065 4,041293,301 589341,480 46649,131 1,800118,153
1920 6,152817,020 4,013311,159 521295,382 3210,150 1,566200,329
From: Historical Statistics of the United States 1789-1945, A Supplement to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1949, by the US Department of Commerce, p 51.

Some surprising bits:
  • I had not realized that the US had dedicated tuberculosis hospitals.

  • The number of beds in mental institutions is much higher than I would have expected. Especially interesting is how quickly the number of beds in mental hospitals grew between 1920 and 1940. Notice that by 1935, roughly ½ the hospital beds in the US were dedicated to mental patients.

  • World War II is quite visible. Between 1940 and 1945 there was a large increase in hospital beds

  • Some of the increase is driven by population growth, but not a lot. The continental US population was about 106 million in 1920 and about 132 million in 1945. The US did not add 450,000 general hospital beds between 1940 and 1945 because of population growth.

20-Oct-2019 2019 World Series Schedule, According to Google The Game Six team information (Nationals vs TBD) suggests that Google is unclear how the World Series is scheduled:

Google: World Series 2019
Alternately, it suggests that a database somewhere was not updated inside a transaction.
15-Oct-2019 Apple Cares About Me! Apple is clearly having back-end IT problems because when they noticed that my Apple ID needed to be locked for security reasons they sent me this e-mail, even though the Apple e-mail servers were down.

Subject: Apple ID Locked
From: Apple Support <IYmw1r9XUAnkUPC-TRelMqZPkiIo4Dhw@sKsn6Iua-63972768.gov>

Apple Icon


Dear Customer

Your Apple ID has been locked for security reasons. To unlock it, you must verify your identity.

Unlock Account>

If you don't unlock your account before 24 hours, your account password will change automatically. You can reset your password at iforgot.apple.com.

Sincerely,

Apple Support

The Apple e-mail servers must have been down, right? With a return address of
IYmw1r9XUAnkUPC-TRelMqZPkiIo4Dhw@sKsn6Iua-63972768.gov.

In addition, the originating server was komnwj2.com, a site that was only registered September 27, 2019. It looks like Apple was preparing for this.
20-December-2019:

Apple seems to be having IT problems again!

Same message, but this time sent with a return address of
zopucshkqccieuk-pstz9mwska1z2bml@gz8tlybf-77497253.info

It originated from: sysupdatelnappuruincorpe.com
13-Oct-2019 Ancient Populations Could Be Amazingly Small One of the challenges to getting an accurate "feel" for ancient history is dealing with the sizes of the relevant populations. When the Athenians sent 100 ships to attack and conquer Syracuse as part of the Peloponnesian War, the total force was probably about 5,000. Which sounds kinda large, but which also fails to convey that it may have been around 20% of the fighting age men in Athens.

US history has similar issues.

The Iroquois Confederation (of "Last of the Mohicans Fame") for example, in 1722 occupied most of what is today the state of New York:

Iroquois Confederation Map (1722)
What is often omitted is that the population of the Six Nations (the Tuscarora were added to the original Five Nations in 1722) peaked at only around 10,000. The New York colony had a population of around 40,000 in 1720, but by the time of the French-and-Indian War the colony population was over 100,000.

By 1790 the population of New York State was 340,000. With a 34:1 population deficit, the Iroquois had no chance to survive as an independent political entity if the neighboring American states did not wish them to. The American states did not wish.
13-Oct-2019 Bad Pie Chart Pie charts are easy to use poorly and difficult to use well.

Still, this example from Bloomberg must be a candidate for "Worst Pie Chart" of the year. Or maybe forever.

Worst Pie Chart Ever?
11-Oct-2019 Worst Economic Crisis Since Two Years Ago From the Financial Times:
Zimbabwe is already grappling with its worst economic crisis since the 2017 army coup ...

Worst economic crisis in two years. The bar is set low.
10-Oct-2019 2019 NLDS: Dodgers Pitching Wasn't the Problem The Los Angeles Dodgers just lost a deciding game five in one of the two 2019 MLB National League Division Series. They lost it when Clayton Kershaw gave up back-to-back home runs to begin the 8th inning, which allowed the Nationals to tie the game and then follow up the tie by scoring four runs in the 10th inning.

The easy narrative is that the Dodgers pitching (and especially Clayton Kershaw) choked away the win. A more realistic view is that the two teams were pretty evenly matched. In spite of their difference in W-L records for the season, the two teams had similar W-L records after the all-star break: the Nationals were 46-27 and the Dodgers were 46-24. The teams were pretty evenly matched and the series was pretty close — deciding the winner in extra innings of game five of a five game series is pretty close. A one run difference in total offense (22 vs 21) between the two teams over five games is pretty close.

If we want to assign blame, though, the Dodger batting should come in for its share and probably contributed more to losing the series than the Dodgers' pitching did.

The scores in the five games were the following: 10, 7, 6, 6, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0.

And the scores binned out as wins vs losses is:
Wins: 10, 7, 6, 6, 4
Losses: 4, 3, 2, 1, 0

It is fairly clear that scoring MORE than four runs per game led to a win and scoring FEWER runs per game led to a loss. Scoring four runs was a coin-flip.

The Los Angeles Dodgers scores were: 10 (W), 6 (W), 3 (L), 2 (L), 1 (L)

And the Nationals scores were: 7 (W), 6 (W), 4 (W), 4 (L), 0 (L)

This suggests that the failure was not the Los Angeles pitching, but the offense. The Dodgers outscored the Washington Nationals overall 22 to 21, but the Nationals' scoring was more consistent and thus more useful.

The Hardball Times has a table of win probabilities given a specified number of runs scored. The data is for the 2000 - 2004 seasons which saw an average of 4.82 runs/game for each team. Conveniently for us, the 2018 National League runs/game per team is 4.78, so the Hardball Times table should work pretty well for us. The table looks like this:
RunsWin %
0 0.0%
1 7.7%
2 20.8%
3 33.9%
4 47.1%
5 59.3%
6 68.6%
7 77.6%
8 84.0%
9 92.1%
1093.9%
The Dodger's offense gave their team two games with a better than ⅔ chance of winning each, but then produced three games with an aggregate chance of winning at least one game of only 48% (1 - 0.923 × 0.792 × 0.661 = 0.483). Alternately, the Dodgers total expected wins were 2.25 (0.077 + 0.208 + 0.339 + 0.686 + 0.939 = 2.249). The Dodgers needed three wins to clinch the series and the offense only scored well enough for about 2¼ wins. Winning the series would require the pitching to perform above average.

The Nationals offense was only a bit better: 2.39 expected wins (0.000 + 0.471 + 0.471 + 0.686 + 0.776 = 2.394). But, basically, the series was an even match and someone had to win. That someone turned out to be the Nationals.

So the Dodger pitching melted down in game 5, but with a bit more offense the Dodgers would have won anyway. And the Dodger offense underperformed more than the Dodger pitching.
10-Oct-2019 Greek Bonds With Negative Interest Rates One of the amazing events in the current financial climate is countries (and even companies) issuing bonds with negative interest rates. You loan the country $1,000 and it solemnly promises to pay you back $950. Or whatever.

An example is German 10-year bond yields which are at about -0.338% right now.

And now Greece has just issued some 3-month bonds with a yield of -0.02%. If you can make this "investment" at the same rate four quarters in a row you will be able to loan Greece $10,000 and get back $9,998!

This feels like something at which the Greeks should excel. In 2011, for example, a number of holders of Greek bonds took took massive writedowns on their bonds. If bondholders are buying bonds where they don't expect to get all their money back, I feel that the Greeks should have an advantage over the Germans. The Argentines should benefit from this environment as well.
5-Oct-2019 Harry and Meghan: Wild Weasels of the Royal Family Prince Harry and his wife Meghan were married on the 18th of May, 2018. Both before and after the wedding, Harry and Meghan have attracted the attention of the tabloids (both British and American). As the most recent exchange seems headed towards a court date — Harry seems ready to sue the Daily Mail — it seems appropriate to consider the possibility that Harry and Meghan are (wittingly or unwittingly) serving the role of "Wild Weasel."

A Wild Weasel is an attack aircraft whose role is to attack enemy air defenses. But to do that, the Wild Weasel needs to get the enemy air defenses to reveal themselves ... which usually requires the Wild Weasel to get the attention of the enemy air defenses. Wikipedia explains:
In brief, the task of a Wild Weasel aircraft is to bait enemy anti-aircraft defenses into targeting it ...
In short, the Wild Weasel has, as part of its job, the task of doing the electronic version of standing around, waving its hands and shouting, "Neener, neener, neener, you can't get me!" This tends, as a side effect, to cause the enemy air defenses to pay less attention to the rest of the attack aircraft who are doing the equivalent of making themselves very inconspicuous and repeating "he can't see me, he can't see me" softly.

The press coverage of Harry and Meghan seems to be drawing (negative) attention away from William and Kate. Thus, Harry and Meghan are serving the role of "Wild Weasel" for the rest of the royal family.
3-Oct-2019 Unicorns Update In early 2016 I wrote up short comments containing my (snarky) thoughts on various tech unicorns. Time has passed (and WeWork's IPO has imploded on the launchpad ...) and I feel it is time for an update.
  • Uber
    Original Comment:
    $50B For an unprofitable taxi company?
    Today: Still unprofitable.

    Uber went public on May 10 of this year at a price of $45/share. This valued the company at $82 billion and Uber as a company raised about $8 billion from the IPO. The $1 billion/quarter operating losses have continued, however, and Uber stock now trades under $30/share giving Uber a market value of about $50 billion.

  • Xiaomi
    Original Comment:
    Hard to figure this one. How valuable are unprofitable Chinese consumer electronics companies?
    Today: Profitable.

    This can be tricky to figure as Xiaomi financials are often priced in Hong Kong dollars (about 7-8 Hong Kong dollars per US dollar).

    Using the ADR (XIACY) financial data the market capitalization today is $27B in US dollars. Xiaomi lost HK$ 9.3B in 2015, made a profit of HK$ 0.6B in 2016, lost HK$ 50B in 2017 (after taking an "unusual expense" ... there was an accounting scandal) and made HK$ 16B in 2018.

    Things went from glorious (#1 cell phone manufacturer in China) to horrible (the term "unicorpse" was used to describe Xiaomi) and now the company appears stable, profitable and growing.

    The stock price (HK$ 8.9) still seems to be ½ the 2018 IPO price (HK$ 17), though.

  • AirBnB
    Original Comment:
    We make our money by violating local zoning laws ... and all the neighbors hate us.
    Today: Well, it seems that AirBnb is profitable if they don't have to pay interest on their debt, pay taxes or take into account amortization. Since real companies need to do all three, it isn't clear if they are actually profitable. AirBnb was believed to be preparing to go public in 2018, but instead had a management shakeup.

  • Palantir
    Original Comment:
    This one seems real. Lots of money selling services to police states and folks that want to be more police state like ...

    Much like Blackwater is/was real.
    Today: In late 2018 Palantir was (privately) valued at around $40B. Meanwhile, also in late 2018 Morgan Stanley mutual funds that owned Palantir were valuing the company at $4B. This is quite a spread! Also, Morgan Stanley would not sell its Palantir stock back to Palantir at the $4B valuation.

    Meanwhile, Palantir has not gone public in 2019 and is trying to raise money in another private financing round using a company valuation of $26B.

  • Snapchat
    Original Comment:
    I don't understand. Of course, I didn't understand Facebook, either ...
    Today: Still unprofitable.

    Snapchat went public in early March 2019 at a share price of $17/share. It ended the day at $24.48/share. Today, Snapchat has a share price of $14.80 for a market capitalization of about $20B. Snapchat lost $0.5B in 2016, $3.5B in 2017 and $1.3B in 2018. It appears to be on track to lose roughly $1.3B in 2019.

  • Dropbox
    Original Comment:
    Because copying files over the internet isn't a commodity business. And also has great network effects to keep you locked in ...
    Today: Still unprofitable.

    Dropbox went public in March of 2018 at a share price of $21/share and a market valuation of $8.2B. After losing between $100M and $500M per year between 2015 and 2018 Dropbox may cut its annual losses to around $50M in 2019. The company is currently valued at a bit over $8B, so very close to its IPO price.

  • Pinterest
    Original Comment:
    Same as snapchat. Except I "get" it more, but don't understand how to make (much) money. Still ... see Facebook.
    Today: Still unprofitable.

    Pinterest went public in April of 2019 with a IPO stock price of $19/share and a market valuation of $10B. 2017 losses were $130M, 2018 losses were around $60M, but in true dot-com fashion Pinterest got its act together and is on a pace to lose over $1B in 2019. Pinterest stock is currently above $27/share and the company has a market capitalization around $15B — both about 50% higher than the IPO price.

  • Twitter
    Original Comment:
    We have never made money, but we're only 10 years old ...
    Today: Profitable!

    Twitter stock price was around $17/share when I wrote my original analysis. Today, about $40. Good job, Twitter!

  • Yelp
    Original Comment:
    We haven't made money, either ...
    Today: Profitable!

    Yelp lost a tiny bit of money in 2016, but has been profitable since. Current market capitalization is about $2.5B. Yelp stock is up about 75% since my original analysis.

  • Groupon
    Original Comment:
    Proudly delivering very bad customers to you, while also chasing off your good customers.
    Today: Sporadically profitable

    Since my original analysis, Groupon stock has dropped from about $4.50/share to about $2.60/share. Revenue seems to be slowly trending down. The company is sporadically profitable, though.

  • WeWork
    Original Comment:
    We rent out office space. But we have an app?
    Today: Unprofitable.

    This is the company that caused me to decide to update the status of my 2016 post. WeWork's last funding round valued the company at $47B. WeWork just pulled its proposed IPO and may be dead by the middle of next year. The good news is that the founder pulled $700M out of the company before the wheels came off the bus.

  • Spotify
    Original Comment:
    By construction, we can never extract very much money from the customers ... the folks who own the copyright will get the bulk of the profits ...
    Today: Profitable!

    Spotify didn't do an IPO. Instead if began trading with a "direct listing" in April 2019. Today Spotify has a market capitalization a bit over $20B. After losing around $2B total over the last four years, Spotify may make a profit of around $300M in 2019.

  • Lyft
    Original Comment:
    We're like Uber, but less trendy.
    Today: Still unprofitable.

    Today: Yep, Lyft is a smaller Uber. Lyft went public in March, two months before Uber. The Lyft IPO price was $72/share. Today, Lyft trades around $40/share with a market capitalization of around $12B. Lyft's losses are increasing and 2019 might be a record year for Lyft losses. Lyft could easily lose $2B in 2019.

  • Zenefits
    Original Comment:
    This one makes sense, but I don't know if this specific company can succeed. A large, recent layoff is sad.
    Today: The company was valued at $4.5B in a 2015 private equity round. The valuation is probably lower today.

    Zenefits is still in business, but still private. It held two rounds of layoffs in 2016 (250 employees let go in February and 106 in June) and followed those up with a 3rd round of layoffs in 2017 (430 employees) that eliminated almost ½ the remaining employees. By the end, Zenefits had reduced headcount by ⅔. The employees were asked to stop drinking at work and also to stop having sex in the stairwells. The company may be profitable. Or may not be.

  • Social Finance
    Original Comment:
    Because individuals are better at assessing loan risk than banks are. If we add intermediaries to "pool" individual piles of money and make the loan decisions, we have re-invented banking.
    Today: Social finance seems to still be around, but doesn't seem as trendy as it was in 2016.

WeWork may be the disaster that ends this party.
1-Oct-2019 Nike: 1 Year After Colin Kaepernick In early September 2018 Nike aired a commercial featuring Colin Kaepernick.

Colin Kaepernick of kneeling during the National Anthem before football games fame.

Colin Kaepernick who hasn't been employed by the NFL since March 3rd, 2017.

This ad (much like the Gillette ads earlier this year) generated a lot of controversy with many people, including President Trump, condemning it and many other people speaking up in favor. Some folks burned Nike products. Others called for, or predicted, a boycott.

But folks who weren't going to purchase the product can't effectively boycott it (as the folks calling for Chick-Fil-A boycotts discovered a number of years back). It appears that the Nike customer base is fine with the ad. Conveniently for everyone, Nike began a fiscal quarter just as the ad was released. This makes it easy to compare the results of the quarter before the ad (Jul-Sep 2018) with the same quarter one year later (Jul-Sep 2019):

Jul-Sep 2018Jul-Sep 2019
Total Revenue $9.948B $10.660B
Gross Profit $4.397B $4.871B
Operating Income $1.334B $1.543B
Net Income $1.092B $1.337B

With sales and profits up much more than inflation it is difficult to conclude that the ad hurt. In addition, Nike's stock price is up about 15% since the ad ran versus about 3% for the S&P500:

Nike Stock: Sep 2018 - Oct 2019
29-Sep-2019 People Like Spending Other People's Money
Americans generally like the idea of taxing other people to provide benefits for people like themselves.

But not surprisingly, redistributive policies become less popular as more details about them become known — one reason some Democrats are worried that initial public support for proposals like "Medicare for all" and guaranteed free tuition to public two- and four-year colleges will eventually wane.

In the Swedish experiment, when survey respondents learned they were higher on the income spectrum than they thought they were, they became less generous in their attitudes toward policies that would distribute money away from people like them. That logic works in the other direction, too: Redistributive policies might be more popular if lower-earning households who perceive themselves as higher on the income ladder knew where they truly stood.

A real-world example occurred after the 2015 State of the Union address, in which President Obama proposed ending tax benefits for college savings accounts (most of the balances in such accounts were held by families making at least $200,000 a year). More than 90 percent of American married couples made less than that, but Mr. Obama abandoned the proposal within a week under political pressure from both parties.

Writing about the episode for The New York Times, Josh Barro offered this summary: "The first rule of modern tax policy is raise taxes only on the rich. The second rule is that your family isn’t rich, even if you make a lot of money."

I suspect, however, that filtering the money through some government agency is necessary for most people's self-esteem. Voting yourself a certain amount from your neighbor's paycheck to be directly deposited in your bank account would probably have less support than raising taxes on your neighbor and using the benefits indirectly.

It seems that there should be some way to run an experiment to determine how this works.
28-Sep-2019 Not a Robert A. Heinlein Story This seems as if it should be an image from a Robert A. Heinlein story. Our plucky heroes are assembling their spaceship in a field next to their barn somewhere in the middle of Iowa or Missouri.

Instead, this is an image of SpaceX's Starship Mk1 prototype.

SpaceX Starship Mk1
27-Sep-2019 Differing Economies
"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."
— William Gibson
The United States economy seems to be qualitatively different than other major developed market economies. Specifically, the US economy seems to have a much larger contribution from technology firms:

Sector US Dev. Markets Europe China Japan
Technology 20.4% 6.3% 5.3% 15.6% 5.8%
Financials 19.4% 23.4% 20.6% 28.8% 13.1%
Consumer Services 13.8% 8.1% 6.6% 15.1% 11.8%
Industrials 13.6% 16.2% 15.4% 10.8% 22.2%
Health Care 12.9% 9.9% 13.1% 5.2% 9.2%
Consumer Goods 7.8% 16.2% 18.2% 12.0% 23.8%
Oil & Gas 4.7% 6.3% 7.6% 3.3% 0.8%
Utilities 3.2% 3.3% 4.0% 2.6% 1.9%
Basic Materials 2.3% 7.0% 6.2% 4.2% 5.5%
Telecommunications 1.9% 3.3% 3.0% 2.4% 5.9%

US: Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF
ex-US Developed Markets: Vanguard Developed Markets Index Fund
Europe: Vanguard FTSE Europe ETF
China: Vanguard Total China Index ETF
Japan: Vanguard FTSEJapanUCITSETF

Looking at the top companies by market capitalization makes the point even more concrete ("technology" companies highlighted):

USA China Europe Other
(1) Microsoft $1,027B (7) Alibaba $438B (14) Nestle $308B (19) Samsung $269B
(2) Amazon $932B (8) Tencent $430B (20) Shell$265B (39) TSMC$203B
(3) Apple $911B (15) ICBC $295B (24) Roche $240B (47) Femsa $173B
(4) Alphabet $752B (30) CN Ping $228B (34) LVMH $215B (50) Toyota $167B
(5) Facebook $551B (31) CCB $218B (37) Novartis $209B (59) BHP Billiton$147B
(6) Berkshire $520B (42) China Mobile$185B (46) Inbev$173B (69) Tata$125B
(9) Visa $379B (44) AgriBank of C$180B HSBC $169B (75) Reliance$119B
(10) J&J $370B (45) Moutai $180B (51) SAP $166B (81) Bank of Can.$114B
(11) JP Morgan Chase $363B (48) Petro China $173B (54) L'Oreal$160B (90) Toronto Bank$107B
(12) Exxon $324B (57) Bank of China$150B (55) Unilever$159B (94) Comm. Bank$103B
(13) Wal-Mart $315B (66) AIA $131B (60) Total$145B (95) Naspers$103B
(16) Bank of America $284B (67) Merchants Bank $130B (62) BP$142B
(17) P&G $275B (92) China Life $105B (66) Medtroinic$131B
(18) Mastercard $270B (73) Novo Nordisk$121B
(21) Walt Disney $251B (84) Airbus$110B
(22) AT&T $245B (85) Linda$109B
(23) Pfizer $241B (86) Astrazeneca$108B
(25) Chevron $237B (91) Rio Tinto$106B
(26) Verizon $236B (98) Allianz$102B
(27) Cisco $234B (99) Diageo$102B
(28) United Health $232B
(29) Home Depot $229B
Value Today: World Top Companies List as on July 1st 2019

The interesting bit isn't that the largest US companies are larger than the largest non-US companies. The interesting bit is the mix of industries represented by the largest companies.

The largest European tech company is SAP. Which is maybe comparable to Oracle (#41 with a market capitalization of $190B). Europe doesn't have anything comparable to Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, or Facebook.

China has Alibaba and Tencent, but then looks a lot like a "normal" early 21st century developed country with lots of capitalization in banks, energy and telecom companies.

Something to remember is that ordering by market capitalization will miss companies that are important, but not public. It will also miss large clusters of small companies. Many law firms are not public and so won't show up on a list of large public companies. A good example of "important but not public" is railroads, where the largest railroads based on 2018 revenue were:

Railway Revenue Market Cap
Deutsche Bahn $51B Govt Owned
SNCF $40B Govt Owned
JSC Russian Railways $39B Govt Owned
Indian Railways $29B Govt Owned
East Japan Railway Company $28B $36B
BNSF Railway $21B Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary
Union Pacific $21B $115B
Central Japan Railway Company $17B $41B
West Japan Railway Company $14B $16B
CSX $11B $55B

Railroads are clearly a non-trivial thing in Europe, but the largest railroad by market capitalization is Union Pacific. It is likely that Deutsche Bahn and SNCF are larger components of the European economy than the Union Pacific is of the US's.

Still, it very much appears that that the US economy consists of substantially more technology than the rest of the world. China may well be next (and, in fact, seems to have an economy that looks more like the US than Europe does!), but the US seems to be further down this path than everyone else — possibly much like Great Britain a few decades into the industrial revolution.
22-Sep-2019 Eating Healthy Everything one needs to know about eating healthy is summed up in this Jack LaLanne quote:
"If it tastes good, spit it out."
13-Sep-2019 Great Olympic Stories In no particular order:
  • 1936 Summer Olympics: Luz Long
    Sportsmanship: "... [Jesse] Owens fouled on his first two jumps. Knowing that he needed to reach at least 7.15 m (about 23 feet 3 inches) on his third jump in order to advance to the finals in the afternoon, Owens sat on the field, dejected.

    Speaking to Long's son, Owens said in 1964 that Long went to him and told him to try to jump from a spot several inches behind the take-off board. Since Owens routinely made distances far greater than the minimum of 7.15 m required to advance, Long surmised that Owens would be able to advance safely to the next round without risking a foul trying to push for a greater distance."

  • 1952 Summer Olympics: Emil Zátopek
    After winning gold in the 5,000 and 10,000 meter races he decided at the last minute to run in the marathon (how does that work???). He has never run a marathon in his life. He not only won the marathon, but set an Olympic record doing so.

  • 1988 Winter Olympics: Jamaican Bobsled Team

  • 1988 Winter Olympics: Eddie the Eagle

  • 2002 Winter Olympics: Steven Bradbury
    Steven Bradbury wins Gold in the 1000 meter speed skating event. To qualify, he won his semi-final race when two of the other four competitors fell and another was disqualified. In the finals, he was far enough behind the other four racers than when there was another pileup with all four other racers going down Steven was able to skate around the pileup and win the race.

8-Sep-2019 America's Government Pension Crises A large number of US pensions are disturbingly underfunded. As one example, California's CalPERS and CalSTRS pension funds are almost $250 billion underfunded given the promised benefits, the money in the pension funds and an assumed investment return of roughly 7%. Note that the 10 year treasury bond yield is about 2% and about 30% of the pension funds are invested in bonds, so to achieve 7% overall returns the rest of the investments must return greater than 10% annualized. If the other investments return a bit more than 10% then the funds are only short of their committed payouts by $¼ trillion. If the funds do not return 7% annualized, then the shortfall is greater than $¼ trillion.

There were three fairly obvious ways to avoid this shortfall:
  1. Contribute more money to the pensions.
  2. Promise fewer benefits.
  3. Get higher returns on the pension investments.
Two of the three ('a' and 'b') are something over which the California government(s) have control so it is reasonable to ask why neither were pursued.

But to do this we need to be very clear about the players. The players in this (simplified version of our) drama include the following:
  1. The taxpayers 30 years or so ago.
  2. The government employees 30 years or so ago.
  3. The politicians 30 years or so ago.
  4. The taxpayers today.
  5. The politicians today.
And we need to be clear that the only folks participating in decisions about how much to contribute and what to promise are the folks from 30 years ago.
  1. The taxpayers 30 years or so ago want services at a low cost
  2. The government employees 30 years or so ago want high total compensation
  3. The politicians 30 years or so ago want to upset neither group I or II.
So:
  1. Contribute more money to the pensions upsets the taxpayers.
  2. Promising less compensation upsets the government employees
  3. Assuming high returns on the pension investments makes everyone happy
Note, too, that the government employee compensation will need to be retirement benefits rather than cash for this to work. The obvious choice for the politicians 30 years ago is then to promise good retirement benefits payable in 30 years. The government workers will provide the work TODAY (teaching children, policing, firefighting, etc) in exchange for pay in thirty years. The taxpayers are happy because their children get taught, their cities are policed, etc. and they don't have to pay higher taxes for this. And the politicians at the time are happy because they don't have groups mad at them.

We don't even need to assume corrupt and venal politicians. People often find it easy to sincerely believe what it is convenient to believe.

But the investment returns didn't show up and the players today are:
  1. The government employees from 30 years ago, now government retirees.
  2. The taxpayers today.
  3. The politicians today.
The government employees from 30 years ago are now retirees who expect to be paid what they are promised. But the money isn't there because the assumed investment returns didn't show up given the money contributed to the pension funds and the promised benefits.

The taxpayers today don't want to pay more in taxes then absolutely necessary and often don't feel responsible for promises made by other folks 30 years ago.

The politicians today are trying to avoid getting yelled at.

But the fundamental problem is that one set of people — politicians and taxpayers from 30 years ago — made promises that can't be fulfilled while a different set of people — taxpayers today — are on the hook for meeting those obligations. There is no obvious way to avoid being unfair to either the retired government employees who expect to be paid what was agreed or the taxpayers today who had nothing to do with the agreement.

There is no obvious "justice" here unless it is considered fair for people thirty years ago to sign up other people to pay lots more in taxes ("Your parents voted thirty years ago that I get 5% of your paycheck. Pay up!"). And it obviously isn't fair to stiff people out of promised pensions ("You believed that you were going to get paid in thirty years???"). but the people who made the promises aren't expected to pay and the people who were promised expect to get paid, so ...
19-October-2019: An Example

The Dutch government pension funds are starting to have a difficult time meeting people's expected payouts. This is because the rate of return the fund uses is conservative — it is tied to the interest rates paid by government bonds and those interest rates are now negative! Some folks in charge of the funds think that the problem can be fixed by assuming a higher rate of return:
Actuaries make assumptions about how long pensioners will live, count up the future payments that have been promised to them and then use an assumed interest rate to "discount" how much must be put away to pay them.

The lower this interest rate, "rekenrente" in Dutch, the more conservative the accounting, and the more it costs to meet future liabilities.

The rekenrente is derived from government bond yields -- which have turned negative across Europe as interest rates steadily fell this summer.

Each 1% fall in interest rates has led to roughly a 12% fall in the coverage ratio between assets and liabilities in pension pots, the Dutch central bank says. As a January deadline approaches, cuts appear inevitable.

That has led several funds and some experts to argue that the rekenrente, which is around 0.3%, should be raised instead. Many blame ECB policy and see its effects as temporary.

Increasing the rekenrente to 2% or 3% would restore the funds to full solvency. Corien Wortmann-Kool, the chairwoman of the 456 billion euro ABP civil servants fund, told Reuters she opposes pension cuts as "unnecessary" for now.

"We believe we can achieve good returns, now and in the future," she said, estimating a 4% return over time is achievable despite low interest rates.
Bolding added by me. I'll note that assuming a higher return going forward does not actually make the fund solvent. The fund will be solvent if it has enough money in the future to pay our future claims. It will be insolvent if it does not. Assuming a higher return going forward does, however, allow the folks in charge today to avoid making unpleasant decisions about cutting benefits or raising taxes...

20-October-2019: Details on the Largest Dutch Pension Fund

The largest Dutch government pension fund, ABP, is invested as follows:
37%Fixed Income
35%Equity (stocks)
17%Alternatives (private equity, hedge funds, commodities, ...)
10%Property
Source: Asset Allocation: State of play

A smaller fund, PMT, is invested like this:
51%Fixed Income (aimed at matching liabilities)
30%Equity (private equity here, not in alternatives)
10%Property
9%High Yield (?)
Same source.

ABP's 15-year target return (2018 - 2033) is 5%. With 37% of the fund invested in bonds, the safest of which have a negative return.
6-Sep-2019 Eastern vs. Western Thinking Japanese history contains a tale about 47 rōnin avenging the death of a master. Their master was ordered to commit seppuku in the year 1701 and did so. The, now masterless, samurai could not successfully avenge their master's death at that time and instead waited and planned. In late 1702, they successfully killed the man they held responsible for their master's death and then all 47 committed suicide because they had committed murder.

The story is consistent with western views about Japanese and samurai and honor.

What strikes a westerner as odd is that the samurai were criticized by their contemporary, Yamamoto Tsunetomo (1659 - 1719). Tsunetomo's criticism was that the rōnin would have been forever disgraced if the man who they were planning to kill had died before they were able to execute their revenge. No one would have believed that they were waiting rather than simply avoiding their duty to avenge him. Better to immediately launch a guaranteed to fail attempt at revenge than to risk disgrace if their target died while they were preparing.

Guaranteed failure is preferred over a plan with some chance of failure, but also some chance of shame!

From Wikipedia:
Ōishi [the leader of the rōnin] was too obsessed with success, according to Yamamoto. He conceived his convoluted plan to ensure that they would succeed at killing Kira [the man responsible for his master's death], which is not a proper concern in a samurai: the important thing was not the death of Kira, but for the former samurai of Asano [the master] to show outstanding courage and determination in an all-out attack against the Kira house, thus winning everlasting honor for their dead master. Even if they had failed to kill Kira, even if they had all perished, it would not have mattered, as victory and defeat have no importance. By waiting a year, they improved their chances of success but risked dishonoring the name of their clan, the worst sin a samurai can commit.

This seems odd to this westerner.

One also wonders if this approach helped the Japanese lose World War 2 more quickly than necessary. If the objection that a plan is doomed to failure isn't seen as a good objection one can imagine tactics and strategies that help lose, rather than win, the war.
6-Sep-2019 Just "Googling" It Why learn "it" when you can just Google it?

This question is maybe not as stupid as it appears to the folks who are appalled that it is asked.

Some things are, in fact, fine to not bother learning. Things such as the three principal exports of Peru. Which seem to be (a) copper ore, (b) gold, and (c) refined copper. Or things such as the name of the 20th US president (James A. Garfield. Also acceptable is "who cares?").

Other things seems a bit more fundamental. There is value in knowing how math works even if one has access to a calculator. Partially because one might then recognize when a problem or question is amenable to math.

But there is a more fundamental reasons to know "things".

Google won't tell you what questions to ask
It is impractical to fact check every claim one runs across. Google can help with the fact checking, but Google won't tell you which facts should be checked. You'll need background information to form a sense of pieces that "don't quite make sense" or "sound wrong."

And Google won't help you to ask interesting questions at all. YOU are responsible for doing this. And interesting questions often come about when two facts bump into each other.

And Google is very poor at inventing solutions. If you expect that someone else has always answered any question you might ask, then, again, Google may be enough. If you expect to ever want to answer a new question, then Google might be a tool, but it isn't the solution.


If your plan is to be a very good drone that can do whatever is (reasonably) asked then you may be able to Google most things. But you'll be doing what someone else wants and extending their thoughts, not having your own thoughts.
5-Sep-2019 Economic Error: Price Matters One of the best active (possibly THE best active) NFL running backs, Ezekiel Elliott, refused to report to training camp this year and was holding out for a new contract. Eventually, the Dallas Cowboys gave him that new contract, and Terez Paylor thinks it is a good deal because "obviously" having Ezekiel Elliott on the team increases the Cowboys' chances to win the Super Bowl this year:
... while the recent trend is to say smart teams don't pay running backs big money, stemming from the belief they're a dime a dozen and less important than they used to be in today's pass-happy era, it's obvious the Cowboys' chances of winning a Super Bowl are greater with Elliott than without him.
Underline added by me. The primary problem with this is that it is NOT obvious.

If Elliott was working for the NFL league minimum it would be obvious that having him on the team was better than not having him on the team.

But Elliott isn't working for the league minimum. Instead, the contract guarantees $28 million and probably costs Dallas about $10 - $15 million per year that Elliott is on the team.

The question then becomes if the team is better having Elliott and ALSO having $10 - $15 million less to sign other players. The cost isn't the money — the NFL has both a salary cap and a salary minimum that is not much less than the cap. The cost is the players that Dallas cannot sign because of the Elliott contract.

This still might be a good deal, but it can't be obvious until one knows the price.
4-Sep-2019 SEC Football One week into the 2019 NCAA Football season, the AP rankings look like this:

1ClemsonACC
2AlabamaSEC
3GeorgiaSEC
4OklahomaBig 12
5Ohio StateBig 10
6LSUSEC
7MichiganBig 10
8Notre DameIndependent
9TexasBig 12
10AuburnSEC
11FloridaSEC
12Texas A&MSEC
13UtahPac 12
14WashingtonPac 12
15Penn StateBig 10

SEC teams have two of the top four slots, three of the top six and six of the top 12. The top ranked Pac-12 team is #13.

I don't expect the final poll to be this lopsided because too many of these SEC teams play each other, but we can certainly start the "SEC if overrated" whining now!
3-October-2019: I Now Track This Systematically

Since I tend to check this occasionally I created a full length document to track NCAA Football rankings and display graphically how the various Power 5 conference are doing.
3-Sep-2019 More Words of Wisdom It can be amusing to listen to folks address an audience when they haven't rehearsed their talk to perfection. You'll occasionally get gems that have a point but are phrased very amusingly. Today I heard this in a talk about an upcoming Heart Walk:
"Heart disease effects many Americans ... <beat> ... and also many of our loved ones."
My employer has a large number of employees born outside America. Including the speaker.
2-Sep-2019 Internet Wisdom, Episode 4
"I will always trust Russians on the subject of misery."
Previous entries:
2-Sep-2019 Death is Not Certain Only about 93% of people ever born have died ... and you are probably one of the remaining 7%!!!
Given the current global population of about 7.5 billion (based on our most recent estimate as of mid-2017), that means those of us currently alive represent about 7 percent of the total number of humans who have ever lived.
Don't give up! The odds are better than most people think!
30-Aug-2019 Investing in Bitcoin! I received an investment opportunity yesterday in my work e-mail in-box:

From: Grand ménage <info@grand-menage.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2019 7:19 AM
To: LastName, FirstName <First.Last@my-employer.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL]: Demande de soumission de Grand ménage

Téléphone :
Jour : 84231355823
Soir : 83838683786

Votre demande :
Invest $ 5,000 in Bitcoin once and get $ 70,000 passive income per month: https://chogoon.com/srt/bvudo?&ygtgf=DHXz2Y5P

--
Cet e-mail a été envoyé via le formulaire de demande de soumission de Grand ménage.
Merci de la part de notre équipe d'experts.

Well! $70,000 passive income per month for a one-time $5,000 sounds quite attractive!

This does, however, require some investigation before sending in my $5,000:
  • Good news is that the 'Jour' ('day' as in 'bon jour!') phone number might have a Vietnam country code (84) and French is most certainly used in Vietnam. So this probably isn't a scam.

    Bad news is that '8' is the Russian country code, and '842' routes to Ulyanovsk Oblast. If so, this might be a scam.

    The 'Soir' (evening) number is either an '8', Russia and thus probably a scam ... or ... '83' which is Italy ... where they don't use a lot of French. Hmmmmm....

  • The provided chogoon.com URL (chogoon seems to be a URL shortener) returns a 404 error message. Darn it! That's not going to help.

  • grand-menage.com goes to a real company ... in Quebec ... where they use French! A good sign. These folks might have an office in Vietnam! To provide an international presence for the ... cleaning services that they offer. When not investing in bitcoin.
I think I'm going to wait for another e-mail and hope that the 2nd one clears things up.
28-Aug-2019 Project Management: Avoiding Analysis Paralysis A strategy I've used in the past to attempt to make good choices on projects while not risking analysis paralysis is to break the schedule for each choice into three time periods:
  1. Search: We're looking for the 'best' choice and lots of options are on the table.

  2. Decision: It is time to make a choice. The timing for this is often forced if there is a schedule with a required delivery date. Sometimes the timing for this is arbitrary to avoid stalling. Here you make the best choice you can with the available information.

  3. Commitment: The decision can still be re-visited, but only if the current choice endangers the success of the project. In other words, a choice that will still allow for success is not to be changed until after the project is delivered.
A few observations:
  • You can use this strategy for multiple different choices and each choice will have its own timeline.
  • You can revisit any choice after the thing you are working on has been delivered. But you should deliver the thing first!
  • Don't treat these rules as inviolable, but keep in mind the danger of not closing on decisions.
27-Aug-2019 Pluto: Never Give Up! Never Surrender!
NASA Administrator Says Pluto Is Still a Planet, And Things Are Getting Heated
MICHELLE STARR
26 AUG 2019

Saturday 24 August 2019 marked a vexing anniversary for planetary scientists. It was 13 years to the day that Pluto's official definition changed - what was once numbered among the planets of the Solar System was now but a humble dwarf planet.

But not everyone agreed with the International Astronomical Union's ruling - and now NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has added his voice to the chorus declaring support for Pluto's membership in the Solar System Planet Club.

"Just so you know, in my view, Pluto is a planet," he said during a tour of the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Building at the University of Colorado Boulder.

"You can write that the NASA Administrator declared Pluto a planet once again. I'm sticking by that, it's the way I learnt it, and I'm committed to it."

...
If Michael E. Brown thought this was over in 2006, he was sadly mistaken!
26-Aug-2019 Griggs and College Enrollment In 1971, the US Supreme Court ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that employment tests could be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Supreme Court further held that the burden of proof was on the employer to show that the test had a business necessity. In case of doubt, the company requiring the test would lose if sued in court.

One proposed 'work around' for employers is to use proxies for the desired traits. Since one of the traits desired is intelligence (a useful trait for almost any job), some folks have hypothesized that college enrollment has soared since Griggs. One example of such hypothesizing is:
As this paper will show, "Griggs v. Duke Power" may have enormously boosted the number of students in college and may have increased the differential in income between high school and college graduates.
We can see the jump here:
Year % Bachelor's or Higher
US Individuals Ages 25 to 34
1940 6%
1950 6%
1960 11%
1970 16%

1980 24%
1990 24%
2000 29%
2009 32%
College Board: Educational Attainment over Time, 1940–2009

Or, rather, we don't see the jump. From 1970 to 1980 the upward trend in US college attendance that had been present since the end of World War 2 continued. Looking at related data for the world finds this:

Image showing college attendance by world region from 1970 onward. (Original Source)

Since Griggs should not have been able to effect non-US companies, a more plausible story is that college attendance trends are up world wide since 1970 and the US is part of the world.
26-Aug-2019 Interns Ask Questions No One Else Does Question asked by intern a few weeks back:
Do deaf people text in ASL?
25-Aug-2019 Becoming a Commodity ... On Purpose! A common goal when running a business is 'differentiating' your product or service so that you are not seen as interchangeable with everyone else offering that product or service.

Almost anything can be differentiated — at least to some audience — but examples of goods that are purchased by consumers and often seen as (at least mostly) brand interchangeable include:
  • Gasoline
  • Table Salt
  • White Rice
  • Computer DRAM
  • Double Edge Safety Razors
Companies often spend time and advertising dollars trying to differentiate their product from near competitors. So, Starbucks wants consumers to see Starbucks coffee as clearly better than Dunkin' Donuts or McDonalds coffee. And if not the coffee itself, then the ambiance at the Starbucks coffee shop. Coke wants people to believe that it is different from Pepsi and both want folks to think they are very different from generic store-brand cola.

Products that forty years ago were clearly commodity (water, white bread, milk, ...) have today often been successfully branded. Bottled water often sells for more per gallon than gasoline, as one example.

So it is interesting to see an industry intentionally commoditizing itself.

Yet this is exactly what the airline industry has (mostly) done with code-sharing.

The idea behind code-sharing is that you might book with United and instead get a seat on an Air New Zealand flight. Or vice versa.

I discovered code-sharing about twenty years ago when my wife and I were flying to New Zealand. We had heard good things about Air New Zealand and figured that paying a bit more to fly Air New Zealand was worth trying for a flight that was going to take 12+ hours. So we carefully specified to our travel agent (remember those?) that we'd like to go with Air New Zealand if it wasn't too expensive.

We got our Air New Zealand tickets and discovered when we got to the airport that we would be flying on (going from memory here ...) United Airlines from Los Angeles to Aukland!

Amazing!

It felt like requesting a Porsche and having Porsche itself tell you that they were sending over a Volkswagon because the two cars were basically equivalent!

The airline industry is often noted as one with very high customer price sensitivity.
A Reuters/IPSOS poll indicates that 83% of airline customers place ticket prices as their top priority. 52% of respondents said they would not pay more to fly on their airline of preference. Both marks are higher than what some execs might have expected.
I wonder how much of this price sensitivity is encouraged by the airline industry signaling that the airlines are all basically alike?
23-Aug-2019 CEO Heading to South America From Matt Levine MoneyStuff column today at Bloomberg:
Ordinarily if you are a shareholder in a controversial and heavily shorted company, and one day the CEO quits unexpectedly and announces that his bags are packed for South America, that is — you know, you hate to see it. Overstock’s stock price was up 8.3% yesterday.
23-Aug-2019 Solving the Three Body Problem Comment about a co-worker:
CoWorkerName's solution to the three body problem is to remove one of the bodies.
23-Aug-2019 A.1. Steak Sauce Bottles Comment by a co-worker:
I had never seen the back of an A.1. bottle.
17-Aug-2019 Dot Com 2? Uber has recently gone public with an IPO valuation of about $80 billion (at a stock price of $45/share). This is for a company that pretty steadily loses $1B per quarter. Lyft is effectively a ¼ Uber with about ¼ the revenue and ¼ the losses.

And now it looks as if WeWork is going to go public. This is a company with a $47B valuation that also has pretty large losses. The business is to re-lease office space that it has leased from its CEO (no conflict of interest there!). For those of us who lived through the Dot Com Boom and Bust this is starting to look familiar. So, what is the status on some other potential dotcom-2 companies? I have this table:

Year Company Annual
Founded Name Valuation Revenue Earnings
2009Uber $60B Public $12B ($4B)
2010WeWork $47B Private $1.8B ($1.6B)
2008AirBnB $35B Private $4B+ $0.1B?
2006Twitter $31B Public $3B $1.2B
2006Spotify $26B Public $5.5B ($0.078B)
2003Palantir $20B - $40B Private $1B
2011SnapChat $22B Public $1.5B ($1.2B)
2012Lyft $15B Public $3B+ ($1B)
2010Pinterest $10B Private $0.8B ($0.063B)
2008DropBox $7.2B Public $1.5B ($0.5B)
2004Yelp $2.5B Public $1B $0.055B
2008Groupon $1.3B Public $2.6B ($0.011B)
2013Zenefits ??? Private ??? ???

Superficially, things do looks similar. What I don't see, however, is absolutely insane valuations in established companies accompanying this.

The original dotcom boom included the following:
  • Nortel with a market cap of $283 billion. It ended bankrupt.
  • Lucent at $285 billion. It ended merged with Alcatel in 2006. Nokia owns what is left.
  • Cisco at $555 billion. It subsequently dropped 85%.
  • AOL at $220 billion. It sold out to Time-Warner at the peak.
  • Yahoo at $125 billion.
  • Oracle at $137 billion dropping 85% from peak to trough.
  • Sun Microsystem at $116 billion acquired by Oracle for less than $10 billion in 2009.
  • Microsoft at $533 billion.
I don't see a huge collection of counterparts today. Of the FAANG companies:
  • Facebook ($500B market cap) is profitable and has a P/E ratio of about 30.
  • Apple ($900B market cap) is solidly profitable and has a moderate P/E ratio of 23.
  • Amazon ($900B market cap) is profitable, though with a high P/E ratio of 75.
  • Netflix ($132B market cap) is profitable, though with a high P/E ratio of over 100.
  • Google ($817B market cap) is solidly profitable and has a moderate P/E ratio of 24.
So a dotcom-2 crash is going to have to come from Netflix and Amazon. The higher profile companies are too small. And Netflix and Amazon don't seem large enough between them to cause a crash. We just don't have the obvious breadth of insanity that was present in 2000.
14-Aug-2019 Jets With Guns In late 1960 the missile-only McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom entered service with the US Navy. It did not have a gun. That this was an error quickly became clear ("They are called missiles, not hitiles ..." goes the old joke). Every US fighter since has been designed with an internal cannon.

And, in fact, every jet fighter deployed by any country since then seems to have been designed with a gun.

A few dedicated interceptor aircraft (Mig-25, Tupolev-28) intended to shoot down high altitude supersonic bombers have been gun-less, but no aircraft intended as a general "fighter" has been produced without a gun since the F-4 Phantom.

The number of bullets or cannon shells available to the pilot has been dropping over time, though, and one could imagine a curve implying that sometime in the future fighter jets would deploy with a gun, but only one round.

Sadly, this is not the case. This table shows the number of rounds for each plane since the F-4 Phantom. It appears to have bottomed out at a bit over 100. Sigh.

Year Country Aircraft Gun Rounds
1965 Soviet Union Sukhoi 15 2×23 mm???
1970 Soviet Union Mig 23 1×23 mm260
1974 United States F-14 1×20 mm675
1976 United States F-15 1×20 mm940
1978 United States F-16 1×20 mm511
1978 United States F-18 A-D 1×20 mm578
1980 China J-8 1×23 mm???
1981 Soviet Union Mig 31 1×23 mm260
1982 Soviet Union Mig 29 A 1×30 mm150
1984 France Mirage 2000 2×30 mm2×125
1985 United Kingdom Tornado 1×27 mm180
1985 Soviet Union Sukhoi 27 1×30 mm150
1986 United Kingdom Hawk 200 1×30 mm120
1994 Taiwan AIDC F-CK-1 1×20 mm???
1996 Sweden Gripen A 1×27 mm120
1999 United States F-18 E-F 1×20 mm412
2003 France Dassault Rafale 1×30 mm125
2003 Europe Eurofighter Typhoon 1×27 mm150
2005 United States F-22 1×20 mm480
2006 China J-10 1×23 mm280
2015 United States F-35 A 1×20 mm180
2019 Russia Mig 35 1×30 mm150
2019 Russia Sukhoi 57 1×30 mm???
  • Sukhoi 35 is treated as a Sukhoi 27 derivative.
  • Mig 27 is primarily a ground attack aircraft. It has a gun.
  • Mig 25 is a bomber interceptor, not a dog-fighter. It has no gun.
  • F-117 is a bomber in spite of its fighter "F" designation.
11-Aug-2019 Accounting Losses At the beginning of August, P&G announced financial results for fiscal year 2019 and one of the details was an $8 billion dollar writedown of Gillette. The result of this $8 billion writedown was that P&G reported a $5 billion loss of the last quarter of FY19.

A few days later Uber reported losses for its second quarter of a bit over $5 billion.

Neither of these were what they seem.

Because of some "quirks" of GAAP accounting rules, a company can report massive "loses" without actually having less money in its checking account (and often without even losing any thing of tangible value). Both of these are examples of this and it is important to understand how "earnings" are defined before one gets excessively excited or depressed by announced earnings.

In the case of P&G, the losses are because in 2005 P&G purchased Gillette for a fair amount above book value. In such a purchase, the excess value must appear on the balance sheet of the acquiring company as accounting goodwill. If, at some time in the future, the acquiring company decides that the purchased company isn't as valuable as had been supposed, the goodwill must be (partially or entirely) written off. This is what happened for P&G. Gillette's sales and profits have noticeably slumped and P&G must reflect that in its balance sheet. Accounting rules require that balance sheet changes be accompanied by entries in the income (or loss) statements, so writing down the goodwill requires reporting a loss. But P&G isn't short $5 billion (or $8 billion) from a checking account.

And note that an internally grown division whose profits drop a lot does not require that a loss be reported. The goodwill writeoff for Gillette only applies to bits of the company that were purchased rather than grown internally.

Possibly the most extreme versions of this were seen at the end of the 2000 dot-com boom. At the end of 2001, JDS Uniphase wrote down $56 billion in goodwill for a variety of companies it had purchased with (overpriced!) JDS Uniphase stock.

A year later, at the end of 2002, Time-Warner wrote down almost $100 billion in goodwill because of the AOL purchase.

Yet another accounting loss (though one that is a bit more "real" for shareholders) is when a company must expense stock options. In this case, the basic idea is that the company has handed out something with a value (stock) below the true value of that something (options are only valuable if you can purchase the stock below market price) and so the difference must be reflected in the company's income statement.

As with goodwill, the company checking account isn't short the money, but in this case the company IS poorer than it would have been if the stock had been sold at the market value and the company kept the cash. So this loss is more 'real' than the goodwill writeoffs, but still qualitatively different than the company being out $5 billion in cash.
5-August-2019 P&G's $8B Gillette Write Down Proctor and Gamble (P&G) has recently released its earning report for fiscal year 2019 and part of the report was that P&G was taking an $8 billion write down for Gillette.

Meanwhile, in January 2019, Gillette had released a commercial claiming among other things that "men need to hold other men accountable". This commercial resulted in both praise and backlash with the backlash centered on (mostly) men feeling that they did not need Gillette to lecture them. Gillette then released another commercial in May, this one of a man shaving his trans-gendered son which, again, generated praise and backlash.

Some folks were ready to claim that the $8 billion dollar write down of Gillette was a direct result of these commercials. It almost certainly was not.

The first thing to do is to look at Gillette sales and profits. Unfortunately, we can't do that because P&G doesn't release Gillette specific financial numbers. We can, however, look at the "grooming" market segment for which Gillette does release financial information and which includes Gillette. What we find is this:

FYRevenueNet Earnings
FY 2008 (Aug 07 - Jul 08)$8.254B $1.679B
FY 2009 (Aug 08 - Jul 09)$7.408B $1.359B 2008 recession
FY 2010 (Aug 09 - Jul 10)$7.631B $1.477B 2008 recession
FY 2011 (Aug 10 - Jul 11)$8.245B $1.775B
FY 2012 (Aug 11 - Jul 12)$8.339B $1.807B
FY 2013 (Aug 12 - Jul 13)$8.038B $1.837B
FY 2014 (Aug 13 - Jul 14)$8.009B $1.954B

FY 2015 (Aug 14 - Jul 15)$7.441B $1.787B Drop begins
FY 2016 (Aug 15 - Jul 16)$6.815B $1.548B
FY 2017 (Aug 16 - Jul 17)$6.642B $1.573B
FY 2018 (Aug 17 - Jul 18)$6.551B $1.432B
FY 2019 (Aug 18 - Jul 19)$6.119B $1.528B

It is clear that the revenue was pretty stable at between $8 billion and $8⅓ billion for the fiscal years between 2008 and 2014 excluding two years of very bad 2008 recession. At the same time, the earnings were slowly increasing from $1⅔ billion to a peak of almost $2 billion in FY2014, again removing two years of bad 2008 recession. This is followed by a visible collapse in both sales and profits beginning in FY 2015.

A Forbes article in early 2019 points out that:
... Gillette has come under increasing competition from low priced competitors such as Dollar Shave Club and Harry's, along with a resurgent Schick who is offering refill cartridges that fit Gillette razors, its market share has dropped from 70% to 50% over the past decade. Gillette has been forced to drop the price of its razors by about 15% over the past few years and is on the verge of losing master brand status.
It makes sense to see the 2019 advertisements as a response to this substantial drop in both sales and earnings rather than the advertisements being a cause of the sales and earning drops reported in 2019! 2019 was the fifth year in a row showing a drop in sales, earnings or both.

The $8B write down is also not what it initially appears.

Gillette was acquired by P&G in 2005 and as part of the acquisition a large amount of accounting "goodwill" needed to appear on P&G's balance sheet. This $8B write down is essentially an acknowledgement by P&G that it overpaid for Gillette and it must now acknowledge that overpayment by writing down the goodwill. Writing down the goodwill must appear in the earnings, thus the $8B write down. But P&G hasn't lost $8B in the sense that P&G's bank account is $8B lower than before the write down. This is purely a book-keeping event.

It does, however, strongly suggest that P&G believes it unlikely that the Gillette sales and earnings will be returning to 2012-2014 levels any time soon, if at all.


Gillette's 2020 grooming numbers continued the slide:

FYRevenueNet Earnings
FY 2019 (Aug 18 - Jul 19)$6.119B $1.528B
FY 2020 (Aug 19 - Jul 20)$6.069B $1.329B

The grooming segment's revenue and earnings are now lower than at the bottom of the 2008 recession.
30-July-2019 Competition, Opposition and Enemy A useful set of distinctions:
  1. The Competition
  2. The Opposition
  3. The Enemy
From the US Army's viewpoint, the US Navy is the competition, Erwin Rommel was the opposition and the SS was the enemy.

You can try to beat someone you otherwise like in a competition. For much of their careers Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlin had this relationship. It is easier to have this relationship if one either (a) is fundamentally on the same team as the other person (e.g. US Army and US Navy), or (b) realizes that the competition doesn't fundamentally matter as in a sporting competition. Another good word to describe the competition is a rival.

You can oppose someone who you believe to be truly, horrifically wrong without believing that person to be evil. Erwin Rommel's British army opponents seemed to feel that way about Rommel. Rommel had to be defeated, but there was no personal animosity towards the man who was doing his duty to his own country.

Random Nazis were the enemy. There was personal animosity towards them because they were "the bad guys" in a way that Erwin Rommel was not.
21-July-2019 MLB Hall of Fame Factors Getting into the Major League Baseball (MLB) Hall of Fame requires more than just good statistics. Stats for two fairly recent MLB players are here (light green for stats that are clearly better):

Player 1 Player 2
Position CF CF
Plate Appearances 7831 7980
At Bats 7244 6858
Runs 1071 1251
Hits 2304 1949
Doubles 414 437
Triples 57 25
Home Runs 207 393
RBIs 1085 1199
Stolen Bases 134 67
Caught Stealing 76 50
Walks 450 998
Strikeouts 965 1729
Batting Average 0.318 0.284
On Base Percentage 0.360 0.376
Slugging Percentage 0.477 0.527
On Base + Slugging 0.837 0.903
OPS+ 124 125
Rookie of the Year 3rd 8th
MVPs 0 0
Golden Gloves 6 8
Silver Sluggers 6 1
All Stars 10 4
World Series 2-0 1-1

These two players both played center field and have roughly similar statistics. But one of these was voted into the MLB Hall of Fame on his first eligible ballot. The other player failed to get enough votes to stay on the ballot after his first year of eligibility and is not in the Hall of Fame.

There are several differences that contributed to one getting in on the first ballot and the second being dropped from consideration after the first ballot.
  • Player 2 was frequently injured and put up roughly the same number of plate appearances over 17 years while player 1 had a career of just 12 years. Not counting rookie years (when the player may fail to get to 600 plate appearances because he was called up later in the season), Player 1 had only one seasons with fewer than 600 plate appearances. Player 2 had nine seasons with fewer than 600 plate appearances. MLB rewards being healthy and able to play.

  • Player 1 was worse at getting on base (OBP of .360 vs 0.376), but better at getting hits and worse at drawing walks. MLB player evaluation prizes hits instead of walks. MLB player evaluation probably should prize walks almost as much as hits, but the folks making these judgements don't see things this way.

  • The hits instead of walks combined with being healthier lead to Player 1 winning many more silver slugger awards (6 vs 1) and the better hitting lead to Player 1 going to more All Star games (10 vs 4).
The conclusion is then that (a) how you get on base matters (hits help you, walks do not) and (b) being healthy matters. You need to perform at a Hall-of-Fame level for many complete seasons. Being consistently health is part of being a Hall-of-Famer.

Player 1 is Kirby Puckett. Player 2 is Jim Edmonds.
21-July-2019 Millennials and Their Coffee Criticizing the young is a historically favored pastime of older generations. Today it seems that millennials (born roughly 1981 - 1996) are to be criticized for their non-serious college "Studies" degrees, their avocado toast and especially their morning latte. From The Atlantic:
Suze Orman wants young people to stop "peeing" away millions of dollars on coffee. Last month, the personal-finance celebrity ignited a controversy on social media when a video she starred in for CNBC targeted a familiar villain: kids these days and their silly $5 lattes. Because brewing coffee at home is less expensive, Orman argued, purchasing it elsewhere is tantamount to flushing money away, which makes it a worthy symbol of Millennials' squandered resources.

...

The old guard of personal finance has spent years turning the habit of buying coffee into a shorthand for Americans’ profligacy, especially that of young Americans. Dave Ramsey, a finance personality who hosts a popular radio show on getting out of debt, says that forgoing lattes is one of four keys to saving thousands of dollars.

...

Finance media has seized on coffee in part because, in the space of a generation, how Americans drink coffee has changed dramatically. In 1994, Starbucks had fewer than 500 locations in the United States. Today, it has more than 14,000.

...

Millennials make up less than a quarter of the overall U.S. population, but in 2016, they drank an estimated 44 percent of the nation’s coffee.

So ...

How Large is the US Coffee Shop Market?
The US Coffee Shop industry includes more than 22,000 stores with combined annual revenue of about $12 billion.

If millennials are responsible for 44% of this, then millennials are spending about $5¼ billion per year on coffee shop coffee. If millennials are more likely to frequent coffee shops instead of getting their caffeine at home or McDonalds, maybe millennials are responsible for ... $8 billion of the $12 billion? It seems unlikely that they'd be responsible for more than this.

How Many Millennials are There?
Millennial population size varies, depending on the definition used. William Strauss and Neil Howe projected in their 1991 book Generations that the U.S. millennial population would be 76 million. In 2014, using dates ranging from 1982 to 2004, Neil Howe revised the number to over 95 million people (in the U.S.). In a 2012 Time magazine article, it was estimated that there were approximately 80 million U.S. Millennials. The United States Census Bureau, using birth dates ranging from 1982 to 2000, stated the estimated number of U.S. Millennials in 2015 was 83.1 million people.
If we use 80 million as a good rough size for the millennial cohort, we then get this:
  • 80 million millennials
  • are spending up to $8 billion per year for coffee shop coffee
  • which works out to millennials averaging no more than $100 per millennial per year for coffee shop coffee.
Clearly some millennials are spending much more than $100/year on coffee shop coffee, but then some other millennials must be spending much less.

On average, $100/year (or about $8/month) for coffee shop coffee for folks between the ages of 23 and 38 probably isn't going to screw up their retirement plans.

Yes, $5/day ($25/week ... $100/month, $1,200/year) spent on coffee shop coffee is going to make a dent in any savings plan. But the typical millennial ISN'T DOING THAT!
14-August-2019: Yahoo has just run an article on Millenials and Avocados:
Millennials spent $453 million on avocados last year: Study

Millennials love avocados.

They love avocados enough to spend $453 million in 2018, according to a new study by the Hass Avocado Board.
So, assuming 80 million millenials, this works out to about $5.50 per millenial per year for avocados. They're never going to save up a downpayment for a house with spending habits like this!

23-August-2019: We can look at this 2018 Starbucks' Edgar filing with the SEC for some more insight.

Starbucks claims about $17.4 billion revenue from US sales out of $24.7 billion world-wide including the US (p87). Starbucks also claims that $14.4 billion out of that $24.7 billion is for beverage sales (as opposed to food, packaged and single-serve coffees, etc.).

So, 14.4/24.7 is 58%, so about 55% of Starbucks' sales are beverages (not all coffee ... some will be tea) and Starbucks' sales in the US are $17.4 billion. 55% of $17.4 billion is about $9½ billion.

This is not totally out of line with the 2016 coffee numbers above, but the 2018 numbers are clearly higher and the 2016 numbers might understate the market. If Starbucks' has ~½ the coffee shop market (note that the next two biggest competitors to Starbucks for selling coffee are Dunkin' Donuts [small coffee: $1.59] and then McDonalds [medium coffee: $1.29] ... neither of which seem like stereotypical millenial overpriced coffee choices), then the market is closer to $20 billion than $12 billion and the millenial share might be ~$12B or $13B. So maybe $200/year per millenial on coffee shop coffee. Maybe. Higher, but still not enough on average to delay purchasing a house. Still, starting to get up there — $400 per year per couple can add up ... but probably not as much as a typical cable bill or cell phone data plan.

27-June-2022:

From ‘Just stop buying lattes’: The origins of a millennial housing myth it appears that complaining about young folks ruining their financial lives by purchasing lattes originates with David Bach in 1999:
"Are you latte-ing away your future?" Bach asked in a 1999 book. 'Everyone makes enough money to become rich. What keeps us living paycheck to paycheck is that we spend more than we make on stuff we don’t need."
Bach then runs some math and assumes that a latte costs $5 (while at the time the typical Starbucks drink order was $2 - $2½) and that the 23-year-old person in question could get an 11% annualized return on saved/invested money. With these assumptions Bach concluded that the person would have more than $2M by age 65.

There are several problems with this analysis:
  • The math doesn't work. Using these assumptions our 23-year old has "only" around $1.5M saved up by age 65.

  • The average price of a latte at Starbucks in 2000 was between $2 and $2.50. If we use $2 instead of $5 then our 23-year-old has saved only $580,000. If $2.50 then $730,000.

  • The long term return of the US stock market (S&P 500 or equivalent) has been around 10% in nominal terms. Using 10% rather than 11% gets us a final saved value of $430,000 and $540,000.

  • Inflation doesn't make one rich and 3 percentage points of the 10% annualized return are due to inflation. If we calculate the REAL saving rather than nominal we get between $180,000 and $225,000. $200,000 is a lot of money compared to nothing, but also only 10% of $2M.

  • And Bach couldn't know it, but the S&P 500 annualized return from Jan-2000 to Jun-2022 worked out to be 6.5% nominal (including re-invested dividends) rather than 10% or 11%. Adjusting for inflation and the annualized return was 4%. Assuming saving the price of a $2.50 latte per day for 42 years and a 4% stock market return and our 23-year-old has saved ... $100,000 in real terms. Not $2M.
In other words, to actually plan on having around $2M in real terms upon retirement our 23-year-old need to save and invest around $20 per day rather than $2 per day assuming historic stock market returns. $20×365 is around $7,000/year. The median US household income in 2000 was around $42,000/year. Median US personal income in 2000 was around $32,000/year.

If our young person saw only 4% real returns, as we have seen from 2000 - 2022, for the 42 years then she would need to save $20,000/year to have $2M at the end of 42 years.
17-July-2019 What Can Set Sand On Fire? On the chemical chlorine trifluoride:
"It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water — with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals — steel, copper, aluminium, etc. — because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes."

17-July-2019 Two Ways of Saying It Sports Illustrated:
"The NFL still very much has a diversity problem in its head-coaching ranks..."

Equivalent:
"The NFL still has too many white head coaches..."
The article mentioned that the NFL is down to four black head coaches (out of 32), down from nine after five were fired after the 2018 season. The five were:
  • Todd Bowles, NY Jets (14-34 for the last 3 seasons)
  • Hue Jackson, Cleveland (3-36 over 2½ seasons)
  • Vance Joseph, Denver (11-21 over 2 seasons)
  • Marvin Lewis, Cincinnati (19-28 for the last 3 seasons; much better before that)
  • Steve Wilks, Arizona (3-13 over 1 season)
17-July-2019 More Wisdom From the Interwebs A blog comment exchange:
First comment: Is the fatness of a pig more or less green than the designated hitter rule?

Reply:Purple. Because aliens don't wear hats
14-July-2019 Anaxandridas II and Henry VIII One of the advantages of a hereditary monarchy is that it "solves" the succession question without having a civil war after each king dies. Things don't always go according to plan, of course, but often they do.

Still, the entire scheme breaks down when the king can't seem to produce an heir!

This situation has occurred many times in history, but a pair that I find interesting are Henry VIII of England and Anaxandridas II of Sparta.

In both cases, the queen was failing to produce an heir and in both cases this was a very clear problem. For Henry VIII, the choice seems to have boiled down to:
  1. Recognize as heir Henry FitzRoy, a bastard son by another woman.
  2. Hope for a grandson by his daughter Mary before he died. The grandson would be king.
  3. Trade his current wife, Catherine, for a new one that (hopefully) would provide him with an heir.
Henry eventually went with option (3), and when the Pope would not agree, Henry split with the Roman Catholic church and created the Church of England.

In Sparta, 2000 years earlier, the Agiad king has a similar problem, but with fewer options: no known (to history, at least) bastard sons and no known (again, to history) daughters. The Spartan ephors tried to convince king Anaxandridas II to divorce his wife and take another. The king refused because he loved his wife and didn't blame her for the lack of an heir. The ephors then suggested that the king could take a second wife without divorcing the first. The king did this, the second wife produced an heir* and the problem was solved.

English history might have been quite different if Henry VIII had been permitted to take a second wife without divorcing Catherine.
(*) The first wife then produced a spare heir, too! And then two more! One of them grew up to be king Leonidas I, the Spartan king who died at the battle of Thermopyle.
9-Jul-2019 Probably, Maybe and Likely Business Insider had an interesting article from 2017 on how people interpret words and phrases such as "likely," "better than even," and "highly unlikely."

One chart from the article is:
Probably, maybe, likely
The spreads of probabilities for each word are interesting.

The outliers can be even more interesting, including the individuals who considered "likely" to mean less than a 50% chance and the individuals (maybe the same ones) who considered probably to mean less than a 50% chance.
6-Jul-2019 Grenfell Tower Fire Two Years Later Two years ago a fire broke out in the Grenfell Tower apartment complex in London, England. 72 people died and in the aftermath it became clear that there were many known safety issues at the tower, including the use of extra-flamable aluminium cladding for building insulation and no sprinklers. Many other apartment buildings shared the insulation, lack of sprinklers and other safety issues.

Eventually it was announced that (some) money had been allocated to replace the extra-flamable cladding in other (non-burned) buildings. But ...
[in May, 2019] Peter Mason, the chair of the Barking Reach residents' association, contacted the builder Bellway Homes, requesting an investigation into the fire risk at his block of flats, following a BBC Watchdog report that revealed fire safety problems at two other Bellway developments. The company reassured him there was nothing to worry about. The wooden cladding had been treated so that it would take 30 minutes before a fire could take hold. "We understand that these news articles are highly alarming for all residents of new homes," the company responded. "And I hope that the above statement has allayed any fears you may have over the safety and construction of your Bellway home."

On Sunday the cladding at De Pass Gardens, part of the Barking Reach development, caught fire in 70 seconds and soon consumed the building.
Still working on this ...
2-July-2019 Wisdom of 4 Year Olds From a 4-year old, as reported by her Pakistani mom co-worker:
I'm not dirty, mommy. I'm just brown!
1-July-2019 Conversation At Work
Co-worker: I have an idea! Let's take a walk and discuss it!

Me (to other co-workers): This is <co-worker's name's> equivalent to 'Hold my beer and watch this.'
15-June-2019 Dante's 7th Level of Hell Dante's 7th level of Hell was reserved for those who commit sins of violence. Dante mentions three rings:
  • Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire for violence against neighbors
  • The suicide forest for violence against self
  • A Plain of Burning Sand for violence against God
It is clear that there is a 4th ring that Dante left unmentioned. This is the ring for violence against grammar. It contains people who split infinitives, end sentences with prepositions, fail to arrange for subject and verb to agree, and people, such as Neil Paine, who write phrases such as this:
"We just witnessed two of the most unique ..."

10-June-2019 60th in Queens I just discovered that someone responsible for laying out streets in Queens, New York doesn't understand semantic distance applied to street names:

Queens street madness
  • 60th Avenue
  • 60th Court
  • 60th Drive
  • 60th Lane
  • 60th Place
  • 60th Road
  • 60th Street
7-June-2019 Dallas Keuchel's Contract Dallas Keuchel, free agent MLB starting pitcher, finally signed a contract.

He signed a 1-year, $13M deal (essentially a 1-year ~$20M deal pro-rated to the rest of the season) with the Atlanta Braves. On April 7th, we got this:
Rosenthal cites a source that believes Keuchel is looking for a one-year deal above the $17.9 million qualifying offer he rejected from the Astros last fall, though he’s still open to a long-term contract at lower terms than the original $150-200 million deal he was seeking over a six- or seven-year span.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/dallas-keuchel%E2%80%99s-asking-price-may-be-dropping/ar-BBVHJrr
In the last three seasons, Dallas had the following stats (provided by Baseball Reference):

YearIP Hits ER BB SO ERA WHIP WAR
2016168 168 85 48 144 4.55 1.286 0.4
2017145⅔ 116 47 47 125 2.90 1.119 4.2
2018204⅔ 211 85 58 153 3.74 1.314 2.6

Going by Wins Above Replacement (WAR), Dallas ranked 26th of all MLB pitchers in 2018, 9th in 2017 (when he was injured ... he most likely would have ranked higher if he was not hurt), and 148th in 2016.

Dallas is 31, so his best seasons are likely behind him. $150M for six years (so $25M per year) seems ... high?
11-October-2019:
Dallas pitched a total of 19 regular season games for the Atlanta Braves. His stats looked like this:

YearIP Hits ER BB SO ERA WHIP WAR
2019112⅔ 115 47 39 91 3.75 1.367 2.1

If we assume he could have stayed healthy through a full 2019 (not a forgone conclusion) season and scale his 19 starts up to 34 (roughly a full season), then his line looks something like this:

YearIP Hits ER BB SO ERA WHIP WAR
2019 (full)200 200 83 70 162 3.75 1.367 3.7

Dallas also pitched in two games for a total of 8 innings in the post-season. His ERA for those innings was 4.5.

With a 3.7 WAR Dallas would have ranked about 25th among MLB pitchers. The players around him (with age in 2020 season) and their remaining contracts are:

WARPlayerAgeContractYears
3.9Kyle Hendricks 30 $55.5M 4 $14.5 team option for 5th year
3.7Anibal Sanchez 36 $13.0M 1 $12M team option for 2nd year
3.7Aaron Nola 27 $40.5M 3 $12.5M team option for 4th year
3.7Dallas Keuchel 32 Free agent
3.6Jake Odorizzi 30 Free agent
3.5Clayton Kershaw 32 $62.0M 2

I'm thinking that Dallas is probably looking at 3 years and $45M for his next contract. It will be interesting to see what teams need for pitching, but there are also a number of good pitchers available as free agents heading into the 2020 season (Gerrit Cole, Steve Strasburgh, Madison Bumgarner, Aroldis Chapman, Hyun-Jin Ryu, Zack Wheeler, Jake Odorizzi ...).

22-December-2019:
It appears that Dallas Keuchel has signed a 3-year, $55.5 million dollar contract with the Chicago White Sox.

28-May-2022:
It looks like Dallas Keuchel is going to be released. His three seasons look like this:

YearERAWAR
20201.992.1 Covid shortened season
20215.280.0
20207.88-1.1 Eight games

The $55.5 million dollar contract (really ~$43M because of the covid shortened season) didn't work out for the White Sox. 1.0 WAR for $43M is a disappointment.
18-May-2019 We Could Hire A Monkey To Do That! Monkey's are surprisingly expensive, so the fact that a monkey could be hired to "do that" doesn't tell us much. The folks at Pirates for Parties provide a price:
We provide Monkeys for any Occasion
You can no longer rent chimpanzees, or use a trained chimp for your film or video production or live event. Rent a Monkey! Monkey Rental minimum cost is $1500 in CA and $1500 in NY and NJ
It is difficult to get a clear cost to sponsor a PhD graduate student for one year and the costs probably vary based on institution and program, but a reasonable starting point might be NSF fellowships. NSF fellows "benefit from a three-year annual stipend of $34,000 along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees (paid to the institution)..." Since universities tend to not charge graduate students tuition (though the graduate student may need to teach a class), we can put the cost of a grad student at roughly $50,000 per year if funded by a fellowship.

Another way to approach funding is to consider what a corporation would pay if it wanted to sponsor a graduate student for one year at $34,000. The "F&A" overhead would take about 60% of any sponsorship money. To get $34,000 to the graduate student would thus cost $34,000 × 1/(1.0 - 0.6) = $84,000. The monkey has overhead, too, so these numbers are sorta comparable.

We can convert the monkey's daily rate to a yearly rate by multiplying by 250 working days per year. Or we can convert to a 9-month school year rate by multiplying by about 180.

Grad Student:$50,000/year — $84,000/year
Monkey: $270,000/year — $375,000/year

One can imagine getting a better rate on the monkey if one was willing to hire it for a nine months or a full year, so maybe the monkey is equivalent to between three and six grad students depending on the length of time and whether most of the money for the grad student gets to the grad student or is siphoned off by the university.

The conclusion is obvious: Just because you can hire a monkey to do something does not mean that you should. Instead, hire a graduate student.
18-May-2019 Luxury Ice Cubes Last year I discovered Raw Water, OEM Water, and Single Source Water. Now I have discovered Luxury Ice Cubes.
In 2007, during a business school lecture at UCLA, Roberto Sequeira had a revelation. What if I could design the perfect business? he asked himself, something niche, high-margin, scalable. He ran through a rolodex of potential consumer items -- watches, food, clothing -- before arriving at his moment of clarity: he’d start an ice cube company. But not just any ice cube company -- one that sold its wares at $8 a piece. Today his brainchild, Gläce Luxury Ice, caters posh events at the Playboy Mansion and L.A. Fashion Week; for the mere price of $325, 50 Gläce cubes are all yours -- complete with an "elegant" resealable bag.

The company web site is here now here.
15-May-2019 Resource Allocation A conversation I had today:
Co-Worker: "I have to carefully allocate my scarce resources."

Me: "Oh. Like what? Hope?"
13-May-2019 As Seen on the Interwebs
A feel good story with wood chippers!
Oct-2022:
Not a feel good story.

Jesus Contreras Benitez fell into a wood chipper in Menlo Park and died. One of the local news outlets had this useful piece of information: "This tragic incident made national news as, on average, only three to five people are killed by wood chippers per year.""
2-May-2019 2000 Saab Compared to 2017 Civic Technological progress is expected in computers, but appears in other products too. I purchased a 4-door Saab 93 hatchback in 2000 and in 2017 replaced it with a 4-door 2017 Honda Civic Hatchback. The Saab was a niche product and the Civic is much more mainstream, so comparing prices has an extra wrinkle. Still, comparing my two cars finds this:

2000 Saab 9-3 2017 Honda Civic
Body Style Hatchback Hatchback
Doors 4+1 4+1
Height 56.8" 56.5"
Width 67.4" 70.8"
Length 182.3" 177.9"
Wheel Base 102.6" 106.3"
Curb Weight 3,160 lbs 2,940 lbs
Transmission Automatic Automatic
Engine 2.0L turbo 1.5L turbo
Horsepower 185 hp @ 5000 RPM 174 hp @ 6000 RPM
Combined MPG 22 34
0-60 6.7 sec 6.9 sec
2000 Price $26,000
2017 Price $37,000 $22,000

Both prices are my price, except that I removed $4,000 from the actual $30,000 price of the Saab to account for a moon roof and heated seats, neither of which I cared about, but which came with the car. The Saab handles better than the Civic (though the way I drive it doesn't matter). But the Civic is basically equivalent to a 2000 Saab 93 hatchback, except it costs only 90% the inflation unadjusted price, requires ⅔ the gasoline and is (probably) more reliable.
  • https://www.edmunds.com/saab/9-3/2000/features-specs/
  • https://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2017/hatchback/features-specs/
18-Apr-2019 Notre Dame's Four Horsemen In 1924, the Notre Dame football backfield was given a nickname by sports writer Grantland Rice. He called them the Four Horsemen:
Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore their names are Death, Destruction, Pestilence, and Famine. But those are aliases. Their real names are: Stuhldreher, Crowley, Miller and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds this afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down upon the bewildering panorama spread out upon the green plain below.
To illustrate how football has changed between 1924 and today we can consider the physiques of these four dominant football players:

Harry Stuhldreher Quarterback ~5' 7" ~151 lbs
Don Miller Halfback ~5' 11" ~160 lbs
Jim Crowley Halfback ~5' 11" ~160 lbs
Elmer Layden Fullback ~5' 11" ~160 lbs

The 2018 Notre Dame quarterback with the most pass attempts and top-3 running backs with the most carries are:

Ian Book Quarterback 6' 0" 203 lbs
Dexter Williams Running back 5' 11" 215 lbs
Tony Jones, Jr. Running back 5' 11" 220 lbs
Jafar Armstrong Running back 6' 1" 218 lbs

The weight of the individual offensive backs has increase by over 50 pounds each!

The sizes of the Four Horsemen were not unusual for the time, either. Red Grange was 5' 11" and weighed 175 lbs.
9-Apr-2019 Things Change Buffalo: 1900
Every city has its wealthy, but in 1901, Buffalo's industries were a recipe for greatness, and the city's millionaires and its mansions rivaled New York City.

Buffalo was the 8th largest city in the country and had 60 millionaires, more per capita than any other American city, and Delaware Avenue became where the wealthy settled.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/buffalo/explore-ny/2016/05/18/gilded-age-of-buffalo
Argentina: 1900
From 1880 to 1930, under a modern constitution and a national unity government, Argentina became one of the world’s wealthiest nations. At the beginning of the 20th century, Argentina was the seventh richest country on earth and "As rich as an Argentine" became a byword.

http://www.cobizmag.com/Articles/The-Economist-An-economic-lesson-from-Argentina/
Venezuela: 1950
By 1950, as the rest of the world was struggling to recover from World War II, Venezuela had the fourth-richest GDP per capita on Earth. The country was 2x richer than Chile, 4x richer than Japan, and 12x richer than China!

http://money.visualcapitalist.com/richer-poorer-venezuela-economic-tragedy/
Detroit: 1960
In 1960, the richest per capita city in America, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, was Detroit.

https://mic.com/articles/45563/detroit-bankrupt-to-see-detroit-s-decline-look-at-40-years-of-federal-policy
5-Apr-2019 The Oppressed Must Unionize
By comparison, Activision Blizzard’s chief executive, Bobby Kotick, made $28.6 million in 2017, a package that included cash, stock and other compensation. That was 306 times the median Activision Blizzard employee’s salary.
So ... ½ of Activision Blizzard's employees make more than $93,000/year.
There’s only one way for these workers to push back against the way they’re exploited while franchises like Call of Duty churn out money for those at the very top: unionization.
I'm not sure I'd lead into a call for unionization with the claim that the median employee is being exploited by only making $93K/year. Of course, maybe the NYT readership properly views this as poverty???
27-Mar-2019 Not "The Onion" From InsideHigherEd.com: Repeated Scandals Stymie USC's Efforts To Improve Its Image.

Repeated Scandals Stymie USC's Efforts To Improve Its Image
22-Mar-2019 Paranormal Teen Romance* is on the Way Out "Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend" is a real book title. Written by Alan Cumyn, a real author. Published by Simon and Schuster, a real publisher.

(*) This used to be a real section at Barnes and Noble stores. The book cases had a sign and everything!
15-Mar-2019 Because Texas
[Terry] Long was later charged with fraud at a freshwater fishing tournament, which is a third-degree felony in Texas, according to the department.
7-Mar-2019 Atlas Shrugged My wife is reading Atlas Shrugged right now because she is going through the PBS Great American Read list. She found this "review" of the book:
I think Francisco D'Aconia is absolutely a dream boat. This book's like blah blah blah engineering, blah blah blah John Galt, blah blah blah no altruistic act, blah bla- HE-llo, Francisco D'Aconia, you growl and a half. Also, there's a pirate. So, what's everyone complaining about?

<...Many more words...>

Anyway, read, discuss, agree, disagree. I'll be making up some "Team John," "Team Hank," "Team Francisco" t-shirts later. I hear in the sequel there are werewolves.
1-Mar-2019 Nob Hill Being Helpful Nob Hill is helpfully identifying the yummy breakfast cereals: Higher In Added Sugar 28-Feb-2019 Fun and Educational Comment from my child:
This will be fun! And educational!

<... pause ...>

Mostly educational.
1-Feb-2019 Morning at Clocktower Coffee I saw this at Clocktower Coffee on the way to work: Pretty Sunrise Picture 28-Jan-2019 Hedge Fund Returns
Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Jim Simons’ Renaissance Technologies beat their rivals in a tough year for hedge funds in 2018, making a combined $13 billion for their investors.

The profits accounted for more than half the money generated by the top 20 managers last year, according to estimates by LCH Investments NV, a fund of hedge funds. Firms outside that top group lost more than $64 billion as stock declines and volatility took their toll.
16-Jan-2019 Wisdom From the Interwebs
Before you get a man bun, ask yourself:

       "Am I Toshirô Mifune?"

If the answer is "no", don't.
9-Jan-2019 Science The amazing things "scientists" expect us to believe!

From SlateStarCodex:
In 1870, flat-earther Samuel Rowbotham performed a series of experiments to show the Earth could not be a globe. In the most famous, he placed several flags miles apart along a perfectly straight canal. Then he looked through a telescope and was able to see all of them in a row, even though the furthest should have been hidden by the Earth’s curvature. Having done so, he concluded the Earth was flat, and the spherical-earth paradigm debunked. Alfred Wallace (more famous for pre-empting Darwin on evolution) took up the challenge, and showed that the bending of light rays by atmospheric refraction explained Rowbotham’s result. It turns out that light rays curve downward at a rate equal to the curvature of the Earth's surface!
Emphasis added be me. Riiiggghhhttt ...
8-Jan-2019 The NCAA Football Season is Over We have the final AP NCAA Football poll of the year. The SEC did well. In the top 12 by conference we have the following counts:
ACC 1 (Clemson, #1)
Big 10 1 (Ohio St., #3)
Big 12 2 (Oklahoma, #4; Texas, #9)
Pac 12 1 (Washington St., #10)
SEC 5 (#2, #6, #7, #8, #12)
Independent 1 (Notre Dame, #5)
Other 1 (UCF, #11)

So, five of the top 12, with only one other conference having as many as two. Also, six in the top 16.

Now we have the entire offseason for the "SEC is overrated" discussions ...
29-Dec-2018 This Year's Cheez-It Bowl I am generally in favor of few(er) college football bowl games. I think 12 would be a nice number. And when I become benevolent dictator for life I will restrict the count to 12 as well as require teams to have at least eight wins to play in one.

But ...

I'm thinking that we may want to keep the Cheez-It Bowl alive as one of the 12. We could try to make this bowl game the most awful NCAA football game of the season. This year's bowl game is an inspiration.
  • The winning quarterback passed for 27 yards and four interceptions. Two of those interceptions were on illegal throws.
  • That QB — TCU's Grayson Muehlstein — was his team's third-stringer, and when he briefly exited, he was replaced by Justin Rogers, who, well:
    [Twitter] TCU is now playing a QB who apparently "doesn't have full use of one of his feet" (+)
  • Muehlstein is one of two senior QBs at Power 5 schools who stayed with their team throughout their college career despite never starting a game. The other is Cal's Chase Forrest, who went 5-for-14 with two interceptions last night.
  • Cal's Jaylinn Hawkins had three interceptions. No TCU player caught more than two passes.
  • The game featured 15 punts.
  • Cal's overtime drive ended after three plays and three yards, when Chase Forrest threw a hideous interception. Jawuan Johnson almost returned it the length of the field before getting tackled by an offensive lineman. However, a TCU official tripped over a first-down marker during the return, so they had to start their drive at the 40.
(+) The TCU 4th string quarterback has been injured all year, recovering from a High School knee injury. He apparently is dealing with a "drop foot condition", which according to the Mayo Clinic is "a general term for difficulty lifting the front part of the foot. If you have foot drop, the front of your foot might drag on the ground when you walk."

Summary list lifted from here: https://deadspin.com/a-non-exhaustive-list-of-batshit-stuff-that-happened-du-1831342193
29-Dec-2018 What Could Be the Common Link? So, three Clemson football players have failed a drug test ...

The school officials are mystified.
"Clemson officials spent much of the past few days searching for a reason behind the failed tests. They spoke with athletic department nutritionists, its executive chef and sports medicine officials to try and find a link between the three players. "
And I'm thinking, "Hmmm ... what could be the link between these three guys? Maybe that they are ALL ON THE FOOTBALL TEAM???????"
4-Dec-2018 The Bahamas Bowl is Played ... in the Bahamas I did not realize the the Bahamas Bowl was actually played in the Bahamas.

USA Today had a writeup after the last one. It sounds absolutely amazing!
So we took a ship down to the Bahamas to see Ohio play UAB, and it has been nothing short of amazing (and honestly, questionable). Here’s a short list of things we’ve done here at the game so far:
  • Brought beer right in to the stadium. The locals at the gate didn't even ask to check tickets. One of them took a sip of my beer.
  • We walked all the way around the stadium, until we reached a fenced off area. A Royal Bahamas Defense Force guard said we should check behind the fence, because he doesn't know what’s back there. Upon walking past the fence, we ended up in the Ohio locker room. No questions asked.
  • People are constantly walking on the athletic track around the field and chugging beer. The security forces down there just keep laughing and high fiving everyone. One of the soldiers keeps hugging random fans.
  • There’s a native family in front of me literally braiding each other's hair. They told me they have no clue about how football works. They just want to have a good time. One of them offered to braid my hair. My hair is 3 inches long.
  • They were doing a T-Shirt toss, and one of the Bahamian families here straight up jumped three rows down onto a group of fans just to grab a shirt. They ended up getting two.
  • A drunk fan just walked on to the sideline and high fived a player. He then high fived a Royal Bahamian Defense Force soldier when walking back. The soldier couldn’t stop laughing.
  • There's like 20 entrances to this stadium, and only like 10 of them are guarded. Literally anyone could walk in here.
  • They have one working scoreboard, and instead of showing the clock, it's the ESPN feed so you can barely see the score and clock on the bottom right corner.
  • Whoever’s in charge of music can't decide the volume. He tried playing Believer and adjusted the volume up and down around 4 times before giving up. There hasn't been any music since.
For these reasons, I urge that the playoff committee consider hosting the national championship here. It would be a terrible idea, but everyone would have a great time. I know the locals are. ... I love this place.
and:
The entertainment on the outskirts of the stadium right next to concessions includes ARCHERY. I saw a child as small as 4 getting help aiming an actual bow and arrow at a target 20 ft away
6-Dec-2018 A Truth that Requires No Context
As with most phrases, it sounds better in French.
1-Dec-2018 Golden Gate Fields I saw this rainbow at Golden Gate Fields in between watching the ponies: Pretty Rainbow Picture 9-Nov-2018 Ezra Pound From the Wikipedia article on Ezra Pound:
The Pounds were unhappy in Paris; Dorothy complained about the winters and Ezra's health was poor. At one dinner, a guest randomly tried to stab him ...
30-Oct-2018 A "Harvard" Education for $54,000 I have just discovered the Bachelor of Liberal Arts (BLA) in Extension Studies from Harvard.

You don't have to be admitted to Harvard to take these classes or to get this degree. Instead, you sign up and take two or three required classes and do well in them (have a 'B' average or better). If you do, then you are admitted to the program and take four years worth of classes, though usually spread out over more than four years, to get your degree. This is just like a "real" degree. Because it is a real degree.

The classes "are taught by faculty who are Harvard scholars, industry experts, leading researchers, entrepreneurs — and instructors dedicated to their students." This isn't quite the Harvard undergraduate experience ... the classes are mostly taught not by Harvard full professors, but by Harvard instructors, adjuncts (though adjuncts from industry rather than underpaid full-time adjuncts) and sometimes by professors from other higher education institutions.

To illustrate, the "Linear Algebra and Real Analysis II" class taught in the Spring 2019 was taught by Paul G. Bamberg, a Harvard Senior Lecturer on Mathematics. Paul has taught "real" Harvard students, too!

One example of a class being taught by a full non-Harvard professor is that Nikolas Gvosdev, DPhil Oxford and full professor at the Naval War College taught a history course for the Spring 2019 session.

Many of the differences are because the target audience is working grown-up adults doing this part time on weekends and in the evening rather than 18-22 year olds going to school full time. Because of this difference in audience a number of the classes CAN be taken on-line and the program tends toward evening classes.

The degree does require a certain number of classes taken on the Harvard campus.

You have access to (some? most of?) the Harvard libraries.

There are no dormitory options.

The $54,000 is total, not per year.
30-Oct-2018 Grammar This is why we (are supposed to) have editors:
A former nurse has admitted to killing 100 patients on the first day of his trial in the biggest serial killing case in Germany's post-war history.
Dangerous trial ...
23-Oct-2018 The Onion vs Reuters One of these headlines is from The Onion and one is from Reuters: 9-Oct-2018 Some Words of Wisdom I was recently at an engineering conference held by my employer. The CTO passed on this wisdom:
Product ramp is more important to Apple than their suppliers. [If the ramp goes poorly] the suppliers can just declare bankruptcy. Apple might lose tens of billions of dollars in market cap.
4-Oct-2018 Picking Your First Pitcher of the Game The Oakland A's used an "opener" in their one-game win-or-go-home wildcard game against the Yankees. It did not work well. Also, it is a big puzzling what the Oakland A's were thinking. The three Yankee batters that the opener is guaranteed to face are:
  • McCutchen (bats right)
  • Judge (bats right)
  • Hicks (bats switch)
If you don't get those three out, then you face Stanton (bats right). So ... our choices for opener:

Role Name ERA WHIP
RP Shawn Kelley 2.16 0.780
RP J.B. Wendelken 0.54 0.780
CL Blake Treinen 0.78 0.834
RP Yusmeiro Petit 3.00 1.011
RP Lou Trivino 2.92 1.135
RP Emilio Pagan 4.35 1.194
RP Ryan Buchter 2.75 1.195
RP Jeurys Familia 3.45 1.213
SP Edwin Jackson 3.33 1.217
RP Liam Hendriks 4.13 1.458
RP Fernando Rodney 3.92 1.597

The As manager chose to go with right handed pitcher Liam Hendriks. This might not be as stupid as it seems, because Liam has pitched in 24 games and only allowed runs in 5 of them ... so an 80% chance that he gets through the first inning?

Except that he is a middle reliever, so he should have benefited at least a bit from left-righty splits and probably hasn't faced the best batters of the opposing teams (at least not in games that mattered).

So it WAS probably as stupid as it appeared.

The As have Yusmeiro Petit, with more innings (so a better sense of how good he really is) and who is quite experienced so you REALLY know what you're getting. He's played in high pressure games before, so that won't phase him. And he's got a much better ERA and WHIP. You'd still have your closer available for later.

In any event, two batters into the game Liam Hendriks had given up a walk and a home run and the Yankees led 2-0.

One really wonders what the As manager was thinking ...
30-Sep-2018 TV Commercials for Supreme Court Nominees? I just saw a TV commercial supporting Kavanaugh.

Not taking a position (though I have one), but wondering procedurally ... at whom is this targeted and how is it supposed to help?
30-Sep-2018 Trivia There exists a US Supreme Court case titled:

Lum v. Rice
7-Sep-2018 Pluto IS a Planet! The struggle continues!

Pluto should be reclassified as a planet, experts say
30-Aug-2018 The Working Class has Changed Some folks in San Francisco have proposed banning corporate cafeterias (in San Francisco).

I don't know if the proposal is still alive or not, but ...

The "workers" eating together at work was part of the glorious socialist revolution that Nikolai Chernyshevsky was pushing in his dreadful 1863 novel "What is to be Done?" I know this because my son and I have just finished reading it (in translation, obviously).

As with your typical Ayn Rand novel, there is a lot of time spent with various characters lecturing each other (actually, there is more of that in this book ... both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" are thrilling action/adventure stories compared to "What is to be Done?").

So, at one point one of our minor characters is explaining the economic advantages of the workers sewing collective that she has started.
"Just as it is with rent, so it is with the table. For instance, the dinner which I told you about cost five rubles and fifty kopeks, or five rubles and seventy-five kopeks, with bread, but without tea and coffee. At the table were thirty-seven people besides me and Viera Pavlovna. Of course several children were included in that number. Five rubles and seventy-five kopeks for thirty-seven people makes less than sixteen kopeks apiece, less than five rubles a month. And Viera Pavlovna says that if a person dines by himself, he can have scarcely anything for this money except bread and such wretched stuff as you find at small stores. At a restaurant, a dinner like this, only not so nicely served, would cost forty kopeks, according to Viera Pavlovna. For thirty kopeks it would be much worse. This difference can be appreciated; a restaurant keeper, while preparing a dinner for twenty people or less, must support himself on this money, must have a house, and have a servant. But here these extra expenses are entirely done away with, or are greatly diminished..."
Now ... Google providing free/subsidized food for its workers is not the same thing as the women in a sewing collective saving money by buying food in bulk and eating it at the sewing collective (vs eating alone at home or going to a restaurant). And Googlers are not the same as the oppressed young women banding together to form a sewing collective rather than working for an employer.

But, still ... pushing up the cost of food to benefit the restaurant owners? In 1863 Russia, this would have made you a reactionary and very much NOT a friend of the people!
"What is to be Done?" is dreadful, but actually interesting because of history. It appears that:
  • The book was VERY popular when published and for a long time afterwards. It seems to have been one of the emotional pushes towards the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin, among others, loved the book.
  • Because it was so widely read in Russia, scholars think that Ayn Rand *must* have been familiar with it. There are some stylistic similarities (the characters lecturing each other, the characters not behaving like human beings) and some philosophical similarities (our heroes keep insisting that they are all acting in their own best interests), which is amusing because one is pushing socialism and one is ... not.
  • The book was both widely known and bad enough that major Russian literary figures felt a need to respond to the book.
But, man is the writing not very good.
10-Aug-2018 Russia is Mexico With Nukes Using first Google result for each:

Russia: $1.28T GDP, 144M people
Mexico: $1.05T GDP, 112M people
USA: $18.57T GDP, 320M people

Russia is roughly Mexico with nukes and a space program.

In spite of the perception of Mexico as "poor" and Russia as "developed," both have GDPs of around $9,000 per capita. Which is somewhere around the median for Earth in 2018 and is quite good by historical standards.

Both countries have rich people, and both countries have a large metropolis where with money one can enjoy a 1st world standard of living.

And both countries have lots of poor people, too.

Mexico is richer than "we" sometimes think, but Russia is poorer.

Russia would not have a space program today if it hadn't inherited it from the larger Soviet Union. And I don't think that Russia can afford to keep their space program current because they can't draw on the resources of the Soviet Union (and Warsaw Pact) to do it.
6-Aug-2018 Non-Commensurate Economies Not fact checked, but seems true:
"One striking fact: of the 500 largest publicly traded companies by value, 16% of value is classified in healthcare (up from 4% in 1984); that excludes almost every hospital and physician's office ..."
I'm sure that it was less than 4% in, say, 1930.

Meanwhile the technology/IT industy(s) must have been around 0% in 1930.

And in 1930, it seems that about 25% of the population was working on farms! Maybe 1% today?

So ... how to compare two economies when they aren't a question of more or less, but wildly different qualitatively????

This is feeding into my "you just can't compare these things!" hypothesis for GDP/capita and standard of living.

You *can* compare the 'dollar equivalent' amounts, but since you can't purchase penicillin in 1930 and the number of bookstores was "small" ... but personal servants were a thing ... ??? But today we have MerryMaids and Uber instead of housekeepers and drivers. How to compare?

US 1940 vs Russia/Mexico today seem to have similar (or even worse!) problems.

I think this may be a case of an "N" dimensional space where we can agree on the distance from the origin, but the various axes are so dis-similar that even if we can normalize with dollars, it just doesn't mean very much.

Odd.
28-Jun-2018 Words I Never Expected to See in Print
"'Italy is likely to have the best data we have,' Wachter said."
28-Jun-2018 Comment by My Child about My Child
"You've raised a good child."
8-May-2018 Pluto IS a Planet! The struggle continues!

At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world’s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world’s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun — thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.

Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined "planet" in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has "cleared its zone," or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what's worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define "planet" in terms of the other objects that are — or are not — orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions. For example, it would mean that Earth was not a planet for its first 500 million years of history, because it orbited among a swarm of debris until that time, and also that if you took Earth today and moved it somewhere else, say out to the asteroid belt, it would cease being a planet.

To add insult to injury, they amended their convoluted definition with the vindictive and linguistically paradoxical statement that "a dwarf planet is not a planet." This seemingly served no purpose but to satisfy those motivated by a desire — for whatever reason — to ensure that Pluto was "demoted" by the new definition.

By and large, astronomers ignore the new definition of “planet” every time they discuss all of the exciting discoveries of planets orbiting other stars. And those of us who actually study planets for a living also discuss dwarf planets without adding an asterisk. But it gets old having to address the misconceptions among the public who think that because Pluto was "demoted" (not exactly a neutral term) that it must be more like a lumpy little asteroid than the complex and vibrant planet it is. It is this confusion among students and the public — fostered by journalists and textbook authors who mistakenly accepted the authority of the IAU as the final word — that makes this worth addressing.
7-Apr-2018 Explosives Engineering
Missouri S&T continues its long tradition as a leading academic institution in training and educating the world's experts in explosives engineering. Current offerings include Graduate and Undergraduate explosives certificates, an explosives engineering minor, an Explosives Engineering MS and now a PhD in Explosives Engineering.

Even better, Missouri S&T offers an undergraduate philosophy degree (which is a bachelor's of science, not a bachelor of arts!). This creates the possibility that someone could graduate with a degree in philosophy and a minor in explosives engineering!
19-Feb-2018 Is Economics a STEM Subject? "Is Econ STEM?"

How reproducible are the results?

How well do model predictions match the real world?
19-Feb-2018 Ice Dancing and Pairs Skating A winning re-tweet from Megan McArdle:
"This is the FINAL time I will explain the difference between ice dance and pairs. Ice dancers have wider, U-shaped snouts, while pair skater snouts are more pointed and V-shaped. Pair skaters prefer saltwater habitats, while ice dancers inhabit freshwater marshes and lakes."
8-Feb-2018 Valuable Life Lesson Today's useful life lesson quote ...
"A basic rule of life is to avoid being a guinea pig in other people’s experiments."
29-Jan-2018 Library Economics in a Download Age So, the Mountain View public library is signed up with a number (four, I think) of eBook "loaning" services. I've downloaded the app for one of them (Hoopla), configured it with my library card info (after checking that this was all supposed to be legit) and have even "borrowed" some eBooks.

Things work pretty much as one might expect. You check the book out for three weeks (one week for CDs, a few days for movies) and they get automagically returned at the end of the checkout period (so no late fees).

Forcing something that isn't actually resource limited (like the ability to copy bits) into a framework where you get paid because of scarcity (physical books can't be copied for $0, so if lots of people want a book then you'll sell lots of copies ...) can lead to interesting secondary effects.

In this case, one of the secondary effects is that you can only check out four books per month.

I was wondering about the underlying economics here and did some digging around. It seems that the way that Hoopla gets paid for running things like the servers and paying the authors is that every book checkout costs the Mountain View library something like $1 to $1.50. Probably different numbers for albums and movies.

Which explains why there is a limit.

If people could check out as many books per month as they wanted, the library budget would get busted.

But ... and this is the point ...

The original point to a library was that "we" could collectively purchase a resource and then share it. $20 for a book that would be read over time by 50 people would work out to less than fifty cents per read. One can, if one is a libertarian, argue that this sort of collective action doesn't require a government ... private lending libraries can do the job just as well (and Blockbuster for videos would be a case in point ...). But the idea that the community members would have access to more books than each could individually acquire makes a lot of sense.

With Ebooks in general, and Hoopla in particular, this assumption seems to no longer hold.

There is no longer any collective action advantage to renting digital items through the library versus renting them ourselves. With physical VHS tapes (and DVDs) there still was an advantage compared to Blockbuster ... the price was capped. But the new model is essentially that the library uses part of its budget to pay Blockbuster to rent the patrons digital items.

So ... MV residents pay taxes. Some of those taxes go to the library. The library then pays for some of the residents' digital media rental. But there isn't really much value-add. We could just give every library patron coupons to use at Blockbuster. But this would make it clear that the library was no longer a "library," but instead a way to subsidize purchase of specific private goods.

In the limit, the library budget just becomes a way for MV taxpayers to subsidize some of the reading habit of the MV residents who read. Which seems like a very odd thing to decide that the government should subsidize.

Am I missing anything obvious?

If we just want to give money to poor people, we can already do that ...
20-Jan-2018 Blockchains Today's blockchain entry ...
A cryptoeconomic powered adult entertainment ecosystem built on the Ethereum network.
https://spankchain.com
12-Jan-2018 Job Titles I Did Not Know Existed A job title I did not know existed:
Unicef Menstrual Hygiene Ambassador
4-Jan-2018 Where Should We Play This Year's Rose Bowl? Texas! On December 29th, Big 10 champion Ohio St (11-2), defeated Pac-12 champion USC (also 11-2), in a traditional New Year's bowl game.

Unfortunately, the bowl game was the Cotton Bowl rather than the Rose Bowl. And the Cotton Bowl was played in Texas, as it typically is, rather than in Pasadena. The Rose Bowl, traditionally matching the winner of the Pac-12 with the winner of the Big-10, featured Oklahoma vs Georgia.

The desire for a single "national champion" is creating some strange games.
2-Jan-2018 Single Source Water It seems that 'single source' water is a thing. The nice folks at Starkey Water even put that on their label. I guess this is supposed to be like single malt whiskey?
A pure, single-source water rising from a 2.2 mile-deep geothermal spring in the mountains of Idaho. Refreshing and pure with a silky smooth taste.
2-Jan-2018 OEM Water OEM'd water is a thing!
Water Source One is a leading producer of PRIVATE LABELED BOTTLED WATER for a number of the largest retailers in the United States.
2-Jan-2018 Raw Water Gizmodo has an article on 'raw' water. In case you want authentic dysentery?
Raw Water Is Water For Rich Idiots

Per a report in the New York Times on Friday that manages to be unusually irritating even by the Times' rich-people-trendpiece standards, "raw water" is now somehow a thing on the West Coast and "other pockets around the country." In San Francisco, one brand of "unfiltered, unsterilized spring water" goes for $36.99 for a 2.5 gallon container, with refills going for $14.99 a pop.

"It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile," Rainbow Grocery shift manager Kevin Freeman told the Times. "Bottled water's controversial. We've curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm."

... one of the most enthusiastic backers of raw water is Doug Evans, the guy behind Juicero, a $399 machine that squeezed pre-filled bags of juice into cups.

A few years later from the New Yorker:
"Pickleball will save America,"" Kuhn told me, as I drank from a can of his personal brand of rainwater.
Can Pickleball Save America?
19-Dec-2017 Artisanal Financial Fraud Matt Levine:
It is hard to believe that anyone commits securities fraud anymore. Right now you can design an electronic token, say in big bold letters that the token is utterly useless, and raise $700 million selling it to people who "don't think it's fair reading into that language too tightly." Why bother to scam anyone?
One can purchase machine made clothing, but some people still like to make their own by hand.

One can purchase food at the local supermarket, but some people bake their own bread.

I would like to think of the folks running [traditional] financial scams in much the same way that I think of people pursuing old(er) technologies and art forms ... as a hobby. And we can appreciate this much like we can appreciate someone who sews clothing by hand (maybe for some event such as RenFair) even if it isn't our thing.
19-Nov-2017 The Internet Could Have Been Such a Good Thing From a Harold Bloom interview:
Interviewer: It’s disappointing because the internet could have been such a good thing. It could have been like an indestructible Library of Alexandria, but with porn.
31-Oct-2017 Insurance Economics For healthcare insurance (or any insurance, actually) to work, you want/need:
  1. A reasonably large pool so that a bit of bad luck doesn't sink you.
  2. No or low correlation between the folks in the pool, so one bad event (e.g. Spanish Flu) can't/won't happen.
  3. Accurate pricing for the individuals (statistically).
ObamaCare breaks (3). Which you CAN do if there is a way to force the folks who are being overcharged to play. But the ObamaCare penalties aren't sufficient to force onto the plans the folks being overcharged by a lot and we don't have nationalized health insurance which would prevent the overcharged folks from skipping.

Letting people sign up when sick with an expensive pre-existing condition but then not charging for it breaks (3), too.

SOMEONE has to pay when the old/sick/poor are being charged (on average) less than they consume in medical services. Increasing the pool won't help unless we increase the pool with people who are being overcharged.
24-Oct-2017 Opposing the Metric System I want to join, but only if I get a membership card:

Active Resistance to Metrication
and:
Wayback Machine (archive.org) Link
16-Oct-2017 Economics and Human Lives So the Grenfell Tower fire has resulted in upgrades across London that will cost about 400M pounds (or about $550M).

The US seems to set the value of a human life at a bit under $10M (this is for official purposes ... there is very little consistency here), while Australia and New Zealand run lower (half as much and maybe much less depending on the source).

Using Australia/New Zealend numbers, this suggests that the Brits are behaving as if the refurbs will save about 100 lives over time.

Alternately, fewer lives, but we score some deaths as worse than others.

I don't expect to ever get an answer, but I'm wondering what the money spent on this will NOT be spent on...

The most interesting thing to me is that the (western) values for life seem to be logically inconsistent.

Lets use $7M as a "value of a human life". The FDA seems to use a number around there.

Meanwhile, median US household income (both parts of a couple, if a couple, and some households just have retired people so no income) is about $60K.

A working life is about 40-ish years.

So ... $60Kx40 = $2.4M.

In theory, we would be willing to have three people work their entire lives to save one other life. This sounds ... wrong? I know that we should be good economists and thinking at the margins, but then the amount we should be willing to save a marginal life should be LESS than $7M ... because we should be able to find LOTS of lives that can be saved for less (e.g. businessinsider.com has an article that claims that ~$3.5K spent on mosquito netting in the correct place saves one life. Not much point to doing that in England, but can probably save a life for $10K?].

So it seems that this is an inefficient way for the Brits to save lives.

If all we care about is optimizing our spending on life-saving. Clearly there is more because 50 people dying in this sort of fire is much worse than 50 people dying in auto accidents (and there is also the cost to repairing damage to the building ... but this should have already been taken into account when purchasing the less expensive cladding).

Still, the difference between a median US worker earns something close to $2.5M over a working lifetime (maybe less?) and we are valuing a human life at about three times that seems like a problem.
26-Sep-2017 Shooting for the Moon
If you shoot for the moon, even if you miss you'll land among the stars.
Or the Kuiper belt. Maybe the Oort cloud.

Or you die horribly in an N1 rocket explosion.
18-Sep-2017 Crocodiles Near Tourist Spots The New York Post is totally on this story:
"A Financial Times journalist was killed by a crocodile while washing his hands in a lagoon in Sri Lanka during a vacation with pals.
    :
The lagoon, known to be crawling with crocodiles, is yards away from popular surf spot Elephant Rock on the southeast coast."
This seems like a bad idea ...
    :
"This is the first known crocodile attack in Sri Lanka. Both tourists and locals surf at Elephant Rock, which is a beautiful secluded beach and very safe."
Okay, maybe it isn't as bad as it seems if there haven't been any crocodile attacks and things are very safe.
    :
"It is a very dangerous place to swim, there have been lots of attacks."
Unless, maybe it is a very dangerous place given how very safe it is.
    :
"In April this year, a 13-year-old girl was attacked and dragged away by a crocodile while she was enjoying a day out with her family at Pulnewa Lake, in Galnewa."
And, of course, this is the first known crocodile attack in Sri Lanka except for all the previous ones.
    :
"And in July 2016, a 60-year-old Sri Lankan man was killed in a crocodile attack..."
11-Sep-2017 Incorrect Use of the Word 'Just' The stats are bogus (self selected survey results), but I'm more interested in the use of the word "just":
Would you spend $1,000 on an iPhone? Just 1 in 3 say yes
The average desktop PC runs about $500 ...

I'm thinking that "just" is ... wrong. If Apple can get one in three people to give them $1,000 for a portable pocket computer with the word "phone" in the product name, there isn't anything "just" or "only" about it.
4-Sep-2017 Waffle House and Cracker Barrel The greater Phoenix area has SIX glorious Waffle Houses !!!

... and three Cracker Barrels :-)

California is scheduled to get its first Cracker Barrel in early 2018, but there are still no public plans for a Waffle House.
31-Aug-2017 Inspiring the Citizenry From "The Register":
"The former Soviet republic of Belarus has declared war on an imaginary country that exists within its own borders.

The unprecedented move – which to be honest sounds no more or less mad than most of the rest of the news in these increasingly interesting times – has come about due to a series of war games called Zapad 2017, set to take place between September 14 and 20.

The scenario for these exercises involve Belarusian and Russian forces facing a combined invasion by three imaginary nations on Belarus's borders: Vesbaria (which occupies the territory of real-life Lithuania), Lubenia (which equates to Poland) and Veyshnoria, which in the war game scenario occupies a space in the northwest of Belarus itself.

IHS Markit analyst Alex Kokcharov has noted that the borders of Veyshnoria correlate to the area of Belarus most politically hostile to the country's president, self-styled authoritarian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, suggesting that the dear leader considers this dissent to be unacceptable and deserving of the threat of military recriminations.

However, if Lukashenko was hoping that the creation of this existential threat within the bosom of the motherland would unite his people in nationalist fervour, it seems he may be disappointed. Instead, the Belarusian population have seemingly taken the nascent nation to heart, furnishing it with its own flag, history, foreign ministry (complete with satirical Twitter account) and Wikipedia page."
11-Aug-2017 Too Much Money Being Indexed? Every so often "people" start getting worried about the amount of investment money that is indexed rather than actively managed.

From CNBC earlier this year: "Overall, actively managed U.S. equity funds now hold $3.6 trillion in assets while their passive counterparts hold nearly $3.1 trillion." If we figure that the actively managed folks average 0.5% fees for the managers, then this works out to $18B per year spent researching US stocks and making buy/sell decisions about their correct prices.

The hedge fund industry also seems to have about $3T under management, though much of this is NOT focused on US stocks. Still, it looks like about $0.75T of this is focused on non-emerging market stocks, so maybe ½ of this is invested or shorted in US stocks. Given the hedge fund fee structure, this is probably another few billion dollars per year spent analyzing US stocks.

How much money per year do people think is required to be spent on active management before the cost of more accurate stock prices is higher than the quality of the price improvement? $200B per decade seems like a lot of money to me to keep the prices in line with reality.
23-Jul-2017 Using Statistics to Break the Dream In late July 2017 Tim Tebow is on a hitting streak and we are getting headlines such as "Tim Tebow has already proved his haters wrong about his stint in baseball." Sadly, the headlines are wrong. Tim hasn't proved anyone wrong. Tim is on a lucky streak. (I'd like Tim to succeed, I just don't think that he will ...)

Tim Tebow's Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) was .308 at low-A and is .356 at hi-A.

He was hitting .220 at low-A and is hitting .308 at hi-A.

So, if we back out about 50 points from his batting average because of his BABIP spike, he WOULD be hitting around .250 at hi-A. Still an improvement, but not the .308 we are seeing.

And it seems to be some sort of fundamental law of baseball that everyone hits around .300 for BABIP, so this is exactly what we want to do if we want to predict Tim's success at his next 500 plate appearances.

So ... his "doing a lot better" is real, but is mostly that he's been getting a bit lucky with where his hit balls have been going.

Most of the rest of his batting average improvement has been in fewer strikeouts. I don't know if we have enough plate appearances to say whether this is a real improvement or not.

Low-A Mets team stadium is *very* slightly pitcher friendly, so adjust Tebow's BA there up a bit .... maybe .225 to compensate. Hi-A Mets team stadium is hitter friendly by almost 10%! So dial his current BA down by 9% or 8% ... then back out his BABIP spike ... and ... not much has changed.

Now only ½ of Tebow's games get played at home, but it looks like BABIP luck plus park effects are most of the story here.

You know how traditional baseball people say that the sabermetric guys suck all the fun out of baseball??? Yeah ...
End of Season:
Tim was batting ".317 in 25 games" with St. Lucie as of July 24. He then went 3 for 14 in his next four games...

Tim Tebow finished 2017 batting 0.220 at lo-A Columbia and batting 0.231 at hi-A St. Lucie.
23-Jul-2017 Must We Insist on Professional Liability Insurance? I have filed off all the names but my own.

This e-mail exchange actually happened. I've arranged it in chronological order for easy reading...
    From: Contracts Specialist-Supplier Agreements
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 11:32 AM
    To: M
    Subject: RE: Vendor Update

    M,

    Vendor struck out the requirement for Professional Liability Insurance. What
    happens if they give us bad code or caused some form of issue due to
    omissions or errors in their work, etc.
    I need this info to get V’s approval.



    From: R
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 2:41 PM
    To: M; Mark Roulo
    Subject: RE: Vendor Update

    Can you provide an answer?

    R



    From: Mark Roulo
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 2:46 PM
    To: R; M
    Subject: Re: Vendor Update

    > What happens if they give us bad code or caused some form of issue due
    > to omissions or errors in their work, etc.

    Budget an extra $25,000?


        "The FBI works undercover on an average of 70 to 90 murder-for-hire
         cases a year. According to bureau press releases, recent quoted fees
         have ranged from $25,000 to kill a spouse to $600 to kill a girlfriend.
         And a drug dealer in New Orleans tried to pay for a contract killing
         in crack."

          http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/
          explainer/2009/02/dirty_deeds_done_dirt_cheap.html

    Just sayin ...

    Or we just terminate the contract with Vendor and fix the code.
    We'll be responsible for maintaining the code anyway, so we need to know
    (a) how it works, (b) how to compile it, (c) etc.



    From: R
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 2:56 PM
    To: Mark Roulo; M
    Subject: RE: Vendor Update

    LOL, Let's go with your last suggestion. I'll get back to you.





    From: M
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 3:01 PM
    To: R; Mark Roulo
    Subject: RE: Vendor Update

    Mark has it right, this is not a stopper,

    Thank you,

    M




    From: R
    Sent: Wednesday, July 19, 2017 3:06 PM
    To: M; Mark Roulo
    Subject: RE: Vendor Update

    Ok.
    
10-Jul-2017 1-In-4 Women Will Be Raped at College The campus rape panic comes and goes. We had an earlier round of it in the late 1980s as well and that is when the 1-in-4 statistic started. A pretty good guess for a source for that statistic is a 1987 paper, "The Scope of Rape: Incidence and Prevalence of Sexual Aggression and Victimization in a National Sample of Higher Education Students" by Koss, et.al.:
"The results indicated that, since the age of 14, 27.5% of college women reported experiencing and 7.7% of collage men reported perpetrating an act that met legal definitions of rape, which includes attempts. ... A victimization rate for women of 38 per 1,000 was calculated, which represented the number of women per thousand who experienced a rape (that met the FBI definition) during the previous 6 months."
(underscore added by me)

The men don't seem to be checking a box that says "I sexually assaulted someone," though.

And notice that the paper scores "attempts" that meet the FBI definition of rape as rape.

The FBI definition in play at the time of the paper (note that the definition changed a few years ago) included emotional coercion as a form of 'force' that would transform sex into rape. I think.

I believe (but this is a lot more complicated than it should be) that the combination of (a) attempts being scored as rape, and (b) emotional coercion making things non-consensual means that person Y telling person X "you would if you loved me" gets scored as rape for the purposes of this paper, even if person X says "no," person Y doesn't use physical force and no sex occurs.

I think.

The folks reporting this are really not being very clear about where they are drawing the lines ...
17-May-2017 Millenials, Lattes and Creative Writing Degrees from Oberlin (This, pretty obviously, originated as a comment I left on a blog ...)

I'd like to dog pile on the Millenials, too (what with their lattes and their degrees in creative writing from Oberlin and all ...), but the current kids are surprisingly pragmatic when it comes to college and I think the Millenials probably were also.

The most popular undergraduate majors look something like this:
  1. Business (yes, for undergrad. WTF???)
  2. Psychology
  3. Nursing
  4. Biology
  5. Education (to be a K-8 teacher, probably)
  6. Criminal Justice
  7. Accounting
  8. Liberal Arts, General Studies, ...
  9. English
  10. History
Note that a bunch of these are very practical (or are trying to be): Business, Nursing, Education, Accounting.

And most of the rest are fairly "real" degrees (or at least can be fairly real).

The Foo-Foo Studies are actually fairly rare as degrees. And a bunch of the kids are looking at college as a vocational/trade school and trying to use it to get a better job (we can be sad about that if we want, but we shouldn't be sad about this and then bag on them for taking BS majors).

I also expect that the bulk of the students are going to public colleges/universities (including junior colleges). Again, making fun of the kids majoring in XXXX at StuffyPrivateUniversity is kinda fun, but the bulk of the millenials with degrees are/were probably public school grads who tried to major in something practical.
31-Jan-2017 How To Pick Stocks Analysis from last year:

Bad Angel: "Hmmm ... Exxon has a pretty good balance sheet (I thought). It is EXXON. It's stock dropped a bunch in the last year or so, and it pays a nice 3.6% dividend. I can't imagine it performing much worse than the S&P500 over the next ten years. Screw efficient markets, this thing looks like a buy!"
Good Angel: "No, no, no ... what do you know that the markets don't?"
Bad Angel: "Um ... Exxon?!? With a nice dividend! I'll feel like an idiot if this thing goes up and I just watched!"
Good Angel: "Sigh. Can you just purchase enough that you won't feel badly if it goes up, but not so much that we get fried when it goes down? Can you hedge?"
Bad Angel: "What if I buy this only slightly related ETF that contains Exxon plus a bunch of other stocks that I don't know anything about?? Maybe we only buy a medium amount of this thing I haven't actually analyzed???"
Good Angel: "Fine. Buy enough that you shut up."

Results this year:

Well, it has been a year! XLE is up 31% from where I bought it (I think this is total return?) and the dividend is now about 2.3% instead of 3.4% (partially because the shares are up 31% ...) ... so not much more than the S&P500. I sold it this morning.

An equivalent purchase of XOM would be up 10% (vs 20% for the S&P500 ... this demonstrates my skill at stock market analysis), still with a good dividend yield, but the XOM earnings have now dropped enough that they are paying dividends out of capital, not earnings. Stock Chart
2-Aug-2016 Minimum Basic Income The US GDP is : ~$17T/year
US Population is: ~320M (adults are about 240M)

So ... US GDP/person is about $50K/year

Current US federal and state+local spending is in the range of $6T/year.

At the federal level ($4T):
  • Military: ~18% (and 4% more for veteran's benefits)
  • Healthcare: ~24%
  • Interest: ~7%
  • Social Security + Unemployment: ~34%
At the state/local level, spending tends to be:
  • Education: ~50%
  • Welfare/poverty programs: next
  • Police+Fire
  • Everything else
I'm going to assume that a minimum basic income DOESN'T include:
  • Seriously reducing the military (we can do that without BMI)
  • Reducing federal healthcare spending (mostly spent on seniors ... who are expensive)
  • Defaulting of the national debt (again, we can do that without a MBI)
  • Making parents in charge of education funding (so public schools stay)
  • Privatizing police+fire
We can consider eliminating social security, unemployment and welfare because that is what the MBI replaces.

So ... we can eliminate about 34% of a $4T federal budget (so ~$1.3T) and maybe 1/3 of the state+local spending of ~$2T (so ~$0.7T) which gives us about $2T/year to split up among 240M adults. I get about $8,300/adult/year (or $700/adult/month).

I'm guessing:
  • Lots of retirees who are currently getting MORE than $8,300/year in social security will be VERY unhappy. The average social security benefit is currently about $1,300/month, so (assuming a non-pathological distribution), the VAST majority of folks on social security will see a very large drop in their monthly check. With no realistic way to replace it (go back to work at age 70?)

  • And lots of unemployed folks who would now be getting $700/month AND NOTHING ELSE (no EBT, no housing assistance, ...) will decide that they are much worse off under the new system. Single mom with two kids probably gets more than $700/month in cash plus benefits today (EBT, housing assistance, etc.)
In short, unless we increase taxes (which we can do without a MBI) or cut spending in other areas (again, which we can do without a MBI) I don't see how this is enough money to help the folks who need help.

US poverty level for an individual is about $12,000/year, so this is solidly below that. $16,600/year is barely above the poverty level for a couple.

Yes, it DOES eliminate the dis-incentive to work when on welfare, but for those that can't work (medical reasons, too old, no skills) they seem to be financially worse off then they are today.

If we make the MBI for everyone (adults and children ... this helps that single mom ... but she also now has an incentive to have even more kids ...), then we have $2T/year to divvy up among 320M people, so about $6,250/year/person. Two married retirees who were getting the average social security check each ($1,300/month) now see their monthly income drop from $2,600 to about $1,000. The US has about 60M people receiving social security checks (not all getting more than $700/month or $500/month, but the majority do ...), so this is a lot of people.

There would clearly be behavioral changes after this, but I can't guess if they'd be net positive or net negative:
  • Some folks (e.g. my wife and myself) might look around and decide that this plus savings is enough to retire. I'd bet on a specific friend taking this option (assuming he isn't already retired)

  • And some (young) folks might decide that three roommates mean that you don't need a job. Ever (hey, they are used to being poor ...). Video games, porn and raman don't sound so bad for low skill 20s males in low cost of living places. I'm assuming we don't want these folks just dropping out of the work force at age 18. Maybe I'm wrong?

  • You will also see people taking jobs that they might have avoided in the past for fear of losing their benefits.

  • And you'll probably see some folks quitting "good" jobs to go off and be artists. This may increase US net happiness, but probably doesn't help FUND the MBI.
But unless we have some solution for:
  • Elderly on SS get screwed, and
  • MBI isn't enough for truly poor to survive
I don't think this is a starter.
21-Mar-2016 Unicorns My (not terribly rigorous) thoughts on current privately held "Unicorns"
  • Uber:
    $50B For an unprofitable taxi company?

  • Xiaomi:
    Hard to figure this one. How valuable are unprofitable Chinese consumer electronics companies?

  • AirBnB:
    We make our money by violating local zoning laws ... and all the neighbors hate us.

  • Panantir:
    This one seems real. Lots of money selling services to police states and folks that want to be more police state like ...

    Much like Blackwater is/was real.

  • Snapchat:
    I don't understand. Of course, I didn't understand Facebook, either ...

  • Dropbox:
    Because copying files over the internet isn't a commodity business. And also has great network effects to keep you locked in ...

  • Pinterest:
    Same as snapchat. Except I "get" it more, but don't understand how to make (much) money. Still ... see Facebook.

  • Twitter:
    We have never made money, but we're only 10 years old ...

  • Yelp:
    We haven't made money, either ...

  • Groupon:
    Proudly delivering very bad customers to you, while also chasing off your good customers.

  • We Work:
    We rent out office space. But we have an app?

  • Spotify:
    By construction, we can never extract very much money from the customers ... the folks who own the copyright will get the bulk of the profits ...

  • Lyft:
    We're like Uber, but less trendy.

  • Zenefits:
    This one makes sense, but I don't know if this specific company can succeed. A large, recent layoff is sad.

  • Social Finance:
    Because individuals are better at assessing loan risk than banks are. If we add intermediaries to "pool" individual piles of money and make the loan decisions, we have re-invented banking.

Maybe add in the robo-advisor firms: Now we have a computer to churn your account. Cheaper than humans!

The other "signal" that things are weird is folks wanting to use blockchain technology. Folks like AirBnB. Because, clearly, running a small RDB won't get the job done to track reputations, but a blockchain will!

2000: On the internet (see eToys, Pets.com)
2009: We have an app for that (because an app changes the underlying business! (*))
2016: With the blockchain

(*) Actually, in the case of Uber, it did!
27-Jan-2016 Hedge Fund Returns
The 20 most profitable hedge funds for investors earned $15 billion last year while the rest of the industry collectively lost $99 billion, LCH said. Those top managers have made 48 percent of the $835 billion in profits that the hedge fund industry has generated since its inception.
20-Jan-2016 Established Technology & New Innovations
The company is relying on established technology, as well as new innovations, to bring humans to the edge of space.
:
:
The newer technology involves returning safely to the ground.
I can see how this newer technology would make it easier to acquire customers.
17-Jan-2016 Investment Banking is Changing
On Monday, the global investment bank told its staff it would allow all employees to use Airbnb Business Travel for work-related travel as part of its corporate travel policy, according to people familiar with the matter.
17-Jan-2016 Institutions Own 127% of This Company Financial Engines is Bill Sharpe's "robo-advisor" company.

It is interesting to see that the "% of Shares Held by Institutional & Mutual Fund Owners" is 112%.

Google finance has it at 127% institutional ownership:

I guess that this is what happens when you have a large (20%) amount of stock that is short?
13-Jan-2016 Probability Fail Conditional probability fail? It is a fail of some sort:
With the Powerball lottery jackpot at record levels, the nation’s attention is riveted on tonight’s drawing. Everyone is weighing in on whether it makes economic sense to play the lottery. In terms of pure expected value, playing the lottery is a bad bet -- in fact, it really has to be, since if the house weren’t guaranteed to win, the lottery wouldn’t be offered in the first place. So why do people seem so willing to throw away their money?
Because the starting size of the pot should never influence whether you stay for the first card ...
18-Dec-2015 Bitcoin Today's internet wisdom, similar to Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd law:
... any sufficiently advanced criminal enterprise is indistinguishable from a bitcoin exchange
17-Dec-2015 Air Force Recruiting It seems that the Air Force is having a difficult time retaining drone pilots.

Drone Pilots Are Quitting In Record Numbers

They have low status compared to the pilots that actually get to fly real planes, they are overworked and there are morale problems when they accidentally shoot missiles into wedding parties full of children.

So I'm thinking that the solution is for the Air Force to develop a test (if one does not already exist) to screen for sociopaths and then hire those folks and assign them to fly the drones...
15-Dec-2015 Eat Bacon for Gaia My dad loved stories such as "salt is good for you". He would love this one:
"Eating lettuce is over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon," said Paul Fischbeck, professor of social and decisions sciences and engineering and public policy.
11-Dec-2015 Student Protests and MOOCs
"I would suggest that such [student] protests [as we have recently seen at University of Missouri, etc.] do not happen at online institutions because online education is fundamentally organized (pedagogically and structurally) to promote a very particular type of learning ..."

(Dan Butin, PhD, is a Full Professor and Founding Dean of the School of Education & Social Policy at Merrimack College)
Yep, that's it! You don't see student's protesting "at" MOOCs because MOOCs "promote a very particular type of learning". Not because it is very difficult to know which server location to picket. Not because protesting a free set of lectures hosted 3,000 miles away from you is both pointless and incredibly difficult. Because the type of learning promoted by MOOCs is so narrow...
18-Nov-2015 ISIS Help Desk
NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint -- a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development -- which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year -- is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.
Wouldn't someone COMMUNICATING WITH THE ISIS IT HELP DESK constitute a "hint of activity"????
12-Nov-2015 Pension Funds & Hedge Funds (2) Another alternative explanation for why pension funds use hedge funds is "consultancy capture" (similar to regulatory capture). I think it is something sadder.

Megan McArdle had an article about one year ago (as Detroit was going down in flames ...) and addressed the question: Why aren't the pensions managed more conservatively? Her answer is that there is a bit of a game going on between the union leaders negotiating the pensions and the politicians on the other side of the table.

*ONE* way to do things would be for the unions and the politicians to agree on a fixed amount of cash that the city/state/whatever would pay out each year towards the pension and then the union could manage the pension.

The "problem" with this is that it becomes clear what the risks are to the union members *AND* what the costs are to the taxpayers. The upshot being that the benefits go *DOWN* while the taxes go *UP* relative to the sorts of deals that folks would negotiate with the current approach. Everyone is sad.

Instead, the folks doing the negotiating (both sides) converge on a solution that involves "optimistic" expected returns. The union members are happy because they expect very nice pension benefits in 30 years and the taxpayers are happy because they don't have to pay as much as they would if things were financed cautiously. This doesn't even have to be a conspiracy.

Thirty years later, of course, things may be going poorly, but this isn't the problem for any of the players at the time of the deal. And the union folks can convince themselves that the pensions *MUST* be paid so they aren't really taking any risks. The politicians can convince themselves that the expected returns will materialize, so they aren't being irresponsible.

The hedge funds seem to be involved in a similar game. Their value here isn't that they are "captured," but that the folks running the pension funds can claim higher expected returns and thus don't have to ask the city/state/whatever to pony up more CASH today to keep the pension "solvent." I expect that the hedge fund guys believe whatever they are claiming (higher returns, less correlation, whatever) and the pension folks can convince themselves of whatever they need to convince themselves. Again, this likely leads to bigger problems in the future, but that isn't an issue for the folks making the decisions today ...

I don't see this as "capture" in any sense. The hedge funds get paid (which is grand) and the folks running the pension funds don't have to be the bad guys responsible for raising taxes (or cutting services). Everyone wins! For a short while, at least.
9-Nov-2015 Pension Funds & Hedge Funds
... in the hierarchy of public-pension fund needs, both [performance and fees] take a back seat to expected returns. This is because the higher the expected return, the lower the capital contributions required of some obligated public entity.

In other words, hedge funds aren't used to generate higher returns; they simply make it possible for some public entity to reduce contributions to the underlying pension. This is the primary driving force in the rise of hedge funds for public pensions.
I like this explanation better than:
  1. the folks running the pensions can't see the obvious, or
  2. the folks running the pensions are consistently overly optimistic
But it really turns the cynicism up to 11. Running the fund such that you *KNOW* it will under perform both expected and required results, eventually leaving the pensioners (or the company or the taxpayers) in the lurch :-(
25-Oct-2015 I♥GAIA1 Is it wrong for a Shelby Cobra to sport a personalized license plate reading:

I♥GAIA1

? Because one was driving around on highway one this afternoon.
4-Oct-2015 Statistics Statistics can be interesting ...

At 538, going "game-by-game", the SF 49ers are expected to win 4 games, lose 11 and one is a 50:50 coin flip ... so

4-11-1

If we sum up all the average "win probabilities" for these games, the "win probabilities" add up to 7.09 games ... so ...

7-9

FiveThirtyEight had the "Average Simulated Season" W-L before the season started at:

8-8

I kinda understand the first two, don't quite get the last one and think that the whole thing is sorta fascinating in a "stats don't work the way you expect" way.

The 49ers can have *EVERY* single game come out as "expected" and their season record will be different from the best guess before the season began for their final record.
25-Nov-2014 Madison Bumgarner Underlining added
Butler, just three weeks removed from playing the Giants in the World Series, now comes to play in the Bay Area. "It still stings, one run away," Butler said of his Royals team falling in seven games to the Giants, adding of Madison Bumgarner, "I didn’t realize it was possible for one person to single handedly win the World Series for their team."
9-Mar-2014 Silicon Valley Engineering Salaries My salary in March 1990: $30K/year from ThermaWave

Rent for 1br, 1ba apartment at Garden Village Apartments:$600/month

CPI-U, mar 1990: 128.7

Today: My employer hires bachelor's degree holders at $60K+, and master's at $90K+

Rent for 1br, 1ba apartment at Garden Village Apartments: $1,385/month

CPI-U, mar 2016: 237.0

Eyeballing this, I'd say rent was slightly more expensive, but roughly comparable (237/129 = 1.84). What might not be comparable is that I didn't have a $100/month cable bill or a $100/month cell phone bill ... but even taking $2,500/year off the current salaries doesn't seem to change the basic point that the ENGINEERING salaries have mostly kept up with rent.

I bought a new 1990 Ford Probe for $13,500 in 1990. A 2014 Ford Mustang can be had for $23,000 today ... and the interest rates are lower today and the car probably more reliable.
August 2019: A few years later and the numbers can be updated. I asked an HR person I know what the mid-range salary for a freshly hired software engineer with only a bachelor's degree would be and also what would be typical after two years. The answers were: $100,000 and $120,000. Not everyone makes this — some make more and some make less with a range of maybe $80,000 as a low starting salary to $130,000 as a high starting salary (maybe paid by Google).

So ...
199020142019 2019 vs. 1990
Salary $30,000/year $60,000/year $100,000/year 3⅓×
Apartment $600/month $1,385/month $1,890/month 3.1×
Probe/Mustang $13,500 $23,000 $27,490
CPI 128.7 237.0 256.6

The apartment is a 1 bedroom apartment at the apartment complex in which I resided in 1990.
The Ford Probe was targeted at the same audience as the Ford Mustang.

It still looks as it the new engineer salaries have kept up with inflation. What has NOT kept up with inflation has been house prices ... those have soared!
24-Oct-2013 I Have a Google Wallet I recently received this e-mail:

Subject: Updates to your Google Wallet
From: Google Wallet <noreply@wallet.google.com>

Google Wallet Icon
Updates to your Google Wallet Account

Hello—you are receiving this email so we can inform you about important updates to your Google Wallet account, and to confirm your communication preferences.

Google Wallet is now integrated within leading Android apps and mobile sites.

Google Wallet is a digital wallet that securely stores your credit cards, debit cards, offers and loyalty cards, so you can shop online across Google services such as Google Play and other merchant sites or in stores with the Google Wallet app. Now, you can pay with your Google Wallet account on select Android apps and mobile sites. Simply select the 'Buy with Google' button and verify your payment information, and you'll complete your transaction in as few as two clicks.

This new feature is available on popular brands.

Buy With Google Button Image

Stay informed with Google Wallet newsletters, invitations to provide product feedback and special offers.

Don't miss out on Google Wallet product news such as the new Wallet app for Android and iPhones. You can subscribe by simply clicking here.

Sincerely,
The Google Wallet Team

P.S. To view your transactions or manage your account, type wallet.google.com into your browser and sign in.

I hadn't signed up with Google Wallet. To the best of my knowledge, I don't have an account with any part of Google.

I called the helpful Google Wallet 1-800 number to find out what was going on.
  1. Yes, I DO have a Google Wallet Account.
  2. Google created one for me because I "purchased something on line".
  3. No, I can't close the account.
  4. Then the helpful phone operator hung up.
And note that I don't have the password for it (because I didn't create it), so I also can't use it ... I then received this followup e-mail:

Subject: RE: [4-8021000002047] Google Wallet Follow-up
From: wallet-support@google.com

Google Wallet Icon
Hi Mark,

Google Wallet is a free service that allows you to carry your wallet on the web. It securely stores your credit card information in your Google Account so you don't have to enter your billing and shipping information each time you shop online.

When you checkout with participating online merchants you can pay quickly by signing in to Google Wallet. You can also use Google Wallet to pay for other Google services and products, like Google Drive and Google Play.

Please note that if you've previously used Google Checkout, you already have Google Wallet. This service is available in many countries. For more information on the availability of Google Wallet, visit https://support.google.com/wallet/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=1711146&answer=1663318

US users can also use stored payment credentials to make purchases using a mobile browser, as well as pay in-store with the Google Wallet app where accepted.

Sign in to Google Wallet at wallet.google.com/manage to get started buying online!

If you have any more questions, please reply to this email. I'm happy to help!

Thanks!

Miguel
The Google Wallet Team

So here we are. I seem to have a Google Wallet account, set up for me by some Internet merchant. I can't access it because I don't have the password. I have no idea what credit card (or other) information has been stored in it, but I also know that Google is storing this credit card information "securely." I can't delete the wallet.
23-Aug-2013 Nigerian Scam Restitution The Nigerian Prince Scam is a fairly well know Internet scam with an illustrious history dating back to the late 1700s. I have never been bitten by this scam, but I recently discovered that the members of the African Union had set up a unit to make restitution to victims of the scam. This was heartwarming, though given the level of poverty in Africa I'm not sure that this is a good use of African government money. In any event, I received this e-mail:

From: Mr. Richard Akinola <mr.akinolarichard@gmail.com>

From Mr. Richard Akinola
Chairman International
Scheme Compensation Unit
F.R.N Lagos Chapter


Dear Beneficiary

This letter is written to you in order to change your Life from today as you have been listed as one of those VICTIM who lost huge sum of money while trying to receive your payment from Nigeria, London, USA etc, we also want to inform you that during the last Head of States Meeting in the African Union (AU) in which Nigeria is a Leading Member Country, we were directed to pay you the sum of $10.5M (TEN MILLION FIVE HUNDRED UNITED STATES DOLLARS) which covers the money you lost plus your Inheritance/Contract Payment.

In order for you to receive this $10.5M without any delay, we have decided to  pay you through a Specialized atm card which is one of the fastest, reliable and convenient means of receiving payment worldwide. As soon as this Specialized atm card arrives your delivery address,  you will be able to use it to withdraw money from any atm machine in your Country or anywhere in the whole word without any delay or difficulty, we can also make the payment direct to your Bank Account in case you prefer to receive your payment through bank to bank transfer.

We wish to inform you that the members of Payment Committee are  honorable men of Great Repute and Intergrity who have served the  Government of Nigeria in both local and International  capacities, we also wish to inform you that the Committee members were  appointed by our respected President to pay foreign Debt such as Contract Debt,  Inheritance/Next of Kin Debt, Compensation Debt, Lottery Debt, Purchase/Sales of Good Debt, and all  other Foreigner debt own  beneficiaries by Nigeria Government, in order to restore Nigeria good image to international  Communities. You are advice to reply back immediately you receive this mail, so that you will receive your own payment. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF NIGERIA  HEREBY ADVICE YOU TO HENCEFORTH STOP COMMUNICATING WITH THOSE PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN DECEIVEING YOU FOR TOO LONG AND WORK WITH THIS HONORABLE COMMITTEE SO THAT YOU WILL RECEIVE YOUR  PAYMENT BECAUSE THIS IS THE ONLY COMMITTEE APROVED BY NIGERIA GOVERNMENT AND AFRICAN UNION TO MAKE PAYMENT TO YOU.

In case you want to receive your payment this week, you are advice to reply  with ANSWERS to the Questions below.

Your Full Name
Your Contact Address
Your Direct telephone.
Your AGE
What You Do For A Living
How Many Months Or Years in which You Have Been Expecting your Payment
The Place you sent Money Last whether  Nigeria or London etc
The Last Amount of Money You sent to Nigeria and What Month or Year




Mr. Richard Akinola
Chairman International
Scheme Compensation Unit
F.R.N Lagos Chapter

Because I have not been victimized by the scam I thought it inappropriate to take Richard up on his kind offer of $10.5M, but it did brighten my day to know that there were people working to correct the wrongs done by the scammers.
13-Mar-2013 Inflation Calculation is Not What You Think I wrote to Mike Bryan at the Atlanta Federal Reserve:
It seems that the way CPI is calculated (imputed rent and all that) that one way to have "zero" inflation would be for housing prices to crater (dropping the imputed rent along with the owner's equity) while at the same time for food, energy, etc. to be soaring.

In theory, the prices of the things one buys going up is cancelled out by the devastation to a homeowner's equity.

Is this correct?
He wrote back that "Yes, this is correct. It happened just as you describe in mid-2010."

So there you have it. For homeowners, in theory, losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in home equity can counteract an increase in the prices of the things being purchased (e.g. food, cars, gasoline for the cars, clothing, ...) so that there is no net inflation!
11-Jul-2012 Ryan Vogelsong is Not an All-Star The rules (per Wiki) are that the players, coaches and managers vote for 8 pitchers per team (5 starters and 3 relief pitchers). The manager for that year then gets to pick some himself (after consulting with other managers, etc).

The NL sent 13 pitchers this year of which 8 were starters.

The selection seemed very odd, given that the best three by ERA didn't make the team, and one guy who allowed more than one run per game more than Ryan Vogelsong did make the team.

The statistically worst starting pitcher is a Cardinal, so my guess is that Tony La Russa used one of his manager selections to pick "his guy." One of the other weaker starting pitchers was from Arizona, and the rules are that each team must have at least one player ... this was the guy from Arizona. We can ignore these two players when trying to figure out why "they" made it and someone else did not.

So now we've got six starting pitchers left. All of the six were in the top 13 for ERA, so they were pretty good a preventing runs. But the top six didn't go. In fact, four of the top five didn't go. Of the guys who did go, however, they were the six pitchers with the most strikeouts. They ranked 1-6 in Ks leading into the All Star game!

So there you have it.

The definition of a 2012 National League All-Star starting pitcher is:
  • Very close to the top of the league in strikeouts, or
  • Sole representative for the team, or
  • Manager likes you and you're pretty good.
In theory, if Timmy had 14 more Ks (which is a bunch), he might have made the All Star team, but I suspect not given his season.

So, there you have it. Ryan Vogelsong is pitching as well as any pitcher in the national league, and he was left off the All Star team because he didn't have enough strikeouts.

Data:
Player Team Record IP ERA K K-Rank WHIP Comment
Ryan Vogelsong SF 7-4 110.2 2.36 77 1.12
James McDonald PIT 9-3 110.0 2.37 100 11 0.97
Johnny Cueto CIN 10-5 120.1 2.39 91 27 1.16
R.A. Dickey NYM 12-1 120.0 2.40 123 2 0.93
Jordan Zimmermann WAS 5-6 110.1 2.61 74 1.12
Matt Cain SF 9-3 120.1 2.62 118 4 0.96
Kyle Lohse STL 9-2 116.1 2.79 67 1.08
Shephen Strasburg WAS 9-4 99.0 2.82 128 1 1.10
Clayton Kershaw LAD 6-5 120.2 2.91 119 3 1.06
Chris Capuano LAD 9-4 111.1 2.91 100 11 1.16
Gio Gonzalez WAS 12-3 101.2 2.92 118 4 1.11
Wade Miley ARI 9-5 100.2 3.04 70 1.09 (Arizona needs one rep)
Cole Hamels PHI 10-4 118.0 3.20 118 4 1.10
Johan Santana NYM 6-5 102.2 3.24 99 15 1.17
Mark Buehrle MIA 8-8 113.2 3.25 66 1.13
Madison Bumgarner SF 10-5 115.2 3.27 99 15 1.10
Zack Greinke MIL 9-3 111.0 3.32 111 7 1.23
Wandy Rodriguez HOU 7-6 114.2 3.38 75 1.23
Lance Lynn STL 11-4 103.0 3.41 105 9 1.23 (Torre coached STL)

All-Stars in light grey.

Perspectives

One of the points to taking classes in different subjects as an college undergraduate is to learn about different ways to view the world — to acquire mental tools for understanding the world. This point is often overlooked, but two disciplines illustrate this:
  • Economics is largely about how incentives influence people's decisions. Learning to think like an economist includes learning to think about incentives. This can be useful.

  • Newtonian Physics is largely about conservation laws. Mass, momentum (both linear and angular) and energy neither get created or destroyed. If one thing has picked up some of any of these, another thing has to have lost it. Taking this seriously leads to trying to look at systems as a whole, even when one isn't doing physics.
This section is an attempt to capture some world views that I find interesting and/or useful. It is a work in progress...
Chesterton's Fence Mcnamara Fallacy The Mcnamara Fallacy is basically an attempt to make quantitative decisions when you don't have (and may not be able to get) the necessary quantitative data.
The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

— Daniel Yankelovich "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business."
If you don't actually have the data you want to make a quantitative decision, it is better to just admit that the decision can't be made quantitatively and explicitly make a "best judgement" decision. At least you are not fooling yourself about how you are making the decision and you probably won't be fooling yourself about how confident you should be.
Amateurs and Professionals
"Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics."
— Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC (Commandant of the Marine Corps) noted in 1980
"“Infantry wins battles, logistics wins wars."
— US Army General John J. Pershing (allegedly)
OODA Loops W. H. Auden: Three Kinds of Society Eric Hoffer: Conservative, Liberal and Radical Eric Hoffer: Men of Words, Fanatics, Men of Action "A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action." Aristotle's Modes of Persuasion: Ethos, Logos, Pathos

E-Books

  • Project Gutenberg


  • Project Gutenberg Australia


  • Internet Archive: eBooks and Texts


  • Faded Page
    Faded Page is an archive of eBooks that are provided completely free to everyone. The books are produced by volunteers all over the world, and we believe they are amongst the highest quality eBooks anywhere. Every one has been scanned, run through OCR software, proofed, formatted and assembled extremely carefully, using hundreds of volunteer hours. These books are public domain in Canada (because we follow the Canadian copyright laws)...

  • Standard Ebooks
    The Standard Ebooks project is a volunteer driven, not-for-profit effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks is already believed to be in the public domain, and Standard Ebook dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing whole ebooks files themselves into the public domain.

  • Some Texts From Early Modern Philosophy
    On this site you will find versions of some classics of early modern philosophy, and a few from the 19th century, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.

  • HathiTrust


  • Open Library


  • Wiley Online Library


  • World Digital Library


Interesting External Sites

Interesting External Articles

  • Tiktok's enshittification (2023)
    Cory Doctorow

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

    I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.


  • The Untold Truth of Action Park, the World's Most Dangerous Water Park
    It was officially called Action Park, but those who went there — and experienced the bone-breaking, skin-ripping rides firsthand — tended to call it other things. Traction Park and Class Action Park were two of the most popular nicknames, and sometimes, things are funny because they're true and mankind has a sick sense of humor.

    Action Park was the brainchild of Eugene Mulvihill, a New Jersey developer who was looking for a way to keep his Vernon Valley ski resort popular in the off-season. New York Magazine says the first ride was the Alpine Slide, and it sort of set the tone for the rest of the park. The slides opened on Labor Day of 1976, and more attractions followed in 1978.

    But, let's be honest here. How bad was it really? Let's start with the thoughts of Evan Schuman, an investigative reporter for the New Jersey Herald. He wrote, "Once you've read the autopsies of the people who have gone on the rides, you tend to want to avoid it."


  • 2002-May-8: Guerrilla Public Service: The Man Who Would Be Caltrans
    PASSING NORTH THROUGH DOWNTOWN ON THE 110 FREEWAY toward Pasadena, between the Third and Fourth Street overpasses, artist Richard Ankrom found himself suddenly confused by the lack of official signage for the 5 North exit. Not clearly labeled overhead like signs for I-5 South, those for the 5 North, which occur two miles later, are haphazardly stuck on a roadside traffic pole, an afterthought at best. Ankrom could have called Caltrans and officially complained, further burdening the beleaguered civic bureaucracy. But being an artist, he did the next best thing:

    He fixed it.

    That is to say, following explicit specifications he found on the Internet and verified in the field, he crafted a red-white-and-blue "5 shield" and green "North" sign out of 0.080 mm 5053 aluminum, covered it with zinc chromate primer and Pantene colors, added an "age patina" of gray paint, and even special-ordered button reflectors, which are discontinued and stockpiled in a warehouse in Tacoma, Washington. (He had to tell the pesky warehouse clerk it was for a movie — not altogether untrue, as it turns out.)

    After stashing the sign and a ladder in the roadside shrubbery — and stenciling the side of his truck with the logo "Aesthetic De-Construction" — he parked on the Third Street bridge just north of the existing sign, set out two orange traffic cones, donned an orange safety vest and hardhat, and physically mounted his homemade handiwork (taking care to sign the back first). He even mocked up a phony invoice, in the event that anyone objected. Yet despite legitimate road crews working the same stretch of freeway, no one seemed to notice.


  • 2016-Aug-30: Why Are So Many BASE Jumpers Dying?
    ...
    Perhaps the most confounding question, though, is why so many people seem to believe that the unthinkable won’t happen to them.
    ...
    Davis observes one trend among beginners and pros. "Seeing accidents with very inexperienced jumpers and very experienced jumpers, one thing we have in common is that the person is pushing it."
    ...
    "I think that as soon as you make being an 'action-sports athlete' your profession, there's a huge risk factor," says Robb Gaffney, a psychiatrist based in Squaw Valley, California, arguably the definitive action-sports capital of the U.S. The Lake Tahoe region, including Squaw, has been hit hard in recent years as many of its local athletes have died pushing the limits.

    "I think that the biggest factor for action-sports athletes is the fantasy of their identity as an action-sports athlete. Most of these athletes aren't making any money. In fact they might not even have health insurance," Gaffney adds. "And yet they're still doing something that could potentially kill them."

    "Progression" is a loaded buzz word that you'll hear every top action-sports star use. Often, progression means gaining recognition by completing an objective that's so dangerous that no one else would ever be willing to attempt it.

    Until someone else does — or dies trying.
  • 2018-Jul-26: SpaceX’s Secret Weapon Is Gwynne Shotwell


  • Adam Gopnik at the New Yorker is worth reading:
  • 2018: 'Ghost kanji' lurk in the Japanese lexicon


  • 2016: The Real Reason Middle America Should Be Angry


  • 2018-Jun-9: The Outrage Epidemic


  • 2018-Mar-11: The Tech Industry’s (Psychological) War on Kids


  • 2017-Dec-17: The Age of Outrage


  • 2019-Mar-18: Conspicuous Production – The Obsession with In-House Movements

  • 2014-Nov-10: The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS


  • 2012-Jun-8: A Golden Age of Books? There Were Only 500 Real Bookstores in 1931
    ... early in the book, I was absolutely dumbfounded by his description of the publishing business in 1931. He draws on a "landmark survey of publishing practices" carried out by one Orin H. Cheney, a banker, as a service to the National Association of Book Publishers.

    Among the normal complaints about book publishers selection processes, we find this staggering stat about the retail business of selling books (emphasis added).

    "In the entire country, there were only some four thousand places where a book could be purchased, and most of these were gift shops and stationary stores that carried only a few popular novels," Davis writes. "In reality, there were but five hundred or so legitimate bookstores that warranted regular visits from publishers' salesmen (and in 1931 they were all men). Of these five hundred, most were refined, old-fashioned 'carriage trade' stores catering to an elite clientele in the nation's twelve largest cities."


  • 2017-Jun-22: Why Can't My Famous Gender Nonconforming Friends Get Laid?
    Alok and Jacob are two of the most publicly visible gender nonconforming femmes I know. As a performance poet, Alok has just gone solo after touring in dozens of cities in the US and abroad as one half of the poetry duo Darkmatter. Jacob was named to 2016's OUT 100, has made a web series for NBC, and been the subject of a GLAAD-nominated episode of MTV's True Life. Both are trans-identified, but belong somewhere in between genders, and they've amassed huge social media followings as gender nonbinary, femme, and fabulous human beings. They've become celebrities in their own right, with Jacob regularly walking down the red carpet at LGBTQ galas and Alok featuring in the Janet Mock–narrated HBO documentary The Trans List.

    But if you think all that would land them a date, you'd be wrong. And nobody is more puzzled than me as to why such obvious catches are having dating problems when so many clamor for their attention.


  • 2014-Dec-14: Get Rich or Die Vlogging: The Sad Economics of Internet Fame
    It was all so painfully awkward. That night, Brittany Ashley, a lesbian stoner in red lipstick, was at Eveleigh, a popular farm-to-table spot in West Hollywood. The restaurant was hosting Buzzfeed's Golden Globes party. For the past two years, Ashley has been one of the most visible actresses on the company's four YouTube channels, which altogether have about 17 million subscribers. She stars in bawdy videos with titles like "How To Win The Breakup" or "Masturbation: Guys Vs. Girls," many of which rack up millions of views.

    The awkward part was that Ashley wasn’t there to celebrate with Buzzfeed. She was there to serve them. Not realizing that her handful of weekly waitressing shifts at Eveleigh paid most of her bills, a coworker from the video production site asked Ashley if her serving tray was "a bit." It was not.


  • 1993-Dec: The Problem With Music, by Steve Albini
    Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.
    :
    :
    The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.


  • They Write the Right Stuff
    As the 120-ton space shuttle sits surrounded by almost 4 million pounds of rocket fuel, exhaling noxious fumes, visibly impatient to defy gravity, its on-board computers take command. Four identical machines, running identical software, pull information from thousands of sensors, make hundreds of milli-second decisions, vote on every decision, check with each other 250 times a second. A fifth computer, with different software, stands by to take control should the other four malfunction.
    :
    :
    But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program — each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.


  • The Graphing Calculator Story
    Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique circumstances.

    I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

    I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.


  • The Curse of Xanadu
    It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. Instead, it sucked Nelson and his intrepid band of true believers into what became the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing - a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair. The amazing epic tragedy.


  • The History Of The Tube Map
    London Tube Map