Week 48

NYTimes

There are about 10 million prime-age men [25-54] who are not working.

Not bad

According to FRED, there are 51.282 million in this demographic, working, and according to this, this group has, "39.9% (male 63,452,792/female 63,671,631) [in total 127123]". Then 63.452 - 51.282 = 12.170 million prime age men are unemployed. NYT's number is a lot closer to the one we calculated.

In comparison FRED's own unemployment number here says 2.572 million. I think gov agencies are purposely playing with the definition of unemployment so that unemployment numbers (hence rates) come out looking lower (that's why we worked backwards from employment numbers not trusting their unemployment numbers). But simple arithmetic reveals what is going on. They do this for overall unemployment numbers BTW. According to this, prime  age unemployed overall is at 4.864 mil, employed are 95.684. When added up, their numbers give 100.548 mil. But this demographic should have 127.123 mil people in it! Where did the rest (27 million) go? Did they all find jobs in Mars?

What they are doing is akin to adding up 3 with 1 and coming up with 10. Actually... scratch that. They're not even doing that. What they are saying is "forget about the 10, forget about the 3. Just look at 1. It's such a low number isnt it!?".

Foreign Policy

The U.S. government seems outraged that people are leaking classified materials about its less attractive behavior. It certainly acts that way: three years ago, after Chelsea Manning, an army private then known as Bradley Manning, turned over hundreds of thousands of classified cables to the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks, U.S. authorities imprisoned the soldier under conditions that the UN special rapporteur on torture deemed cruel and inhumane. The Senate’s top Republican, Mitch McConnell, appearing on Meet the Press shortly thereafter, called WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, “a high-tech terrorist.”

More recently, following the disclosures about U.S. spying programs by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency analyst, U.S. officials spent a great deal of diplomatic capital trying to convince other countries to deny Snowden refuge [..]

The deeper threat that leakers such as Manning and Snowden pose is more subtle than a direct assault on U.S. national security: they undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it.

Slam dunk

Comment

[Paraphrasing] Arabs messed up big time, Middle-East always in deep shit, they should do some naval gazing.. Etc..etc..

Do that, but notice it is an unlucky geography

Starting from the pharaohs, then Rome and until / including Ottomans, these people have been living under adverse conditions, blatant barbarism for very long time. The discovery of oil in the region made things worse - France, Britain then US basically caused a lot of mess in the region. There are many examples of this, I'll give the main ones.

Installing minority regimes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq: the idea was that the rulers of these countries hailing from minorities themselves, would always be scared and would depend on "outsiders" (France, Britain) to stay in power. It worked. Scared ruler, pissed-off street. Great dynamic right? The exact preconditions you need for development (not).

Until he became the leader of his country, Saddam was a regular thug; he was handpicked by US to become what he became. And he ruled his coutry like a thug. Not much development, but he knew war, so when mullahs came to power in Iran and executed all senior military officers, Saddam thought "aha here's my chance" bcz their military was gone, right, so aided (probably egged on as well) by US, he attacked Iran. Mayhem, squared.

CIA toppled the democratically elected leader of Iran (Mosaddeq). Which caused f--king mullahs to come to power in the first place.

Kuwait: I am convinced Saddam was fooled by US officials and was told "it's okay to attack this little country" and that US would support Saddam on that. Saddam did invade but was (of course) left out there by himself. His action furthermore legitimized the counter-attack on his regime and the US military/industrial complex had a field day. Great passing / pick-and-roll there between the underlings in US gov and the top dogs. The top only sees guy invading, so he can stay above the fray, give great speeches and order the military in, while the underlings, unbeknownst to him, did the dirty work to get the guy invade.

Then Iraq was invaded by US en masse under false pretenses. At this point it was like, why the hell not?

Unconditional support of Israel caused mayhem on Egypt and Syria (who were attacked preemptively by Israel).

Enough examples?

Actually it is a miracle the Middle East is not worse off today. Having said that however, ppl in the region must work twice hard because of all this bullshit, otherwise the conditions they find themselves in will never change.

Commentators

Middle East is part of Europe

Maybe

Some are trying to extend European cultural underpinnings to include all of Middle East. I read couple articles to this effect. That's fine as long as the narrative is that ME represents what Europe left behind, which is war, conflict, authoritarinism i.e. Rome whose continuation is the "Roman" Catholic Church (I see the new gumbah in there trying to improve things tho which is a good thing for sure). 

If the cultural mishmash goes too far, then things can get weird. I mean, some mixes are just not possible. You can have pizza, you can have chicken tikka masala, but you cant have chicken tikka pizza.

The Jerusalem Post

The cabinet voted in favor of the controversial Jewish state bill.

Ha ha..

So they did exactly the opposite of what we said here. Great job.

(Sarcasm comes through right?)

News

Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar

They must be scared

Afganistan and Pakistan have been working closer recently, which could have scared Taliban. They are trying to warn Pakistan, it looks like. I hope it backfires.

Oh, while we are on topic, let's not forget how Russians caused a mess in Afganistan. It was because of the dumb-ass Soviets (Putin's favorite empire in the world) attacking Afganistan this backward-ass donkeyhumper peasant Islam was sponsored, and the mess grew and grew..

Good job Russian rulers.

Movie Quote

[From the movie Swordfish] Jefferson shot a man on White House lawn for treason.

True, but...

The man was found guily for treason, by the courts, so he was facing the firing squad already, Jefferson only told the firing squad to take a hike, and basically did their job. It's a little gangsta, but not too much. He was enforcing the decision of the courts / the law after all.

The way the movie Swordfish presents it however, kinda, sorta made it sound like TJ just called some guy in da house and executing the man on the spot (you getting up on my grill fool?). No.. Nothing like that happened.

BTW this movie was probably bankrolled by neo-con "interests". It was all about "doing what's necessary", and generally about "letting go", "letting it rip".

Link

When OPEC announced on Thanksgiving Day that it would maintain oil production at 30 million barrels per day, chaos broke out in the oil market, and the price of oil around the globe spiraled into a terrific plunge. The unity of OPEC, if there ever was such a thing, was in tatters with Saudi oil minister smiling victoriously, and with a steaming Venezuelan oil minister thinking of the turmoil his country is facing [..]

During the closed-door meetings in Vienna, Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi told OPEC members that OPEC had to combat the US fracking boom. If OPEC cut output to raise the price of oil, it would lose market share, he argued. The way to win would be to allow overproduction to depress prices to the point where they would destroy the profitability of North American producers [..]

Asked if this was a response to rising US production, OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri essentially confirmed OPEC had entered the oil war against the American shale revolution: “We answered,” he said. “We keep the same production. There is an answer here.” [..]

Interesting

Personally I'd like to see frackers take a plunge, along with Putin's petro-mafia. Overall tho the latest fall did not change the overall pattern in oil prices. We are talking about a diminishing resource, and overall price trend is up. Even frackers getting ..  fracked, is part of Hubbard's model. I plotted a moving average of monthly oil prices starting from May 1985,

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('oilprice.csv', header=None, index_col=0)
pd.rolling_mean(df[1],100).plot()

That simple duuuude! The output

Whassup.

Ian Hay

[Talking about modern/industrial war-making] It would be child’s play to shell the road behind the enemy’s trenches, crowded as it must be with ration wagons and water carts, into a bloodstained wiklerness … but on the whole there is silence. After all, if you prevent your enemy from drawing his rations, his remedy is simple: he will prevent you from drawing yours.

Brrr

Scary stuff.. This is how senseless second-wave wars had become. The military/industrial complex of both sides started wars, and they just kept on going, both sides locked into its continuation and neither taking steps to cause "finishing" damage to the other side as is seen from the example above which is quite ironic because that's supposed to be the aim of wars. This kind of war making at a certain level simply made wars for the sake of making them. Great example of mutually assured destruction (MAD) - in its active form.

Europe did not arrive at its present state by accident, some bitter lessons were learned the hard way, as seen above. That is also why victors of WWII, such as Russia, Britain, US have such a hard time today coming to terms with wars and/or military adventures.

Oren Etzioni

It’s time to intelligently discuss artificial intelligence. I am an AI researcher and I’m not scared. Here’s why [..]. [A]s an active researcher in the field for over 20 years, and now the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, why am I not afraid?

The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals, and have its own will, and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game. It assumes that with intelligence comes free will, but I believe those two things are entirely different.

To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations. A calculator is a tool for humans to do math more quickly and accurately than they could ever do by hand; similarly AI computers are tools for us to perform tasks too difficult or expensive for us to do on our own, such as analyzing large data sets, or keeping up to date on medical research. Like calculators, AI tools require human input and human directions.

Now, autonomous computer programs exist and some are scary - such as viruses or cyber-weapons. But they are not intelligent. And most intelligent software is highly specialized; the program that can beat humans in narrow tasks, such as playing Jeopardy, has zero autonomy. IBM’s Watson is not champing at the bit to take on Wheel of Fortune next. Moreover, AI software is not conscious. As the philosopher John Searle put it, “Watson doesn't know it won Jeopardy!” [..]

So where does this confusion between autonomy and intelligence come from? From our fears of becoming irrelevant in the world. If AI (and its cousin, automation) takes over our jobs, then what meaning (to say nothing of income) will we have as a species? Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we have been afraid of mechanical men, and according to Isaac Asimov’s Robot novels, we will probably become even more afraid as mechanical men become closer to us, a phenomenon he called the Frankenstein Complex.

At the rise of every technology innovation, people have been scared. From the weavers throwing their shoes in the mechanical looms at the beginning of the industrial era to today’s fear of killer robots, our response has been driven by not knowing what impact the new technology will have on our sense of self and our livelihoods. And when we don’t know, our fearful minds fill in the details.

Exactly

Now Etzioni is an active researcher. And by active I mean I should have read about your work or heard about it / know you are in the field. I know about Etzioni. A month ago I read one of his papers about optimizing purchase time for airline tickets. He uses [geek] a variation of reinforcement learning, time series analysis, and a rule learner out of which he creates an ensemble [/geek]. I tried to learn from this, mulled over it, so on.. So the guy is in there, doing stuff. In comparison, one of the few AI researchers (?) talking about the "AI calamity", Kurzweil, did some work, but I see nothing recent, and things he's done compared to what is going on today, I am sorry to say, is the equivalent of Pong. The rest seem to be from "shit can go wrong" fields such as Physics.

A lot of people in fear do not seem to understand how much work it takes to create a functioning AI / ML system. I can understand outsiders who are wild-eyed about this stuff who have gross expectations from it and the ML practitioners can derive an enjoyment of sorts from that maybe because they were able to impress a lot of people with what they created. But there are many details that would impede Skynet, let alone an army of T1000 that can unequivically, guaranteed kick your ass. Even for cases with specialized software, i.e. Deep Blue beating Kasparov on chess, some details are not paid attention to. Before the game DB had access all of Kasparov's previous games, but Kasparov had none of DB's playing patterns. So even if Deep Blue was playing against another AI, the game was not exactly fair. In the context of an AI calamity scenario there will be many such details (bugs so on) that'll make a much-feared widespread ass-kicking impossible.

Guy

Innovation has slowed down [..]

Untrue

Innovation has sped up so insanely that people have lost the ability to follow what is going on.

The video card on your computer has brought the art of parallelism to new heights. This was done because from start video card makers had to worry about processing a lot of pixels at the same time, necessity bred innovation, the current state-of-art is the end result. Now seperate from this, some time ago someone had the brilliant idea to submit regular computation tasks to the video card as if they are graphical tasks. They would be exploiting the card's innate parallelism this way because such capability is much higher than compared to regular CPUs. Pure crazy. This technique became GPU computing (as opposed to CPU computing), a lot of Deep Learning makes use of this new type of processing actually, and the technique is spreading. I recently saw the video card maker NVidia selling a stand-alone card called Jetson which can be plugged into to a regular computer. It has 192 GPU cores on it for the cost of 192 dollars.

Now in terms of the amount of innovation we are talking about moving from black and white TV to color TV here. But did anyone take notice? Not really. Even practitioners in the field took a collective "meh" and moved on to crazier stuff.

Keith Wiley

[The movie] Interstellar might depict AI slavery

Dude

I was literally shaking my head in disbelief, I mean, so if future AI is not depicted on one extreme, it has to be another extreme.. ? Bots in Instellar were useful, helpful, were not T-1000 hooked-up to Skynet, then logically it follows that they are slaves..(!) Isnt there some sort of middle-ground?

garner

FreeLunchism

Duncan Watts is a researcher in Network Theory.

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andreessen #smorgasbord