thirdwave

Github Mirror

Week 28

Maudin, time travel not possible.

Video

Dang they say 7.1 will take your bed and throw it out the window? Kill half of Stanpoli? Id like to finish what I started before this thing hits man.

Really? Why are Aussies so into Huawei?

"But although more cash and more staff can multiply an ambassador’s effectiveness [in Washington], they cannot make her effective on its own. What counts is having a clear objective, and pursuing it in every possible way. France has been single-minded about the Iran deal, Australia about Huawei." Link

"@zerohedge

Since 2008:

Stocks have risen 14% annualized

Home prices have risen 5% annualized

Real wage growth is negative

The Fed has been tremendously successful at making the rich richer while destroying the middle class"

Great rendition of All Along the Watchtower for BSG s03e20,

Link

Why we became bipedal - Link

I was referring to NYT Brooks last week.

I needed linearization around stable point derivation, who had it? Strogatz Nonlin Dyn classes of course, lecture 6. Ma man.

"SINGAPORE — Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies has announced the signing of an MOU to supply 1,000 units of 100kW and higher automotive fuel cell systems for heavy duty trucks within three years, with the first units to be delivered in the second half of 2019. This represents one of the largest deployments of fuel cell heavy vehicles globally."

"@jacobinmag Centrists claim free college is a giveaway to the rich. But durable social-democratic programs have to be universal, covering even the wealthy. Plus we're going to raise their taxes to pay for it, anyway."

Dropout is patented? One of the most basic building blocks of deep learning. If Goog goes after ppl bcz of this patent, it will not be cool.

End software patents

"@chipro Google's dropout patent went active today and we should all be worried"

Great! Push for fast payments. I Dont care how we get there. Good job Ms Presley.

Link

All I am offering is the truth, nothing more

Yo

Isn't that just wonderful?

from sympy import *

x, y, z = symbols('x y z')

m = Matrix([sin(x) + y, cos(y) + x, z])

pprint (m.jacobian([x, y, z]))

⎡cos(x)     1     0⎤
⎢                  ⎥
⎢  1     -sin(y)  0⎥
⎢                  ⎥
⎣  0        0     1⎦

Hey not bad, does the job

Link

Jamie Fox convo with artists, one says "NBC stands for n..a be careful".

Woha. Huge number.

"ICE is ready to deport 1M illegals says top immigration official"

Ok.. looks like some real math is being used. Good.

Haha.. just saw SpaceX Falcon lander simulation package on Github, to test out different landing strats (landing on a small platform at sea)

https://github.com/arex18/rocket-lander

It talks abt one RL "Deep Shit" style controller. I wonder if SX used that in their lander? I'd be very disappointed if they did. Doc says RL style did very well. Will you pay me money if I beat that approach with straight LQR?

The plan is cartpole, lunar lander, than maybe rocket-lander.

Just saw this by the metro line today, warning passengers about a 27500 Volt electric line! Suggesting not to approach more than 2 meters. I believe they are talking about the lines that go above the trains to power them?

BTW this is an incredibly stupid design. You could safely and cleanly power the trains with hydrogen, no need for such crazy warnings and no need need for mile long cables.

In May 2019, Angstrom Advanced Inc officially completed the Microgrid hydrogen-based power-storage system demonstration project. [..] This groundbreaking project was the first of its kind on the East Coast of the United States.[..]

The success of this project also proved the feasibility of establishing and implementing “Hydrogen Energy Communities” or “Hydrogen Cities”. In such a scenario, hydrogen would be the critical medium in bringing together renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, etc.), power, heat and utilities, and the ability for grid peak-shift. Additionally, hydrogen can be used as a backup power source, as well as the fuel for Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicles (FCVs). The ultimate goal of the “Hydrogen Energy Communities” is to take advantage of hydrogen as a clean, zero emission energy source to achieve sustainable development.

Link

Yang is Just Do It Nike Man type. When in doubt, act (obviously don't act for the f--k of it either). These ppl lock themselves into inaction overthinking stuff. They also worry too much about saying what others expect them to say (in the negative).

I am starting to realize ppl make money through obfuscation. Why explain when u can hide? Take the simplest thing a spin up an obnoxious story around it? Imbeciles (goaded to be that way by ppl who should know better) will eat it up. So called "religion", science, journalism is replete with this.

In my writeups, in order to show end result I take snapshots from "the system", and save them as simple images. "The system" could be my code (for pendulum, double pendulum not too hard), or lunar lander, cart pole from an outside simulator. In either case snapshots are taken, saved, and I combine snapshots with ImageMagick for an animated gif and share that as simple file.

So reader can see end result immediately, one click, see animation, and more important, he sees how those snapshots are taken from the system, shared as code in the writeup.

Setup requirements, nearly zero. Just one additional package install on Python, if that.

Wiggers niggers dont get it. Less dependence, simplicity is better.

Docker tech can create a fully installed machine from a single image. Instead of writing down a long list of "install this and this first" some ppl like to just share a docker image.

But it is an overkill for this case.

I am emailing frickin MIT professor who taught such classes. He has code but to make it work gazillion instl steps needed (readme actually talks abt using a docker image!), and he turned the code into a "framework" (which means scattering shit in multiple places so it becomes extremely hard to follow). I bet he is thinking "Imma do a startup one day, maybe, and this is how pro code looks like".

On an old vid of his I saw a boring-ass code on screen, i asked him "where is that?". He is like yo that's gone man.

Bitch what have u done? Guy is failing with his first duty to the public, to educate.

The state of sci education is obnoxiously bad. How much effort does it take to do a write up on math, code that shows simple physical systems. It turns out noone thought of it.

Without women we're just bunch of brutes. Look at this teacher, so nice. The toy plastered top left on the blackboard is her TA (announced in the 1st lecture). Isnt that nice? https://youtu.be/aNiPDunyXt0

"But the invention of compass was so important!"

No it wasn't. You can find true north by just looking at the sun. Remember the tilt of the Earth, so "at noon, it looms in the middle of the horizon and directly south. That means when you're facing the sun at noon, walking directly toward it will take you south". At nights there are other methods.

On other times, use watch,

Link

Right on dude. I'm right there with you

"Riccati-Differenzialgleichungen".

"@Stefan_BC

I guess 'anti woke left' is somewhat catchier than “adult South Park fan” "

Calculus works well for physics because Calculus digs into the very small (then puts it back together - derivation / integration) and the real world also consists of the very small. So the mathematical method mirrors the real world.

For AI what would that parallel be? What is the most basic building block of thought?

"A match" maybe? Like ATPPTPPT is the same as ATPPTPPT, or a cat is visually the same as another cat, within constraints. If something is not the same, how similar is it? Can that be measured?

Maybe an algebra can be built around such basic building blocks. A match, a pattern.

So Idlib is going under the knife?

"At least 544 civilians have been killed and over 2,000 people injured since a Russian-led assault on the last rebel bastion in northwestern Syria began two months ago, rights groups and rescuers said on Saturday. "

"@robdelaney Fun watching the inbred British press trash Labour as they grapple with the upcoming nightmare Johnson premiership they know they won’t be able to sell to the public."

(CNN) — Intense heat waves have killed more than 100 people in India this summer and are predicted to worsen in coming years, creating a possible humanitarian crisis as large parts of the country potentially become too hot to be inhabitable.

Link

Too funny. All my favorite buzzwords in one place.

"Laclau also cited the transformative nature of EVs, artificial intelligence, machine learning and the cross-sectoral push for electrification (..) Those tipping points have likely got ..."

Link

"@LCTTA I wish I could get students to appreciate that Einstein took about ten years to learn differential geometry, so there’s no shame in taking time to understand anything. There is no stigma, only deeper understanding, which is never bad."

Did the latest Spiderman mov just shut down multiverse theory? Bcz Mysterio said he was from another universe, but he was a bullshitter.

Iron Man for fuel cells, now this? It's good!

Haha..dude wrote a hip-hop song referencing a famous Rocky 4 scene, the lyrics keep saying "if he dies, he dies", repeating I. Drago line cuz in the scene shows another black man brutalized "pushed down by the white man"..

Video

Good..

Does that mean less likelihood of "doing" Iran?

"In our [G. Friedman] 2019 forecast, we predicted the United States and the Taliban would reach a deal in Afghanistan and that before the end of the year Washington would announce a schedule for withdrawing the bulk of its forces. That forecast seems roughly on track"

Wut?

"@Intel_sky High Expected strike will be made by #IAF & #USAF in Syria very soon".

Still cracks me up...

Not cutting could be signal for lowered crisis expectations signaling positive view of the economy causing stocks to go higher but no, in the bizarro world we live in, stocks go DOWN.

"Wall Street dips as rate cut expectations relax"

Ahh how did I miss u Jorge? Mute.

Cars in many ways are mission critical applications. An app that needs to work in life / death, sometimes extreme weather situations. So which idiot thought it was a good idea to put your bloody laptop battery to power it? It will degrade just like your notebook battery, it wont work in cold weather, when u r out of power, u need a frickin charging station to come to you.

Seriously. Who are these people? I need names and addresses.

These are not different civilizations, they are part of the same one. They were all agrarian based mafia civilizations.

Then there was the British Empire, with its gunships, trains, clocks which was a completely different civilization.

Civilizations are based on the means of production.

"Egyptian civilization... Roman civilization"

What's this thing I hear China is having trouble finding cheap H2 tank solutions.. How do Hyundai, Toyota handle this? I can't imagine tank tech being more expensive than LPG tanks.

Summers is one confused son of a bitch. After crisis says "Minsky explains it", then "a chronic shortfall in the demand for investment relative to the supply of savings". Now you are lost. If you continued on Minsky mathematically u'd land on Keen providing you little insight on credit.

Darn.. Nazis going green.

Link

"This needs to be a people's revolution", etc. Bernie does say these things but let's not forget this is coming from a leftist who's been pushed outside the system for decades. He is worried "what will happen to this movement if I wasn't around as a leader?". He is worried the left being overrun by the right again.

But personally I don't think a repeat of post-Berlin Wall situation is possible; That euphoria, with a sense of victory, an evil empire gone, these things are unlikely to be repeated near-to-mid future. The left is here to stay.

I'd worry more about Dems being corrupted past the point of no-return, failing to provide a home for left thereby creating a vacuum in the political sphere.

"The [EU] Commission barely had time to celebrate reaching its historic trade agreement with the South American bloc (comprising Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) late Friday — after 20 years of negotiations — when a storm of criticism blew in. Senior politicians and agriculture lobbies said the deal is a risk to Europe's sacrosanct farming sector and food safety standards, and threatened to block its approval."

Link

RIP

"Mitchell Feigenbaum, physicist who pioneered chaos theory, has died"

You say much of "Asimo [robot] is overly controlled. Humans and many species in nature evolved to be underactuated, that is guiding their system with minimal control". Does this relate to waves and life?

It does

Both industrial age and agrarian age are examples are overly controlled environments. Agg is a very hard business, everything needs to be right in order for crops to grow. The land is controlled, with clear borders around it, watered, fertilized at certain intervals. The crops are genetically engineered to be a certain way, chosen after years and years of "unnatural" selection.

In a factory, robot arms are overly controlled, every move is planned for, and the driving control is in exact proportion to the outcome you get (Asimo is the end result of robotic arm technology, something Honda was already very good at). A clock the same way, the symbol of the Second Wave.

But almost all interesting problems in robotics these days is underactuated. Flying, swimming, walking all must be underactuated, you need to rely on and predict the chaotic environment around you to move around with reasonable energy. It's easy to make the Tesla car with half a ton of battery that kill people left and right but quite another to replicate human actions with minimal energy, and equal success.

In most areas we are starting to deal with nonlinearity more and more. Nonlinear environments are extremely hard to predict.

Question

So that means mystery, people running around in multiple universes, electron going through multiple slits?

No that is "mystery for morons"

That's confusing weirdo nonsense, the kind of drama you get in a Jar Jar Abrahams show.

"A small change in initial condition causing wildly different outcomes a few steps later" is non-linearity. This is fascinating enough; my doppleganger with a goatee in a different universe wearing leather pants with a butt cut-out is not. That is silly. It's like listening to fusion jazz, is this fusion or confusion? Sounds bunch of pots and pans thrown down the stairs to me... Not exactly music - good jazz can be fascinatingly complex, but still be music. Not fusion jazz.

Question

What is art?

Seth Godin is right

"Art is a personal gift that changes the recipient. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another"

I add, art provides a peephole into another form of existence. It takes someone away from their existing reality into that other one.

That other reality can border on the fantastic, but that's okay as long as it is internally consistent. I see a cat, I see the same cat again, they changed something in the Matrix. Internally consistent.

Tooze, Crashed

[After 2008 crisis and QE] Dollars were cheap for everyone. Any investor who was willing to take a gamble on exchange rate movements could borrow cheaply in dollars and invest in high-yielding emerging markets. Assuming the dollar did not sharply appreciate before the debt was due, it would be a profitable carry trade. By the middle of 2015, governments and businesses outside America would pile up $9.8 trillion of debts denominated in dollars. Much of this went to rich, developed world economies. But $3.3 trillion was owed by ​emerging market borrowers, both government and private. From the point of view of the yield-chasing investor, the more exotic the securities the better. (..) In May 2013 the boom reached its peak, with the $11 billion ten-year bond issued by Petrobas, Brazil’s state-owned oil company. It was the largest bond issue ever by an emerging market corporation. Demand was so great that the yield on the Petrobas issue fell to as little as 4.35 percent, less than many sovereign borrowers. (..)

This global interest in emerging market debt was exciting from the point of view of the borrowers. But it also exposed them to serious risks. Huge, aggressively managed funds crowded into tight markets. As the IMF pointed out, given that the largest five hundred asset management companies had more than $70 trillion in their portfolios, a 1 percent reallocation implied a flow in or out of an asset class of $700 billion. This was enough either to swamp or to starve the emerging markets. The withdrawal of funds that had caused such stress in 2008 around the periphery of the world economy had amounted to only $246 billion. The unprecedented inflow that transformed the outlook of those same economies in 2012 was $368 billion.

Brrr

Tooze

That the astonishing events in Congress in 2013 did not lead to an immediate crisis in the bond market pointed to the resilience of the US Treasurys as the global safe asset of choice. (..) Ultimately, the market for IOUs drawn on the American taxpayer was underwritten by the Fed. (..) America’s central bank left no doubt that it backed its government’s debt. QE3 bond purchases provided immediate support, keeping prices up and rates down. (..)

The real question was the likely fallout in the financial markets and money markets when the Fed changed its stance. Any move to moderate the Fed’s bond purchases, let alone to unwind its position, implied a comprehensive adjustment in the willingness of the markets to absorb not only a greater volume of bonds but also some of the maturity mismatch that the Fed was carrying. And that would have to happen at the same time as short-term interest rates were nudging up. If, on the other hand, the Fed continued QE3, its balance sheet would further inflate, bond prices would remain elevated, interest rates would remain stuck near zero and imbalances would further accumulate. In 2008 the Fed had embarked on a vertiginous tightrope walk from which there was no way back to the certainties of the great moderation. (..)

In 2008 the Fed had intervened to stop the market from imploding. It had pumped trillions into the financial system. Now the markets hung on its every word.

Yeah no shit

Tooze

The swap lines that had been so crucial to stabilizing global financial markets and which had been uncapped in October 2008 were now being established on a permanent basis. As in 2008, this network had limits. None of the most fragile emerging markets were included in the inner core of the Fed’s swap network. But they were not left out in the cold either. What began to take shape were regional subnetworks. These were uneven. There was nothing of note around the core European central banks. But in Asia the central banks were more active. In September 2013, as anxiety about the Fed’s tapering rose to a crescendo, India negotiated an increase in its existing swap line arrangement with Japan from $10 billion to $50 billion. In December Japan doubled the swap line facilities it offered to Indonesia and the Philippines and announced that it would be looking to negotiate similar bargains with Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia. Japan’s enormous reserve holdings of dollar assets, second only to those of China’s, gave it the means to offer such facilities. And in the event of a crisis, the Bank of Japan could always draw on the Fed. Thus dollar liquidity would percolate out through the entire system.

As in 2008–2009, in 2013 the public bluster about the need for a new monetary order and a “de-Americanized world” distracted from the reality that a powerful new network of liquidity provision was being rolled out across the world economy. The swap-lines story stayed buried on the interior pages of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal. There was no fanfare, no new Bretton Woods Conference. There was also no congressional or parliamentary approval. These were administrative measures. But they were also far more than that. Five years on from the crisis, while markets remained unsettled and the American political system was racked by dissension, the global dollar system was being given a new and unprecedentedly expansive foundation.

About the technical efficacy of the swap lines there was little doubt. Their political legitimacy was a different matter. And in the autumn of 2013 one couldn’t help thinking of another of America’s technical systems of ​power that had been revealed earlier that year: the NSA’s electronic surveillance network. The network that Edward Snowden exposed in early June also centered on US power and technological capacity. It too was no American monolith. Like the Fed, the NSA worked through local agencies. It too promised to provide a blanket of security for the United States and its allies. Of course spying and exchanging currencies were not the same things. But they did have in common that their functional power and administrative efficacy were not matched by anything resembling public political authorization. They were testimony, at one and the same time, to the continuing significance of US global power and the difficulty in justifying that power in public either in the United States or in the countries whose governments and business interests were enrolled in America’s network.

No need for new BW, techocrats are ruling by fiat

These passages claim the position of the dollar as the global currency was not weakened due to global crisis, but in fact strengthened.

Question

One of the most famous singers [Bulent Ersoy] in TR is a transwoman. How is that possible in a convervative country?

It's a result of palace culture

In agrarian era the palace is always associated with excess, weirdness. In the peasant's mind, the weirdo village life he is living must be multiplied 10-fold "over there" in the palace. Look at the show Game of Thrones, there is incest, barbarism of all kinds (not saying trans choice is like that, bear with me), resembling the gladiator shows during days of Rome. This is "the ultimate landowners" as seen by the rest.

In such cultures different sexual choices are entertainment for the palace, the king and queen, if not overtly practiced by the "royals" themselves. Then the peasant is interested in these things because they are practiced, or an object of interest by the king or queen.

Normal people (as in nomadic, adaptable) would not be fascinated by unorthodox choices and look at them as things in a zoo, but just let them be.

Story: I did a joke at Ersoy's expense once; As I mentioned before ağa is the landowner patriarch male in TR. And this famous transperson, in her woman form, comes very much across as a hanımağa, a she-boss; it's the weirdest thing to see. But she is liberal in her views, not overly militant... One time she made an anti-militant comment and I said "well that was very courageous to say, she surely knows how to MAN UP (the comment was erkek kadınmış)". Heh :o I drop them jokes man.. that's right.

Question

Do all agricultural societies became bone worshippers?

Yes

Burial sites were found in China that suggested similar ceremonies around ancestor worship.

U cant escape a thing that surrounds every part of your being. You might domesticate plants but they will also domesticate you.

Trek TNG

[Captain Picard] Shakespeare was witnessing the end of the Renaissance and the birth of the modern era, and Prospero finds himself in a world where his powers are no longer needed. So, we see him here about to perform one final creative act before giving up his art forever [..T]here's a certain expectancy too. A hopefulness about the future. You see, Shakespeare enjoyed mixing opposites. The past and the future. Hope and despair.

Interesting

Shakespeare lived in an interesting time lived between two waves it seems...

U know what else was born between two waves? The United States of America.

Comment

Electrons are sometimes waves sometimes particles.

Mmm

Moth-f-ka - do you realize how much energy it would take to make something into a particle from a wave, and back again?

See here

"Acts like a wave" and "is a wave" are two different things. Good physicists know this difference.

Why don't you just admit, you found an angle that lets you compute easily, you have nothing beyond that.

Comment

America is a melting pot

No

America is a tomato soup. A tomato soup has already very distinctive taste, whatever you add into it, it remains mostly tomato soup, tastes like tomato soup.

The tomato is the Protestant culture.

Link

"Beautiful (behavioural economics) experiments: "loosing" 17,303 wallets among 355 cities in 40 countries to measure the returning rate. (..) Switzerland 1st, Italy last among Europe."

Well that makes perfect sense.

Let's say you are a capo, walking on the street in Rome and you see a wallet. Of course you take it, that's one less shakedown you have to do that day, now you can feed your wives, provide for your underlings.

Look at the graph, Italy is very close to Greece and TR. Rome 1, 2 and 3. The ground-zero for mafia empires.

Comment

"But [bad coutry XYZ] in international relations cannot be reasoned with / handled "

This is polemical

A common misconception or tactic utilized in this polemical, and war-like IR is labeling an international actor unreasonable. Israelis keep saying "Palestenians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity", like "look at these jackasses, they cannot even deal! How can we sit down with these ppl to make piece!?" Which completely ignores the history and the power relations of the conflict of course.

Or, I've heard an US IR type comment on Iranians once, over 10 years ago, he was saying "look, when you deal with Iranians don't forget you are playing chess with a donkey. You might make all your clever, fancy moves on the board, but the other side can just lean over and eat your piece".

So forget all that rational or irrational moves, thoughts, the oppo is a donkey! How can you deal with a donkey? Drop bombs!

Tooze, Crashed

The leaders of Wall Street had never liked Trump. They clearly preferred the Clinton brand. He had paid them back in kind and he had won. The question of who was boss had been answered.

Trump’s about-face once in office was utterly unabashed. He would do as befitted a boss-president. There would be a bonfire of regulations and in particular those of his predecessor. The thought of doing a “big number” on Dodd-Frank pleased POTUS. And it pleased him also to bestow favors on and receive applause from powerful interests, even those he had previously made a show of attacking. As he told a meeting of CEOs in April 2017: “For the bankers in the room, they’ll be very happy.” To have favors lavished on them by the man who had pilloried them on the stump might seem topsy-turvy. But the bankers were not complaining. As the Financial Times commented: “Imagine going to the races, betting 98 per cent of your stake on the favourite [Clinton], which loses in the final stretch, and going home with huge winnings.” As far as Wall Street was concerned it turned out that the game of politics was heads I win, tails you lose. Neither the politicians nor Wall Street gave a second thought to the angry voters who had actually put Trump in the White House.

The house (Wall Street) always wins

Tooze

The resulting tax bill that passed both houses of Congress in December ​2017 was hugely controversial. The sugar coating, such as it was, consisted of across-the-board reductions in personal income taxation and cuts to exemptions that principally hit high-income local taxpayers in states that voted Democratic. But these were time limited. Within a few years many lower-income Americans would be paying higher taxes. Of more lasting benefit to the very wealthy was raising the estate tax threshold to $11 million. And what really mattered was a 40 percent cut in the rate of business taxation, which meant that profits could either be retained for growth or paid out to shareholders. Given the vast inequality in wealth holding and particularly in the holding of equity—the top quintile of the American income distribution owns 90 percent of corporate equity—the benefits go to the better off.

Some tax cut

Tooze

His main shtick was that he was a businessman, a deal maker. And because his business was real estate, Trump lived the American business cycle close up. As Hyman Minsky, the legendary analyst of financial crises, observed already in 1990, Donald Trump was the very epitome of a Ponzi scheme capitalist, living hand to mouth by borrowing against the expected appreciation of his assets. As a result, crises punctuated Trump’s career. He was hit hard by the early 1990s recession, almost losing his business. By 2008 he was less vulnerable, having diversified into media and branding. But his real estate exposure was still significant. Indeed, he was seeking to increase it. In 2006 he started a mortgage brokerage and announced plans to open a mortgage lending business. Luckily for Trump, neither got off the ground. By 2008 his casino business was failing again and would ultimately close. But Trump’s real vulnerability was a gigantic condo development in Chicago. It was a spectacular project, the tallest building to be built in the United States since the Sears Tower, and sales had originally gone well.

But in 2008 Chicago condo sales stopped dead. By the fall it was clear that Trump and his business partners were in trouble. Since his bankruptcies of the 1990s, Trump was no longer on good terms with the major American banks, so the Chicago project got its funding mainly from Deutsche Bank’s North American real estate arm. In the first week of November 2008, as Barack Obama celebrated his election victory with his adoring Chicago base, Deutsche and Trump went to war. Deutsche sued for $40 million, for which Trump was personally liable. Trump responded with an astonishingly audacious legal broadside. He claimed that the greatest financial crisis since 1929 constituted force majeure, akin to a natural disaster. He therefore demanded more time for the project to pay off. Deutsche’s own suit was typical of a predatory and dangerous lender that had helped to bring on the crisis. Trump’s countersuit claimed $3 billion in compensation for the damage it was causing to his reputation. It was pure legal swordplay, but it bought him the time he needed. In a tight spot Trump is nothing if not pragmatic, and he was certainly not one to be squeamish about the maxims of free-market economics. Faced with the 2008 crisis he knew that American business needed all the help it could get. He had decades of experience working the subsidies available from American government. He liked the cut of Obama’s jib; 2009 was not his moment to get on the anti-Obama bandwagon.

So what's in those tax returns?

Mitt was saying "there are bombshells in those tax returns" meaning DJT but it's probably just embarrassing stuff, Trump might not be as rich as he claims.

The culture code for money in US is PROOF. Of success, having made it, etc. That is why, at a cultural level, a billionaire is accepted.

Question

What is the culture code for POTUS?

MOSES

Bernie has an advantage here

Keen

Since these older and more economically powerful property owners dominate the electorate, politicians are reduced to doing their best Man of La Mancha impersonations: they “Dream the Impossible Dream”, and aspire to bring about “affordable” expensive housing.

The best way to do that is to give young people a government handout to let them climb onto the property ladder. A name evocative of concern for the young, such as the “First Home Buyers Grant” in Australia, or even more evocative, the “Help to Buy” Scheme in the UK, helps make the policy look worthy.

This way, politicians are seen to be doing something to help the young, deflecting blame onto others (as they rail against rigid supply, which is not their responsibility), while actually fuelling the engine that drives house prices higher faster than consumer prices (and household incomes)[..]

That fuel is leverage – the rising level of household debt compared to income. Not only can politicians do something about this by changing the regulations on bank lending – they have done something about it in the past, by changing the regulations in ways that allowed this bubble to form in the first place.

House prices only took off when politicians followed the advice of economists – and the special pleading of the finance sector – that the economy would work so much better if the heavy hand of government regulation was lifted, and industry was allowed to innovate. However, the innovations we got were not industrial but financial, as banks found ever more ways to persuade households (and also corporations) to take on more debt.

Here the UK data is remarkable, even in the context of a worldwide trend to higher levels of leverage. Between 1880 and 1980, private debt in the UK fluctuated as a percentage of GDP, yet it never once reached 75% of GDP. But in 1982, both household and corporate debt took off.

In 1982, total private debt was equivalent to 61% of GDP, split equally between households and corporations. 25 years later, as the global financial crisis unfolded, private debt was three times larger at 197% of GDP, again split 50:50 between households and corporations.

The key changes to legislation that occurred in 1982 is the UK let banks muscle into the mortgage market that was previously dominated by building societies. This was sold in terms of improving competition in the mortgage market, to the benefit of house buyers – allegedly, mortgage costs would fall.

But its most profound impact was something much more insidious: it enabled the creation of credit money to fuel rising house prices, setting off a feedback loop that only ended in 2008.

The man speaka some sense...

Beard et al, from Introduction to Feedback Control

I had a need for a new masters student in my research group and hired one of the top students in the class. We had designed a gimbal system for a small unmanned air vehicle, and needed a control system implemented on a microcontroller for the gimbal. I tasked this new masters student to model the gimbal and design the control system. I was a surprised by how much the student struggled with this task, especially understanding where to begin and how to model the gimbal. If I had given him a transfer function and asked him to design a PID controller, or if I had given him a state space model and asked him to design an observer and controller for the system, he would not have had any difficulty. But he did not know how to do an end-to-end design that required developing models for the system, including physical constraints

There is a lot of that going around

Education is increasingly pigeonholing ppl into areas, into weird -isms, noone can do end-to-end design anymore. It's like Isaac Newton knowing some algebra but not being able to compute anything, or vica versa. We complain science became huge, one person cannot manage it all, but the essential core really did not, a lot of concepts taught are umimportant and a core general science / engineering knowledge with solid math and computation can be learned by all who are such inclined.

Jacobin Mag

How Obama Failed: [The flaws in the admin] were baked in. As Hundt makes clear, despite Hillary Clinton’s primary loss, the Obama residency essentially became the second Clinton administration that she and her family’s entourage had been planning for, with Obama surprising John Podesta by tapping him to lead his transition. Podesta staffed top posts with Clintonite neoliberals, ensuring their ideology predominated in the administration

It’s ironic that Obama’s defenders point to Republican obstructionism to explain away his administration’s inadequacies, when Hundt makes clear that the primary source of obstructionism was coming from inside the house

Some call Biden Hillary 2.0

But IMO Obama was Hillary 2.0. Biden would be Hillary 3.0.

Why did Bam become a Clinton continuation? Well, if you are a young guy with a weird name who is really green, you have to belong somewhere. Clintons provided Obama that umbrella. Then the usual suspects filled the ranks of his admin, financial industry was saved, citizens were not.

Question

Marx defined socialism

No

At the time when Marx wrote there were many other socialist economists, he was just one. He wasn't even a good one. But his writings became influential bcz cons chose their enemy. Marx was preferred bcz of his shortcomings.

Question

But isnt it important to poll ppl to find out what they think on spec items? Experienced pols like Clinton polled all the time

Bill is IaC

By default they dont listen to anything, so polls might have been his systemic way of offsetting that shortcoming. I remember that era, coincidentally CRM was a huge buzzword back then perhaps partly due to that.

How important is listening in general..? Depends. How much did Steve Jobs listen? Did he give customers what they wanted, or what he decided they needed?