Work crises have of course eaten my weekend. And then I have to hop on an airplane to go to Miami for the week. Here’s your links and be grateful, you demanding bastards. And of today’s birthdays, I’ll narrow it to the two most important ones: Harry Houdini and the guy I want to grow up to be, R. Lee Ermey.
I hear the Acme Wolf Supply Company may be getting in a new line of anvils. And tunnel paint.
Team Red says, “Hold mah beer.”
I guess it would be tasteless for me to say I got something in my eye.
Conversations that never happened. At least I dearly hope they didn’t.
Department of Really Terrible Ideas
Did you ever see a Commie drinking water, Mandrake?
And now it’s time to say goodnight.
SDNY- the hack lawyers’ best friend.
Old Guy Music! And someone mentioned Mingus yesterday. Yes, we should always be listening to Mingus, especially when Eric Dolphy and Jaki Byard are around.
;
someone mentioned Mingus
Someone, yeah sure. But I’ll take it. recognition at last.
If you behave yourself, Swiss might come by and give you a First. Will that help your owie?
A frozen bag of peas may be more helpful
Firsts are easy, any old schlub can get a first, I’m trying for a catbutt.
That’s the spirit.
*thumbs up*
as of late I’ve been diving a lot into jazz –
wife-o really likes the Japanese pianist Ryo Fukui
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxlvMmUjpTY
Also Hiroshi Suzuki – trombonist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFmH7moCL2c
Feeling very sleepy…
Keep your MIngus. This guy kicks his ass every time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfmrHTdXgK4
*sigh*
I miss when we were all elitists.
“Mueller report’s unknowns”
Known knowns, unknown knowns, unknown unknowns. It’s like, sometimes, I just don’t know, man
By this time next year, CNN and MSNBC will be able to prove that Unicorns exist!
It looks like they will have plenty of help from the scientific community.
My understanding is not that they are against “statistical significance” for statistics, but because the .05 confidence level is arbitrary. You could have results that show up at some level slightly higher, and opposite.
But any level is going to be arbitrary, and having a convention that everyone knows makes it easier to communicate results.
They should focus on the wonky statistical methodologies that they use rather than significance levels.
I think the end target here is the fact that there is no statistically significant climate change.
I’d bet money the end game is to fix that. Watch and see.
That’s just crazy talk.
As I mentioned the other day, in my field a 3-sigma effect is something that is interesting and deserves being studied further, but a 5-sigma effect is required to get most people to believe it. Bogus 2-sigma effects happen all the time.
From the side bar of the toilet seat story:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-6844091/Spice-Girls-Geri-Horner-confesses-Mel-B-great-boobs-amazing-bottom.html
Spice girl lesbian fling. Giggity
It moved.
Don’t worry OMWC, we’ll all be just like R. Lee Ermey someday.
I met him in the security line at LAX a few years ago. Nice man, but looked like he could still break you in half.
That pic is huge.
>>‘How Could They Let Trump off the Hook?’
STEVE SMITH NO LET ANYONE OFF HIS HOOK
I wonder how 600 different municipalities have standing to sue one company.
Because fuck you, that’s why.
These municipalities are far more addicted to money than anybody is to opioids.
Yeah, I love how government at all levels seem to have inherent standing for anything that they claim can cost them (their taxpayers) money, but how an actual taxpayer tangibly affected by government policy has to jump through more hoops than a circus dog to get standing.
>>Conservatives wage assault on Mueller report
more like pointing out the obvious
“Republicans pounce”
I saw that Tucker Carlson bit (my parents are always watching when I visit.. he does sarcasm pretty well). The first instance he noted was from over 50 years ago.
I’m just so confused. Now I have no explanation for why Hillary lost.
Because evil conservatives denied minorities the right to vote in some states.
Because of the Electoral College, of course. So undemocratic and patriarchal. Popular vote!!1!
I saw that the NYT came out with an article in favor of abolishing the Electoral College. Geez, I wonder why an organization with New York in their name would be in favor of New York along with California, deciding every presidential election from this point forward, forever.
MSNBC has been discussing it lately.
Fuck these people. You want a real civil war? This is how you get a real civil war.
This morning Chuck Todd on Meet The Press had a segment on the Electoral College. That does seem to be the next Big Thing.
Do the Dems have any ideas that aren’t naked power-grabs masquerading as pie-in-the-sky fantasies that have zero chance of passing? I mean we haven’t even gotten reparations and green new deal yet; let’s talk about those some more!
“Do the Dems have any ideas that aren’t naked power-grabs masquerading as pie-in-the-sky fantasies that have zero chance of passing?”
No. Communism didn’t work. They’ve figured that out now, so they’re just going to sit around and masturbate from now on. We’re all better off for it.
“We won’t resort to violence and we won’t accept it at all,” he stressed. “We want to achieve our state and rights through peaceful means, and this means negotiations. We won’t choose any other way to achieve our rights.”
And then the crowd went silent for a few seconds before bellowing out in laughter.
The question the Mueller report raises, but even after 2.5 years, nobody is asking: “What did Obama know, and when did he know it?”
Take yourself back in time…. back to any point in the post-Watergate era, specifically. But prior to Obama being president.
Now, imagine this: Several branches of the US government spy on the candidate for president from the opposing party. They get wire-taps from several agencies. They send in honest-to-god spies to infiltrate the campaign (they’ll call them “informants”, but they are not connected to the campaign and attempt to infiltrate, so they are spies). They illegally “unmask” US citizens who are recorded talking to foreign citizens under wiretaps that are required to only target foreign nationals. They pay upwards of $3.5 million dollars to foreign spies to get dirt of dubious veracity.
And this ends up with high-ranking members of the party bragging that they are going to impeach the opposing party candidate within hours of his election, showing that knowledge of this program of spying on a presidential candidate is widespread among the leadership of the party. High ranking members of the administration even take to the pages of the New York Times to brag about how they distributed classified information around the government to be leaked in order to precipitate the investigation that they believed would lead to impeachment.
Imagine what the reaction in the press is to these revelations. Are you imagining that the press would be breathlessly cheerleading the people who were spying on a presidential candidate? Are you imagining that they are reveling in the hope that political operatives for the previous president would be successful in using the threat of prosecution to get someone to roll over on the new president so they can have an impeachment? Are you imagining that they would be lionizing the president who oversaw all of this spying? Are you imagining that they would be cheering for the raid on the new President’s personal attorney?
If that is what you are imagining, I dare say you were not more than 5 years old when Obama took office. For those of us who were alive during Watergate, the reaction of the press to this scandal is unimaginable. And for a guy like Mathews, who was there for Watergate, to be on board with this stuff with such passion….. it truly boggles the mind.
Yeah well, Nixon was icky.
You missed the big difference. Watergate happened to a Republican, this was all orchestrated by Democrats.
Orange Man Bad! And to steal from the Washington Post, this is how a “democracy” dies.
It is called demoralization. I never would have dreamed it would work so well in this country, but there you have it.
Really? Do you forget the surplus, the wretched excess of salty prog ham tears after the last election? The Mueller report was their last hope for a redo. This is going to demoralize them like we’ve never seen. But expect the fringes of the party to turn violent.
If, 15 years ago or more, you had described the above and asked me which country this happened in I would have been guessing somewhere in South America or Africa. To see it happen right out in the open in the US… I have a hard time expressing all the feelings it gives me – none of them positive.
Eh. We all have to grow up sometime.
Archy – Max or Min- not even once.
He’s clearly a witch! Get me another Inquisitor!
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/435456-muellers-end-shifts-focus-to-new-york-prosecutors
This is also extremely dangerous. This is third-world banana republic stuff, the practice of using various legal jurisdictions to target political enemies with criminal investigations, particularly investigations that are primarily designed to elicit “process crimes” so that they can extort damaging testimony from someone positioned on the inside.
As far as I know, this all started with state democrats in Texas going after Tom DeLay with politically motivated investigations of extremely dubious quality. They pretty openly stated that their motivations were to “get” Tom DeLay because he was a prominent republican at the time.
Fast forward to today and we have an FBI that explicitly found evidence of several felonies by a Democrat candidate and covered it up at the direction of the (democrat) Justice Department, while the exact same people were involved in spying on the Republican candidate for President and would later be involved in strong-arming “cooperation” out of people associated with the campaign based on allegations that had nothing to do with the campaign. …. and yet failing to get their man. So they are off to other venues where perhaps people with even greater party-based motivation can go on enough fishing expeditions to accomplish their political goals.
When studied in the history books 75 or 100 years from now, this era will be looked upon as an embarrassment and a stain on our democracy. (and not just because we elected Trump the reality show star famous for saying “you’re fired”…. who was running against the wife of a popular former president.)
This is true. They are a disgrace of the worst kind.
investigations of extremely dubious quality
It’s more clear that those charges were for violations of laws that should have never existed.
“state democrats in Texas going after Tom DeLay with politically motivated investigations”
“Well, it was necessary. You see, DeLay was not one of us. He had not earned his stripes. He was from the bug exterminator class”
/sarc
And had this been a Hollywood movie script this – right now – would be the point where the GOP leadership takes charge and righteously uproots the corrupt FBI and DoJ. rounding up the bums and putting them behind bars. In reality, they just mewl and shiver, looking for their next chance to lick the hand of power.
too many links.
Do you want the IKEA of links again? This is how we get the IKEA links.
I’m trying to think of a really short ELP song.
Book of Saturdays?
And then I realize I confused ELP and King Crimson and slink away in shame
I just remember the one where he asks for a ladder,
‘Murica!
Derry Girls is good television. Sort of like Always Sunny but Irish schoolgirls in the 1990s.
Needs more redheads.
“More than 600 cities, counties and Native American tribes from 28 states have filed a federal lawsuit against eight members of the Sackler family — owners of the pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma LP — accusing them of creating the opioid addiction crisis through ownership of the company that manufactures the painkiller OxyContin.”
Yeh. That’s not good.
In a culture where irresponsibility and unaccountability is rewarded (think smokers who win against tobacco), forgive me if the plaintiffs win. In tobacco, at least they could argue subliminal advertising or whatever.
Personal agency. How does it work?
Look, they had to know that they were delivering more OxyContin to the pharmacies than the people actually needed if they were only using them for pain relief. Therefore, they were causing addiction on purpose!
(this is not a parody… this is actually the argument I’ve heard them using. In fact, it is the argument that the government has used to make sure that we can’t get narcotic painkillers for things like dislocations, sprains, gall bladder surgery…. because they have set quotas for pharmacies and doctors, and if they exceed the levels set by the government, they lose their licenses. And get prosecuted.)
As I understand it the FDA dictates to the drug companies the quantities of drugs they are allowed to manufacture. On top of that many FDA employees are also hired as consultants by the drug companies. It is a shitshow.
Starting down this path began with the concept of punishing, for example, gun shops for selling guns used to kill people. Since they can’t get what they want (gun control or confiscation) they’ll teach a lesson by punishing the class least at fault.
Do this for all goods and services perceived to harm society and it’s not hard to see this will have a chilling effect on enterprise and entrepreneurship.
Mix in a little retard Bernie ‘no one needs’ and you have a recipe for a productive retrenchment.
It is a multi pronged attack. Control drugs, healthcare, food supply, energy, information (press and internet) etc. It is textbook fascism and a grab for total power.
The thing that gets me is this coalition seems to be between the people who want to ban everything and the people who want to have workers paid more. If nobody can make anything, then nobody’s getting paid.
The case is basically a fraud case, alleging that Purdue and others created fake science to downplay the risks of time release opioids in order to create a lucrative new market.
Scientists and doctors creating results that their paymasters want? Why, I never!
800 signatories call for an end to hyped claims
except the hype won’t be going away. We can’t throw out good systems and methods because some people misuse them. Abuse and mistakes occur with fire, guns, cars, and everything else; P-values matter, and no over-arching method of weighing hypotheses and data is waiting in the wings that doesn’t have all the exact same vulnerabilities to abuse.
I didn’t notice about the example calculations, but there was some point about overlapping results seemingly contradicting each other; that could happen for a million reasons, but it can only be understood and reconciled by the next, better-constructed tests . . . one of the chief benefits of conflicting results is they help shape even more beneficial follow-up studies. But some of the results hardly matter at the individual level: two tests that both prove that X increases 20% might matter (from a fifth of the population to a third) or they might not (from one fiftieth to on thirtieth). And, anyway, are you really changing the way you drive based on the latest crash test results?
Let’s set aside abuse for a moment. By aggregation of an international standard, the P-test means that 5% of drug tests conclusions were wrong and 5% of all PhD were awarded for work results that don’t reflect reality. Okay, let’s reintroduce abuse: a great deal more than 5% of drug tests conclusions are/were wrong and PhD were awarded for nothing.
I’m not a statistician, nor did the engineering field I worked in rely on statistics to a significant degree (pun intended).
The takeaway I’m getting from that article is that they want to broaden the acceptance of what are currently statistically insignificant studies. Am I incorrect in that appraisal?
If so, it’s a horrible idea. We’re already flooded with bullshit studies from every angle.
“…to broaden the acceptance of what are currently statistically insignificant studies…”
See my comment above at #2 replying to leon. This is about peddling their global warming bullshit.
You have an uncanny ability to be right about these things, so I won’t bet against it.
But my initial read of what they were arguing is that p-values are too weak and have turned into a crutch for bad science to be passed off as good enough. However, I agree with Don that there is no silver bullet, no better methodology waiting in the wings, to save us from the scourge of p-hacking and 95% “confidence”.
Karl Pearson himself advocated for an alpha of .05 not as *proof* of a relationship, but as the point where we might *begin to suspect* a relationship, which ought to be pursued through further study.
I think the difficulty arises when, after studying the matter further, you cannot reach any definitive conclusions (or at least, not on the questions you want answered). The 5% threshold gives you (false) certainty (and lets you get published). The hard reality is that most effects we can study are not nearly as certain and clear-cut as gravity (which is not that simple, either), and that we often can’t identify the real variables that are causing the effect, stumbling around instead with loosely correlated variables that we can at least identify and control.
Well, sure. A 10% threshhold would let you get published even more. That doesn’t make it a good practice. Reality *is* hard and messy, but oversimplifying it and overconfidence in “results” for the purpose of winning glory and authority is a long-term disaster.
I agree entirely. My point is that the incentives are stacked not to the advancement of knowledge but the drawing of specious conclusions. Tighten, weaken, or ignore entirely the p-value threshold, and you’ve got the same underlying problem.
The problem with empirical research is that it is conducted by humans.
I, too, am not a statistician, but the field I work in relies heavily on statistics. So….
Yes and no. P-value thresholds are not fundamental rules of mathematics, but, quite literally, rules of thumb that have evolved from decades of research in a particular discipline. N.N. Taleb has done God’s work in showing how statistical inference is often fucked up by the researcher’s ignorance of statistics or knowingly abused. The problem is that most people dip their toes in basic stats and get the fundamental concepts, so the fact that null-hypothesis testing might not always be appropriate sounds like crazy talk to them as much as electron clouds/atomic orbital sounds crazy to someone who has only been exposed to the Rutherford-Bohr model of the atom. P-values and null-hypothesis testing assume frequentist probablity is correct and the data is tested against normal distribution. You may be familiar with the ways in which the assumptions of Bayesian statistical inference differ frequentist statistics; likewise, Taleb has shown that many natural phenomena exhibit more skewness or kurtosis than we would like to admit, and as such, an assumption of normality is inappropriate.
P-values matter – they do but not by themselves
Exactly. And I reject their claim at the beginning of the article that researchers will say at conferences “there was no difference between the groups.” I don’t think I have ever heard that spoken that way, and I have been going to medical conferences for over 30 years. The speakers will say or show their results, the statistical test(s) used, and say at most, the differences “were not statistically significant”.
And you need to have a point where you consider results to be significant, and even .05 is awfully high. You would like to see .001or better against placebo to really up your chances of FDA drug approval, for example.
One exercise I used to do with my intro stats class was to show that the number of wins of a certain MLB team was significantly correlated with the number of Atlantic hurricanes. We’d run the numbers, get a nice r^2, a p-value less than .05 . Everyone was amazed.
Then I showed them that what I REALLY did was run the correlation coefficient with all 30 baseball teams and cherry-pick the best one, which is almost always significant at .05 for the simple reason that there are lots to choose from.
Not usually a fan of Bonferroni corrections but clearly a case here. You would need to set significance threshold at 0.0016.
I agree that data hygiene and statistical rigor count more than the particular framework of statistical inference one employs, however, I disagree that the frequentist framework is the appropriate one in all cases – or even most cases.
White privilege.
Epitome of (reverse) racism.
Let’s concede it exists. Is it not because Western civilization is – cover your eyes and ears – white and white Christian?
Caucasians built this civilization. So to turn around and scream ‘white privilege’ is in essence calling for the reversal if not dismantling of those institutions and ideas Europeans (who are….mostly white leaving aside the endless mix of races and blood inside their veins) invented.
Question then becomes. What will the racist hacks pimping WP replace it with?
Just some mental (but not physical) masturbation.
That is exactly what it is about – dismantling the institutions that stand in the way of total power. What will they replace it with? A feudal system where the elite lord it over the serfs. Blow away all of the smoke and it is as simple as that.
nono equality utopia. Comments like this show people like you need to go to a nice reeducation camop.
A camp for adults?
Bonus points: A feudal system in which most of the elites and moneyed Lords will be… you guessed it, white progressives.
I forgot to add that. There will be a few non-whites also in order to keep their demographics in line but yeah, most of the non-whites will be cast away. Look at Cuba.
Caucasians built this civilization – ON THE BACKS OF SLAVES YOU MONSTER
Don’t pretend. We have your number, Pie.
i do not descend of people who had the means to own slaves. Anyway slavery was rather minor in Romania, but did exist ad it was mostly gypsies.
It was a joke.
I know still I need to signal my good working class roots.
No civilization developed in isolation. Case in point, your Judeo-Christianity is, by definition, an Asian institution that was eventually adopted by the Romans.
well the term Caucasians kinda implies that as well
Let’s not forget that the person who coined the term was a fucking idiot.
good taste in clothes though
That fucking forehead is huge. Looks like a god damn mutant.
Well, that’s just a sign of his superior Caucasoid brain.
He’s also remembered for his hit song “Mongoloid, he was a Mongoloid!”
Well, one problem with the “white privilege” concept is that “white” winds up just referring to whatever arbitrary group the user has decided to define as a socially-dominant group. Just doing that assumes a lot of facts not in evidence, so to speak, but even if it didn’t they’re tying social dynamics to appearance. So now they’re either arguing that the group they’ve named “white” is genetically superior and will breeze through life with power and privilege whether they live in Boston or Bali, or they’re making the tautological argument that members of a dominant social group have advantages in that society that members of other groups lack, which isn’t a genetic argument so much as a cultural or social argument.
All of this is to say that the people who drive the concept of “white privilege” either know that it’s meaningless and use it as a stalking horse to attack the foundations of modern Western societies, or feel very deeply about helping other people and addressing perceived injustices and are pretty much shootin’ from the hip without thinking about it too much.
OT question: how much of a blow to the legitimacy of the FedGov would it be if every US state had legal medical (and/or recreational) marijuana but the DEA still listed it in Schedule 1?
Its a bit hard to seriously argue a drug has zero accepted medical value when most states have doctors that prescribe that drug for a variety of specific ailments. It feels like mostly only stoners could be swayed by an argument that the FedGov clearly doesn’t represent the people that cited this example though.
It is about money. The war on drugs was too lucrative to make legalization possible until states figured out there was more money to be had in legalization. Until the feds get cut in on it they aren’t going to reschedule MJ.
In the olden days it was illegal AND taxable!
Most people are loath to question the legitimacy of government, or any of its organs or actions. Progressives have intimidated and conditioned people against doing that.
As to the money argument – also don’t forget big industry players like Altria and Bayer who are working behind the scenes to be able to get into the MJ business. These people are much better organized and effective than the stoners.
Not necessarily a starting strength fan but i did look at some of their stuff and when the barbell medicine guys started their offshoot I followed some of their stuff. The recently had a YouTube about nutrition in which they simply waive away the epidemiology as basically settled and move on to the important parts which are increased taxation and integral top down regulation by the central government of the entire food system for public health. it was very disappointing. The most childish arguments as well, starting with muh food deserts and taking just a little more from the mega wealthy… I would have taken the politics better if the science part was not unsubstantiated claims and little more. But it did amuse me when the guest proposed a cap and trade system for food justifying it by how well it worked for CO2…
How is that working out for Venezuela? For the USSR? China? It is funny how these kinds vehemently deny being communists yet all of their policies and policy recommendations are indistinguishable from those of communists.
just the tip
Lots of them think it’s working out pretty well for China, actually. They see it as Top Man Technocracy rather than True Communism. Indeed, if you look at the political parties in China that aren’t named the Communist Party, they are basically technocratic regulation advisory groups subordinate to the CPC. This is the ultimate dream, not of Marxist or Maoist communism (but where those can be a means to an end!), but Top Men in charge without all the messiness of democratic opposition and personal liberty. Consensus of the elite, propaganda to the plebes, and a reeducation camp or twenty to fix the ones who won’t conform.
I dont like labels very much. Everyone means something different when they use them. Much of what they are shooting for here is fascism yet I keep calling them commies. Neither is accurate. What they are doing is the same as they have done elsewhere…using a mix of different strategies that work and hanging their own label on it…in our case democratic socialism. International socialism, national socialism, bolivarian socialism, democratic socialism….whatever, it is all still socialism and in the end the results look very much the same.
you need to reread the socialist party twitter to see it is not real socialism
China checks every box for fascism. If they had a dictator figure it would be obvious to everyone, but so far they have smartly avoided that.
Xi Jinping is shaping up to fill that hole.
He is kind of alarmingly retrograde as far as the post-Mao leadership goes.
-500 social credits
Dovetailing with the above discussion, a lot of medicine/food/health studies are examples of the p-value problem. They are uncontrolled, often unreplicated, and generally unreliable (as in, you can conduct a study to show the opposite result with little adjustment). Yet people will springbroad from a single such nearly worthless* study to dictating “public policy” (read: rules for the little people). It is “scientific government” at its absolute worst, where the experimental core of science is thrown out, and the (wo)men in white lab coats are turned into quasi-dictators.
* = It’s nearly worthless because it’s only the starting point
in this case the settled science was saturated fat causes cardiovascular disease, which i don’t think is that settled. But the guy did not explain how it was s settled and did not touch any recent study like PURE. That bothered me. Or how European countries there is no correlation between sat fat and CVD. Address these things so a viewer understands why. Just threw some ad hominem insults to keto/paleo people and moved on o the politics, where he also made some unsubstantiated claims like the countries with the highest wealth inequality are US Australia and UK, which is not true no matter the data set I looked at.
and of-course they dismissed the notion of personal responsibility in diet completely. food deserts and must ban advertising sweets to children and raise the minimum wage etc…
What is interesting about saturated fats is that if you heat them up they become unsaturated.
*facepalm*
They are counting on people not knowing what saturated fats are.
Other way around. The pi system is reactive.
Like, Rippetoe’s starting strength?
yes. These guys Austin Baraki and Jordan Feignbaum started with Rip and then made their own thing. Rip was probably to libertarian for them
?Sunday, Slutty Sunday?
https://tinyurl.com/y4wn4wnr
Untertitten!
just the tip
Was there one real set in the batch? There sure as hell weren’t more than two.
Maybe 26? I’ll need to research the source material to be sure.
Also – 7, honey? Clean your bathtub.
It looked like the majority were real, but most were scrunched by the bras to make them look bigger, and thus looked fake.
For the fans-of-old-movies set. The other night, I watched Along Came Jones (on Amazon). I had forgotten what an excellent and amusing movie that was. Gary Cooper was perfect.
Thx added to watch list.
Gary Cooper was perfect.
That’s what Patricia Neal said.
Vegan Youtube is imploding.
There are many groups that I hate. The elderly. Children. Mormons. Progressives. I’d put most of these people into camps if I could. Or at the very least take the most prominent among them and give them helicopter rides. But the vegans?
There can be no half measures with this filth.
Also, would several of the females in the link.
Ditto. Totally not coincidentally the chicks who got back with the omnivore program.
The elderly. Children. – OMWC twice affected
Food weirdness is not the result of sane, level headedness. That this would happen was inevitable.
Same for any extremism…social, political, identity etc.
Food weirdness is not the result of sane, level headedness.
Is anything?
There are definitely vegans who seem to be doing it specifically so they can be smug, insufferable little pricks. I know quite a few vegetarians and have known a vegan or three in my life who weren’t awful, although one of the vegans listened to a lot of Earth Crisis, so there’s that. From the outside looking in, it seems like veganism is damned hard to pull off without being really thoughtful about nutrition. Like, vegan might not be, and I say this without judgment, a natural condition for the human animal, and not maintainable without technology. Obviously just eating whatever can’t get away from you has worked very well for us and continues to do so, and vegetarian diets seem to be pretty easy to do without suffering from nutrition issues, but vegan’s a tough row to hoe. In fairness, I think the same is true for the “paleo” diets and their variations.
“There are definitely vegans who seem to be doing it specifically so they can be smug, insufferable little pricks.”
There definitely are because for them it is all about signaling superior virtue. It is mostly only show. The ones I have known would happily eat a steak if they thought no one was looking.
‘Moderation in all things’ is the best dietary advice you can get.
As I’ve gotten older, I had to switch to going after fatter and less physically fit prostitutes for this very reason. I miss how game a good 105 pound methed out whore could be, but ultimately it’s safer and better for my back and knees. Trade-offs are a bitch.
Boy Wonder adds his two centavos
Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke has said he thinks it is “beyond the shadow of a doubt” that President Trump colluded with Russia for the 2016 election.
He made the comment Saturday during a town hall event in Charleston, where he called impeachment an “absolute last resort,” but added: “You have a president who, in my opinion, beyond the shadow of a doubt, sought to—however ham-handedly—collude with the Russian government, a foreign power, to undermine and influence our elections.”
“It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that once in office, the president of the United States sought to obstruct justice – first, by firing the principal investigator into what had happened in the 2016 election and then, in the light of day, tweeting at his attorney general to stop the Russia investigation,” O’Rourke continued.
Uh huh.
In my opinion beyond a shadow of a doubt the words “in my opinion” and the words “beyond a shadow of a doubt” cannot properly be used about the same thing in the same sentence. Similarly the words “Beto O’rourke” and the words “IQ above 70” cannot be used about the same person in the same sentence.
How can they let Trump off the hook? So far tonight, we have no reason to believe Trump is going to be charged by rhetoric in the document itself, in the Mueller report, he will not be charged with obstruction or of collusion, without ever having to sit down with the special counsel and answer his damn questions. How can that happen?”
We all know he’s guilty. Somebody get a rope.
Think it’s about time for some bacon and challah french toast.
[golf clap]
Full belly:)
Speaking of statistics abuse
For a whole generation, Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw defined the conventional wisdom in economics. He taught the university’s introductory course for 14 years. I read his best-selling textbooks to help prepare for grad school, and later used them when I taught undergraduate macroeconomics. When people say “Econ 101,” he’s probably somewhere in the back of their minds.
————-
Mankiw’s economics is based largely on classic ideas. The idea that the market is a mostly well-functioning system driven by rational actors engaging in voluntary trade for mutual benefit goes back to 18th and 19th century economists like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Leon Walras, and William Jevons. And the theory of supply and demand, which undergirds much of Mankiw’s introductory-level analysis, was formalized by economist Alfred Marshall, himself the author of a famous textbook called “Principles of Economics.”
But critics of Mankiw have always perceived a political slant. Mankiw’s first basic principle of economics asserts a fundamental tradeoff between economic efficiency and equality.
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Meanwhile, Mankiw’s approach to economics education may have a more subtle problem: an over-reliance on theory instead of data. Mathematical models and logic figure prominently in a Mankiw textbook, with supply and demand taking pride of place. But in the world of cutting-edge economic research, deductive theorizing has long been supplanted by empirical analysis:
It’s kind of a long-winded slam against Mankiw. He’s a “libertarian” after all. But the thrust is that economics needs more hard numbers and empirical research. This overwhelms me with dread, because the statistics, like the people who report on them, tend to be a little too squishy and manipulable for my liking. I don’t care who’s using it, the Demand Curve isn’t exactly as consistent as the rate of acceleration due to gravitational attraction.
What makes Smith believe that the empirical data won’t support the presuppositions of Austrian praxeology?
if you torture it enough it tells you what you want.
Bingo. We have plenty of studies to look at. The US experimented with a mostly free market while the soviets experimented with a top-down centralized one. Toss in all of the other experiments and the results are pretty clear.
In the joke that is today’s “empirical analysis”, none of that counts. You can’t turn it into a study in a published paper, you can’t assign it a p-value, and you can’t get “peer” reviewers to accept it. While the causes of the failure of the Soviet Union are more complicated than just capitalism-vs-communism, throughout the duration of its existence, the people of the USSR and communist countries under its influence were markedly poorer than their capitalist neighbors. They were consistently 20 years behind, the only real exceptions being in weapons (guns, tanks, missiles, etc.) but even then they had a substantial leg up from capitalism (whether directly through Lend-Lease or indirectly through espionage).
Lots of presumptions are proven on the macro or on the average despite lots of conflicting bits.
Ricardo makes some interesting predictions: Free markets tend to lead countries to excel in the industries in which they have a competitive advantage (France exports wine, Italy shoes, what have ye). But at the micro it is also true that France imports some wine, Italy imports many shoes, and so on. Looking back, do we look at the net to say Ricardo was correct or to the mishmash to say that he was wrong?
I’m the kind of guy whose first step in any analysis is skatters; regression can give a hard trend and point to strongest influencers, but there’s more to be learned from the mass. There are eddies in the Mississippi that flow “north” that can kill you even if your corpse will most assuredly ultimately float south.
All of those theories are born of empiricism. And unlike the “empirical analysis” of today, they involved actual observation. What passes for “emprical analysis” today is feeding bullshit numbers into biased computer programs and spitting out new bullshit numbers.
Stupid logic and deductive reasoning. I’m sure if we just looked at the data harder, we could build an economic perpetual motion machine with no tradeoffs necessary.
TW: NYT
An appeal to safety to bring back the manual transmission.
Like a lot of enthusiasts, I find my manual Boxster S to be more engaging on track, but it’s a bit… tedious when sitting in traffic.
He’s not wrong, but as you say, standard transmissions weren’t built for stop and go traffic.
I never liked traffic before, but since switching from automatic to manual, I now avoid traffic like the plague. It’s fun to drive… when you’re not shifting too often.
Some manuals are vastly easier to deal with in that situation. My BMWs were telepathic. My Subie is significantly less forgiving.
Yeah it might be a Subaru-specific problem. Getting my WRX into first gear is a chore.
Put down your vape pen when grabbing the shifter, bro.
Moving the shifter is easy. Balancing the accelerator, brake, and clutch pedals on varying slopes, that’s where it gets more complicated. Although it does have “hill start assist” which means you’re usually just balancing the accelerator and clutch.
I learned to drive on an automatic, so maybe I’m just missing some skill that native manual drivers have. But I’ve been driving stick for 5 years now and getting into first is still the hardest part. No stalls anymore, and rarely any burned clutch, but it’s nowhere near as smooth as shifting from first to second, second to third, etc.
Hmm, reverse might actually be slightly worse than first. I usually can’t leave the clutch out when reversing.
Practice, practice and more practice!
Use the handbrake on steep hills. Works great. I learned on a ranch truck 40 years ago, so I have a few more years on you, but I still prefer manuals.
Assuming they still exist on the U.S. market by that time, my next car will be a manual, too. I enjoy it, despite the occasional rough start getting into first gear.
When you say ‘getting it into first gear’, so you mean actually engaging the first gear or getting rolling in first?
I can get the car into gear and moving, but sometimes it will be sluggish for a couple of seconds (due to under-acceleration I assume), and other times there will be a slight jerk (due to over-acceleration).
I learned on my brother’s manual and living at the bottom of a steep hill that was the only way out of the neighborhood. What a shitshow.
I learned on manual, but my first car was a VW Scirocco, so it was much, much easier to handle than a WRX. My only experience in that regard was when I valeted for a nearby hotel, which involved driving a lot of cars in first gear without making their owners nervous. One guy showed up with a WRX STi. Beautiful car, but getting it to just pull off slowly in first was tricky; there was a narrow, narrow band between stalling out and chirping the tires.
From what I’ve read, Subaru does that on purpose. The accelerator is extremely sensitive… for about the first 10% of travel. They want the cars to seem “fast” (read: stupid). It’s still a great car, but one of the things that just about every tuner for it will do is change the accelerator response to be more linear.
My WRX STi is exactly as you described.
OTOH, with the 328xi, you could literally start it in any of the first three gears as long as you gave it enough gas.
Manual transmissions highlight the difference between motors with low end torque vs high end horsepower (think turbo vs displacement) when used in more demanding starting conditions. (hills, heavy loads, etc.)
Wow, that guy is all over the place. He bounces from fucking up because he won’t turn his head when backing up to planes falling from the sky. Impressive.
One of the biggest reasons that manuals are disappearing are CAFE standards. Most autos today deliver a couple MPG better than manuals. Also people are pussies.
I agree with his headline, though.
I don’t mind driving a manual in traffic. At all. It’s worth it when it comes time to do transmission work. My truck has a 10 speed auto. Probably just a tad more expensive to service than simply replacing the clutch.
I’ve had 3 cars go north of 150k miles and never had any transmission work done other than flushing the fluids.
Supposedly clutches are a consumable part? I’ve never had to replace one, and I’ve driven nothing but manuals since 1998.
Presumably you don’t regularly do burnouts, braking downshifts or use the clutch to hold your car at a standstill on a hill.
No, I haven’t. For some reason, I like using my brakes for braking. Houston parking garages were challenging, but I managed to never hit the person in front or behind me.
I know it can be cool to downshift for slowing down, but brakes are made to be consumable and are a hell of a lot easier to work on than a clutch. Plus a IC engine is not regenerative.
I downshift(ed) to slow down, especially in the snow, and on my motorcycle on gravel.
You shouldn’t slip the clutch during a burnout, just a bit at the start.
dumb Corvette owneer
I’ve done one – on a car I bought with 150K on it. I’ve never burned one out, either, but the point is, if you keep cars a long time, a clutch is pennies compared to an auto rebuild.
Pay walled for me.
Came across an ad in a 1950’s auto mechanics’ magazine recently that 4 out of 5 new cars at the time were automatics. Seems a bit high for my perceptions, but if so the sky has been falling for a long time.
It’s one of the arguments I make about my driving, if I’m speeding, I’m paying attention to everything going on. When I’m on autopilot and zoned out, my sub-conscious is just follwoing the taillights or bumper in front of me.
I switch to automatic with my new car after always driving manual. I miss it at times, but technology marches on. I don’t see any advantage to manual besides the “fun” part. But my 8 speed automatic is just too smooth and fast, it’s wonderful. Slushboxes, no more.
Guess How Much AOC Owes In Corporate Back Taxes
The amount is meh, but the situation is hilarious! And then there’s this:
She’s so precious.
I understand that people like AOC are sociopaths who don’t see, or more likely just don’t care, about their own manifest hypocrisy. But you’d think that they’d at least have a clue how other people will see this. Is she emblematic of the moral malaise of an entire generation?
“But you’d think that they’d at least have a clue how other people will see this.”
Many sociopaths cant see that either. It is a symptom of lacking empathy. They have to experiment and watch how people react. They learn it but they cant see it ahead of time. Look at the things Clinton said during the campaign. It was painfully obvious that that was what she was doing.
She’s a WoC, she’s precocious–I’m sorry, I mean she speaks truth to power–and she’s a Democrat. For a lot of people those are the only relevant facts. A lot of people also get most of their intellectual exercise on Twitter, so…
Well, business and government provide two completely different money making opportunities. In business, you need a good idea, hard work, and maybe some luck. In Congress, you just figure out how to fuck the business people out of what they were able to create.
So, basically, she’s doing it right.
basically, she’s doing it right
* golf clap * you’re onto something
What makes Smith believe that the empirical data won’t support the presuppositions of Austrian praxeology?
The discrepancies between per capita GDP numbers for Europe vs sub-Saharan Africa are going to require some serious massage to get to a happy ending.
Not really. The prepackaged answer is that neocolonialism is stealing all that wealth. International corporations set up shop, bribe the government, and then take all of the natural wealth and profits arising therefrom offshore.
Never mind that several countries (e.g. Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam) have managed to turn export-oriented industry into lasting economic success.
So you deny the economic reality called the Wakanda phenomenon?
You know, I almost Googled Wakanda phenomenon to see if that was an actual term coined by some prog recently.
And this is only possible because of corrupt local politicians. And you notice how they never try to prosecute people like Mobutu who sold out their own countries. Those companies paid their bills – it’s not their fault that the money never reached the people.
Indeed, and the same level of scrutiny is rarely applied to “foreign aid” getting exactly the same treatment and results (Dambisa Moyo notwithstanding).
There are basically three frameworks that could explain the discrepancy: environmental determinism (Guns, Germs, and Steel), cultural determinism, and genetic determinism.
I really enjoyed Guns, Germs, and Steel but I can’t help feeling that it’s too pat an explanation to work on its own.
It is cultural.
If you go to wild, undeveloped places it is easy to see the paucity of resources available and that holds true for nearly every place on earth. Some cultures are better at taking those and building on them to acquire more than others. If it were only environmental as Diamond claims then the european advantage would have manifested long before it did. It didn’t manifest until after the culture changed. If it were genetic then there would be no people of subsaharan descent working in technology or teaching difficult subjects. I think Diamond read too much HG Wells.
I suppose it’s possible that the right combination of interbreeding and killing from the Roman era to the late Middle Ages may have selected for a certain set of genes in the European population. Given how much the people of the time got around (there was a Viking kingdom in Sicily, for fuck’s sake), it’s hard to say anyone has “pure” genes tracing back to one specific pre-Roman tribe. But whatever those genes might be, nobody in the modern day has identified them.
I am going to argue that it is purely cultural. Africa has as much resources as europe, maybe more so. I dont think europe has anything africa doesnt other than shitty weather. I think Diamond argued that africa did not have the horses and cattle that europeans had access to but that is bullshit. Long before the european ascent africans had imported them and better, they had camels.
Also, as you mention over time there has been a lot of gene mixing. African decended people when raised in western culture are indistinguishable in their behavior and ability than their european decended counterparts.
It’s cultural. There, the science is settled.
Manual transmissions in traffic: if you resign yourself to chugging along at a slow but steady pace, instead of lurching forward and then jabbing the brake pedal, it’s annoying, but not really that big of an ordeal.
Unfortunately, people are stupid.
exactly correct
I continue to point to traffic as the clearest model for mass behaviors: sociology, culture, law. The clown in front of you of who can’t merge gets to vote, is managing an investment portfolio, will misdiagnose your plumbing problem. The layout you are traversing is of mediocre construction and design to solve priorities of ten years ago (at the least). Traffic proves that the best salve for people is distance.
Save me: the same logic that tells me that government should be tiny because people are stupid also tells me that almost no one should have the right to vote. Only if government is so small that it doesn’t matter will I be comfortable with the people in traffic getting to vote in its (government’s) members.
Impossible to do in cities. Leave or maintain a gap and you’re slamming on the brakes as someone cuts in.
^This. My daughter has learned more profanity as a result of some idiot seeing a car length between the car in front of me and my truck and thinking, “Herpity derp, why’s this guy driving sooo slooow? I’ll do it better!”
You’ve been listening to the wrong “elites”
In 2006, a few months before heedless financialization plunged the world into economic crisis, an Economist cover story ecstatically praised Goldman Sachs for its mastery of risk, hailing “the development of huge markets in swaps, derivatives and other complex and often opaque instruments.”
This was an instance of what George Orwell once identified as a “major mental disease,” an “instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible.”
Such diseases tend to spread during a time of hectic and bewildering change. “Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the end of the Establishment,” a timely new book by Aeron Davis, a political communication professor at the University of London, argues that “Globalisation, turbo capitalism, financial engineering and new communication technologies have destabilised and disoriented elites as much as anyone else.”
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There should be no doubt that much rage against this self-perpetuating elite was released into the vote for Brexit.
How then can such an establishment save itself? No society can do without elites. But it is also true that no elite can survive in a democracy without holding itself accountable.
Don’t listen to those bad elites. Listen to the elites I trust.
After all, the elites in Brussels know what they’re doing.
So, we need to slow everything down so the elites can catch up?
“No society can do without elites.”
Yeah, go blow that out of your ass somewhere else. No society can survive without competent individuals. The word ‘elite’ implies something that every society is better off without.
Not gunning for anyone, but wrong elite is simply tautology.
If I like an elite, I point to his successes (self-made millionaire, hotel chain) and ignore his trappings (Penn, random personality and frequent unhinged outbursts, family business, loans, multiple bankruptcies, creepy personal history and creepier associations). If I dislike an elite, I ignore his successes (electric cars will fall of their own weight) and upbraid him for his trappings (Penn, random personality and frequent unhinged outburst, multiple citizenships).
Most people just talk in circles, but it boils down to my guy is my guy. I’m far from a Trump or Brussels guy, but rest assured that there is another layer of British failure in the works, and the elites responsible for them will simply be British . . . and the same folk will be arm-wrestling and nay-saying and our elites versus your elites about it a generation on.
In other news, all of you are now pedophiles:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-6844591/Isabela-Moner-stands-Kids-Choice-Awards-trailer-Dora-Lost-City-Gold-debuts.html
Please report to the nearest center to register your name and pick up your van. Try to arrive early to avoid the line.
Hey, 17 is age of consent in a lot of states.
Old maid at this point.
Moner, eh?
Better than cryer.
She looks a hell of a lot better as Dora than in that hideous pink outfit and the kissy-lips.
Better than bunnyphile.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8679033/marks-and-spencer-easter-egg-viral-rude/
Sigh. Must be my age, but she does absolutely zero for me.
You’re too old, or is she?
She’s 17?!?! Dude. I’m not that old, and I wouldn’t card her for booze. 17 looks a hell of a lot older these days.
To me anything under 30 looks like a kid.
Psh. Male Gazin’ a 17-year-old don’t make one a pedo.
Who was it that would pay $10k to fuck Dora in the ass? He was so delightfully serious about that. I don’t want to imagine what his sock drawer looks like after mackin’ on that.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Guaido, if he ever becomes President, will also turn out to be a corrupt PoS.
I’m not betting against that.
I’m trying to process some unsettling news I learned about by best friend that ran askew of the law. So to work through it, Im gonna day-drink, rub some ribs, and listen to some Quebec Redneck Bluegrass Project.
Funny, a good friend of mine I’d known since high school is getting out of a federal pen after seven years and I believe five months for the kind of thing you’d generally skin someone alive for doing, and I doubt that any of his friends will be there to greet him since we’ve all got kids. If that gives you an idea.
Nice work if you can get it.
https://hotair.com/archives/2019/03/24/baltimore-bookgate-continues-books/
*pugh* *pugh* *pugh*
They don’t need no stankin books. All of the students already know they will vote for Democrats. That’s all the lurnin they need.
From what I’ve read, Subaru does that on purpose. The accelerator is extremely sensitive… for about the first 10% of travel. They want the cars to seem “fast” (read: stupid). It’s still a great car, but one of the things that just about every tuner for it will do is change the accelerator response to be more linear.
I had a rental car (not a Subaru) which did exactly that. It had (I assume) an eccentric throttle cable actuator which made the first ten per cent of pedal travel drive the first thirty five or forty per cent of butterfly actuation. I had to power brake the stupid thing to keep the nose down. It was intensely annoying.
There are more Subaru Crosstreks in this neighborhood than any other car. By a large margin.
My Tuscon has something called sport mode that if I turn on, makes it a little zippier. Not sure exactly how that works, but I turn it on because it makes part of the dashboard lights orange and I like the way it looks.
Usually that feel is created by lifting shift points to hold a lower gear longer on the way up and also allows for more engine-braking on the way down. With pickups it’s called “towing mode.”
This takes up a stupefying fraction of automotive projects. I remember reading about Porsche design principles: 50/50 front/rear weight and liner pedal input/output design, this from the Carter (Schmidt?) administration.
There’s linkage and hysteresis in all automotive systems even if they’re “purely” digital because the outputs are abundantly mechanical. There are gears and levers and steppers and whatnot that all need to be tuned so that most people will get what they expect when they move a knob or thumb a lever X percent. When you turn the temperature dial on even a cheap HVAC control, you’re twiddling with at least $250k worth of design, programming, tooling, testing, more programming, and more testing; the slightest changes in space under the dash, under the hood, or over the hood will render all the old knowledge moot.
Almost no one in the industry will admit that we’re no better off on base systems with all this expense that we were in 1968 with slider levers and bowden cables.
Now, automatic temperature control (set it and forget it) is something I can get behind, but that’s all feedback: hysteresis can be ignored. Braking into a corner is another kettle of fish: no scenario in which it can ever be ignored.
ps- That nonlinear throttle control is great for your race car, where you drop the hammer and then spend the majority of the time at or very near WFO. Not so much for stop-and-go traffic.
Leo: The Hanged Man, reversed – Selfishness, crowds, voters
This one sucks. By reversed, does it mean you will end up wishing for the sweet embrace of death?
Good one, dumbass.
*moves to proper thread*