please don't go to film school

cities, economics, higher ed

[missm0ss-deactivated20151117]

Do you have a plan or idea of what you would do in case of a dollar collapse, martial law, or whatever is soon to come? It's so distressing, I feel like a sitting duck & I want to be prepared in any way I can.

I get this question a lot. My advice to you is pretty simple and stating the obvious:

Do what you can, with what you have, wherever you are.

I feel like people prefer to spend time being distressed than actually doing what is within their power to be prepared for whatever may come. And by preparing, the things necessary are not that different from what rural families still do and have done for decades:

ensure you have access to basic survival necessities (food, water, warmth, shelter, first aid) 

ensure you have means to self-defense

diversify your wealth/property if possible (to attempt to retain some wealth and be able to barter with it)

develop contacts and friends you can potentially rely on

expand your knowledge of practical skills

know yourself

My final advice to you is to stop letting negativity and dread dominate your feelings. Yes, you are one small cog in a very large machine. You cannot stop the turning of history or determine what time you were born into. But you still have the right to self-determination and access to very basic, affordable measures for preparation. You can still decide how to act in the time that you are given.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

People worried about “dollar collapse,” ca 2014

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

Remember that libertarians/austrians thought we were facing imminent dollar collapse last year.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

dollar hasn’t collapsed yet. maybe austrians revised their position?

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

As sort of a masochistic project I’ve been trying to simulate some Medicare Part A/B/D data in Excel. I’ve come to really enjoy doing this stuff outside of stat packages. It feels more like a toy than writing scripts or plugging in commands and forces you to think a little more precisely about what operations you’re actually doing. Also pretty pictures.

Above I’m trying to model everything using random walks which I thought of as sort of the general baseline for time series work. But the random walks don’t look anything like my samples! That’s because as stochastic processes the payments I track have virtually no interesting features. They are best described as a straightforward average. This is actually pretty great news - more evidence that a full-on Medicaid simulation is possible without doing any serious time series work.

[missm0ss-deactivated20151117]

Do you have a plan or idea of what you would do in case of a dollar collapse, martial law, or whatever is soon to come? It's so distressing, I feel like a sitting duck & I want to be prepared in any way I can.

I get this question a lot. My advice to you is pretty simple and stating the obvious:

Do what you can, with what you have, wherever you are.

I feel like people prefer to spend time being distressed than actually doing what is within their power to be prepared for whatever may come. And by preparing, the things necessary are not that different from what rural families still do and have done for decades:

ensure you have access to basic survival necessities (food, water, warmth, shelter, first aid) 

ensure you have means to self-defense

diversify your wealth/property if possible (to attempt to retain some wealth and be able to barter with it)

develop contacts and friends you can potentially rely on

expand your knowledge of practical skills

know yourself

My final advice to you is to stop letting negativity and dread dominate your feelings. Yes, you are one small cog in a very large machine. You cannot stop the turning of history or determine what time you were born into. But you still have the right to self-determination and access to very basic, affordable measures for preparation. You can still decide how to act in the time that you are given.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

People worried about “dollar collapse,” ca 2014

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

Remember that libertarians/austrians thought we were facing imminent dollar collapse last year.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

I've been thinking about college again. Commented on an NPR piece about grad school in the sciences and several people told me that my assumption that many college students are slackers, particularly in the humanities, is very wrong. I'm curious now if I'm generalizing a bit too much from my experiences at Duquesne. Duquesne is not an incredible school. In my little PA education universe, I put it behind the state-subsidized schools like Penn State and Pitt but ahead of state-operated schools like Bloomberg and Slippery Rock. 

I used to have a lot of research on this kind of on hand, but right now my biggest quantitative bulwark is when Wesleyan started enforcing it's grading scale. They saw a massive movement of students from (in one migratory stream) sociology to economics, because the mean grade in economics was going up and the mean grade in sociology going down. Basically shows that students are estimating their position in the grading distribution as a sort of cost and weighing that against the value of the degree. 

So I might prefer sociology because it's "easier" (or its realization at my undergrad is easier than alternatives) despite giving me less of what I want (be that job prospects, technical skills, esteem, grad school placement, etc). But if I raise the cost by making it difficult, or lower its value by reducing my apparent position in the skill distribution, then the parameters change.

[johnricco]

Streetcars are a pretty inefficient means of moving people around. Even most support-all-transit-at-any-cost fanatics will admit that. So instead of selling streetcars on actual transportation benefits, advocates claim they spur development. This is a point that I have mixed feelings about – I...

[johnricco]

If workers could freely move to places where their marginal product would be higher then our country would be 1.7 trillion dollars richer. 

[johnricco]

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more preposterous rationale for NIMBYism. It’s really, really hard to sympathize with someone who feels that:

Accommodating demand for housing is in no way different from forwardly racist real estate tactics from the early 1900s

Restricting growth increases diversity, whatever that might mean

They’re entitled to free (read: subsidized) street parking

By the way, this white building is what they’re talking about. The deadful, out of place, neighborhood character-destroying home in the middle:

And I wonder why I can’t afford to live in Adams Morgan. 

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

functional cities that can accommodate lots of growth are really important to the liberal project in the US. if you want European levels of government efficiency and a more inclusive, diverse country, you need to start by making cities denser and that means deregulation.

[johnricco]

A friend directed me to this awful BloombergBusinessweek article (?) yesterday in which the authors claim that there is no link between CEO pay and company performance. This is a wholly reasonable conjecture; it’s possible if not likely that corporate executives’ salaries are decided by a...

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

College was probably a lot harder before computers were cheap

Even when I was a freshman in college I took my writing pretty seriously. I would rate myself as one of the more thorough readers in my class but what I did necessarily pales compared to the efforts of the typical college graduate in the 1970s. Before digital journal archives one would physically find and search through journal volumes. The mind boggles at the tedium this would have involved. 

Digital searching of books was also not an option. One would have read several entire books probably before putting down a single word. Even as one of the more dedicated researchers I would read at most several chapters of a book. So college students back in the day were probably much smarter and had more balanced opinions on lots of issues then I did.

Now the nice (?) thing about our thesis process is that you do have to read pretty much the whole field pretty much cover-to-cover (perhaps skipping over some of the more arcane formulae). But the tools I had (like Stata and Jstor and word processors) gave me an unspeakable advantage over the hand-calculated/ink-based technology of the past. In short, most students (myself included) won't have an experience that brings them remotely close to that of the Ancients.

Coincident with this trend is the decline in the NPV of a bachelor's degree and a gargantuan increase in the amount of master's degrees. It would be cool to measure this more precisely.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

We can now pay very low prices with lower transaction costs which is good for efficiency in digital markets

It's hard to find anything in a store that costs 1 penny. There is one place where people still dream of 1 cent sales: the Internet. NPR's planet money team reports on the value of the virtual penny.

Why is this important? Economists have a particular type of public good called a utility. Utilities have diminishing marginal costs but high fixed costs. A good example is a large park like the one in my hometown. Even on very busy holidays, there is lots of space to enjoy and it rarely feels crowded. My presence in the park does a trivial amount to diminish the value of the park for other people.

So how should we distribute a good like a park? It still costs money. There are park rangers that need paid and trails that need laid. So we could charge everyone a fee to enter that would be roughly equal to the average cost of operating the park. But with each visitor, the average cost decreases. So the park operator needs both the scale offered by low prices and the up-front money offered by higher fees. Managing this tension is very difficult and this is why you see public operation of parks (and roads and other similar goods), because the true marginal cost is zero.

Today, we are dealing with similar problems posed by a slightly different class of goods. MP3s, operating systems- the marginal cost of production is very low. I can "manufacture" a song on my computer at a trivial cost, simply by copy-pasting it. This is an economic explanation of why people steal software and media all the time. The "true" price is zero. The price you pay is really the average cost of the good. So it would be efficient to scale up production of these things by reducing prices (optimally to very close to zero).

But there isn't a compelling political reason to fund the distribution of video games or OSX so we still have to pay for some of these things (although in line with economic theory Apple has stopped charging for its OS). 

In comes this new technology that reduces transaction costs on the internet. In the past, it cost about 30 cents to transact anything digitally. Now that those costs have fallen its economical to charge lower (and closer to optimal) prices for digital goods. Which is great.

I got a B in public economics. 

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

Reading through Harley Brown’s fiscal policy, some troubling contradictions. However I think the two less-than-mainstream candidates made some salient points on forest management and federal land use.

[whatshouldbetchescallme]

Reblogged for Sabrina the Teenage Witch

[mf1337-deactivated20190311]

SonicSpike writes: “In a recent interview, Senator Rand Paul said there’s one thing he would change about Bitcoin: it should be backed by something with intrinsic value, like stocks. He said, ‘I was looking more at it until that recent thing [sic]. And actually my theory, if I were setting it up,…

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

This is actually brilliant because it would lead to default monetary easing during a recession. Stocks crash and your money is worthless so everybody rushes to spend it. It's similar to Miles Kimball's digital money idea. Although I think the Pauls are agains that? Hyperinflation?

[theheritagefoundation]

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

Banks make loans. Loans are not free. In 2013 the Ex-Im bank made a net $1 billion off "hostile regimes" like China and Russia. If you're going to spread around crap from Heritage at least google it first. Additionally: are you against trading with other countries? Wasn't it trade and engagement from the US that opened China to the extent it is today? Isn't it Russia's global economic integration thats forced it to spend $4 billion in reserves propping up the ruble?

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

It would be easier to pick a major if you worked for a few years

One of the econ majors graduating with our class is 27. He has a very clear idea of his interests that he didn't have as an integrated marketing and communications major and fraternity brother 9 years ago.

Had this guy had exposure to marketing (which he hates) and public policy (which he likes) he might not have spent four years and a lot of money on a degree that he regards as pretty much a complete waste. 

I think education costs would be a lot lower if people knew what they wanted to do when they started. But it's impossible to do that because you need a degree to work. If you could figure out a way to get people career exposure without degrees that would reduce a lot of the pressure on kids to immediately start college following high school and possibly constrain price increases.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

Ethicist argues that computer subroutines and video game characters are about as sentient as some insects, deserve a degree of moral consideration

Brian Tomasik argues that consciousness is a spectrum, and even the simplest processes — like computer opponents in video games — can be conscious. It's much worse, he says, to kill an animal than a bot, but the bot still matters.

I think the implications of this are really interesting. Jains wear masks to avoid accidentally inhaling bugs (and microbes?) Imagine a sort of parallel to kosher eating where you had AI-friendly computing practices that preserved the integrity of different computing processes. We would have sprawling archives (catacombs) to preserve all these barely-thinking-things we create on a daily basis and don't even think about.

[vulgareconomics]

Could a higher capital gains tax be used to manage the hyperinflation libertarians are worried about while allowing the fed to keep interest rates low?

[objectivistnerd]

Why do we want interest rates low, again?

[libertarian-dharma-initiative-d]

To spend, spend, spend!

[vulgareconomics]

To feed the ponzi scheme that is the capitalist system.

[pleasedontgotofilmschool]

The eventuality "hyper-inflation" has already been planned for. The Fed got the ability to pay interest on reserves in 2008. When liquidity demand starts to decrease due to improving animal spirits, they will raise this rate in order to control outflow of reserves.

Whenever a libertarian asks about the excess reserves just tell them to Google excess reserves. The Fed is very transparent about this.