Malarkey73

It's just really difficult to understand what this means.

The first big caveat is that 1990s to 2010s stops at the financial crisis. Due to austerity the UK has since then seen the greatest period of wage stagnation of all the advanced nations except Greece. But employment has remained high. So whilst the report is a picture of time before the crash its not clear to me what has happened since.

Second - Yes I think I do care more about the overall level of poverty and inequality. I'm not happy if people are moving in and out of destitution.

Third - I really don't understand how to square this analysis with the obvious fact that half as many people own their own home now as in the 80s. For 25-34 year olds its gone from 65% to 27% during the period of this study . What's that downward income mobility? I sthat a good thing? Or does that not count as it's not income?

.. I just don't really know what this is saying..?

The article uses the same "tone" that we regularly use to write about the Romans - who crucified people, ritually strangled prisoners during their triumphs, kept slaves, and made people fight to death for their fun. That said I'm not sure the Gauls or Parthians or Carthaginians were saintly.

I don't think the author is implying that the Aztecs were better or the same or worse than Tlaxcala or Cortez conquistador. The neutral tone is adopted for European and Native American ancestors alike because of the separation of time not cultural sensitivity. And so we adopt this historical voice because we realise that the past was bloody and awful and the same society that had Cicero also had Crassus crucifying 6000 slaves along the Via Appia during the same lifetime. And the same people who built towers of skulls were enslaved and wiped out by Cortes.

But honestly it's not a competition. You adopt the neutral tone to avoid endless whataboutery.

I'm sure there are plenty of bad actors who will keep spamming regardless. Thankfully those ones seldom get through my spam filter - so barely trouble my consciousness.

Indeed. I was reading a tragic article about the energy cost of bitcoin and I started to wonder how much energy, bandwidth,HD space is totally wasted on sending everybody spam, junk, messages every day that they will never read. And keeping info for the same. I wonder if it is a reasonably large chunk of the total energy and infrastructure of the whole web?

Maybe we could power a big Chinese city just by getting ourselves deleted from gym mailing lists (weirdly a gym in Cardiff sends me spam mail -- I have never been to Cardiff???).

Here in UK I have been receiving about 5-10 emails a day from various companies - most of whom I don't remember - telling me I need to sign up again so they can keep my details and keep spamming me.

Fantastic.

Hear hear...

ditto the UK. Took virtually no refugees but rents still increasing ... hmmm something wrong with this theory?

Seriously though in the UK we have had immigration over the last 20 years and that must have led to higher demand and prices. Best estimates are about 20% in 20 years in England.

https://fullfact.org/immigration/have-house-prices-risen-bec...

BUT

English house prices have risen by 320% on average over this period.

Other factors are - getting married later, more single people, more divorced couples, and financialisation of housing.

Probably a similar story in Berlin.

I'm honestly more tired of essays about p-values than p-values.

It's true that like all metrics if it becomes a target then it maybe abused (Goodharts Law).

However if you abolished p-values people would start hacking or misunderstanding priors or confidence limits or OR.

It's an easy dumb stat that most anyone can do in excel and most everyone recognises. The emphasis should be that it remains a quick shorthand for casual use but that more complex studies have more sophisticated models and probabilistic reasoning.

But the emphasis on the p-values is bizarre. As best illustrated by JT Leek the pipeline of data research has multiple points of failure that may lead to false findings or irreproducible research. But we talk very little about them whilst essays about p-values come out every week...

https://www.nature.com/news/statistics-p-values-are-just-the...

Nope that's not my claim. Try reading what I wrote.

If I understand you correctly. Nobody had run a 4 minute mile before Roger Bannister.

Now lots of people have so standards must have dropped.

1. I don't mention nor advocate social justice. 2. I don't anywhere imply everyone should be average. 3. I don't say ability is random among the population but I don't actually understand what you are getting at here? 4. If we couldn't lift the ability of pupils or indeed people generally then we would still be living in caves. If we educate more people better then more people will be better educated no matter their innate starting ability. 5. Did the government make everyone smarter or lower standards you ask? I can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that moving from 3.4% to 50% University population has possibly diluted the fraction of geniuses within academia but greatly increased the number of geniuses within academia and improved education and academia as a whole.

That presumes

That the top 3.4% really were just the smartest - not the also the wealthiest and best connected. There is probably both some dilution of talent and also more competition from all levels of society.

And as to point 1. In the UK at least there is no doubt many many more are doing a lot better at school nowadays. Schools have evened up and pupils work far harder as most jobs require qualifications.

"He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do."

It's interesting itself that more women graduate than men. But equal pay means equal pay for people with similar qualifications doing similar jobs. This comparison means nothing to me.

I'm in the UK not US so I'm n to totally sure what sort of fake news US electors get.

However during Brexit and UK elections I get political ads and memes via FB. Google don't push that stuff at me.

Google if it (rarely) pushes politics at me pushes links from political parties or identifiable campaign groups. So if it is lies or fake then I and others can hold them to account.

FB often seems to be pushing fake stories - sometime started by fake users - actually started by who knows who. So Propaganda can't be held to account.

Actually I think Twitter problems are more similar to FB - except they maybe lack the deep profiling of social networks that FB have.

I know Google is profiling me and harvesting my data. But it's not using me to harvest my friends information.

I know Google is targeting ads at me - and they maybe AB tested. But those ads are from real companies or organisations - they aren't fake bots or astroturf groups algorithmically designed to tell me what I want to hear.

I'm sceptically watchful of Google, I feel I have a social contract with them where they use me and I use them. I think Facebook has way overstepped that mark.

Loved that.

If they have such cheap power (nearly free minus maintenance and capital) from hydrothermal - why can't they convert it to electricity to power lamps?

It's economic for Marijuana producers even in countries with high energy costs. I know bananas are not so high value - but then the energy is cheaper?

I think he is being disingenuous. Maybe he started it as an experiment but it's obviously been all about the Benjamins for a long time (20-25 writers? $10000-30000 a month?).

I've always thought of it in the way that if you went to an area like Yosemite or Font (bouldering) - then for every 100 people messing about, then 10 of them would be able to climb (5.12, Font 7a+) and 1 of them would be climbing (5.13, Font 8a).

Those difficulty conversion are possibly way way off and this areas may attract particularly good climbers ... but my point is the scale is logarithmic in the sense of how many people can achieve each tick level.

"Epistemology" is probably the best word.

Yeah - but they weren't votes from "real Americans" ;)

The first thing I want to know from an "everything you want to know about all-hands" article is :

What is an 'all hands'?

I think it's possible to create a hybrid whereby your personal AI - has access to those external systems to check public (maps, search) and cloud data (calendar, mail).

But it stores the private data about your location, your searches, your purchases. this could even be an encrypted private fire-walled bit of cloud rather than a robot in your house.

The point being your AI is serving you. And you can delete/edit this private data (or even the whole AI) if you wish.

(IMHO) Absolutely everything in that response is completely wrong:

1. Railways are a real and concrete example of wrongheaded privatisation.

2. More congested roads are not an alternative to efficient rail services.

3. The greatest technological innovations of our time from cancer drugs to satellites to the internet are spin-offs from government funded research. I could bore on all day about this...

4. A good education system is an externality in that society as a whole benefits from highly trained doctors, engineers and even in my view artists and poets. It is a profoundly social enterprise that we all have a stake in.

5. Public education maybe messed up in the US (I don't know it well) but it's doing just fine through much of Europe and the UK - or even in profoundly free market economies like Singapore. Indeed the UK in particular where the tensions in education exist over school placement and better/worse schools within the public system illustrate that educational variation is usually down to social status and economics - not public ownership.

The EU commission are judge jury and executioner because Eire are cheating the rest of the EU by being a tax haven. They are booking sales made throughout the EU in Eire purely artificially and Apple paying v little tax on them.

The EU are judge jury and executioner because Eire are part of the single market of free trade and free movement. So they are asserting Apple and Eire stop taking us for a ride.

Indeed - I think it's unclear how you should begin to teach R now. There is a lot of legacy stuff that you may need to recognise if you want to understand the help documentation. But if you wanted to seriously work in R it maybe better to skip straight to ggplot2, dplyr and broom without touching base R, the apply functions, and list in list in list hell.

Idiomatic R has changed enormously with the growth of Magrittr the ℅>℅ operator, dplyr and now broom. Code by expert users is unrecognisable from that of a few years ago.

This is an odd article because the main "demagogue" featured is John Bright who was more regarded as an economic and social reformer and great parliamentary orator.

He may have aroused strong passions but was far from a populist having lost his seat opposing the then popular Crimean War.

Just because a newspaper - presumably a politically opposed newspaper- once called him demagogue doesn't make him so. Especially odd as the article ends by defining demagogues as unable to face their opponents in debate - the very talent that John Bright is historically remembered for.

I'm sorry - I don't mean to imply that Germany is all powerful. The power dynamics of different EU institutions are complex and sometime unwieldy. And often a single country can block something. However I respectfully disagree with your last sentence - assuming each country has equal power is not reality but fantasy.

Influence in the Euro institutions is largely determined by the size of the economies and their contributions to the budget. Germany is first among equals.