I agree. I can also say, as someone who changed majors and fits this description somewhat (my change of major was due to medical reasons that caused me to transfer back to a local university so I could live at home) that the part I found most infuriating wasn't the science classes, but some the unrelated general ed course that we were forced to take. At my first school, Comp Sci majors were forced to take biology classes designed for mid degree level pre-med students as part of their general ed science requirement. I know several people who changed majors there not because they couldn't do the math or the Comp Sci / engineering / physics / etc, but because they weren't good enough at biology or chemistry (completely unrelated to their degree) and it was either change majors or flunk out.
He then used the first model to produce another segment of data (2011-2020), and found that the second model did not predict this 'new' data at all.
Seeing how that data for those years has yet to be recorded, he cannot possibly compare the forecasted values to the actual values to test the accuracy. Regarding actual data versus fictional data? It's entirely relevant to the accuracy of the model. You cannot use fictional data to try to understand the causes and variation in a real world variable. I'm well aware that what he's doing is over fitting the data - hence why I called out his "calibration" as bullshit. Perhaps if you knew something about what the article was talking about, you might understand why you're wrong.
Care to tell the class what you do for a living and your educational background? We've already established that I have reason (both educationally and career-wise) to know WTF I'm talking about - how about you provide your credentials?
Bull. The only people who bought reasonably priced houses (and there IS no such thing in a city - suburbs of a city, sure, but not in the city itself) that are having problems paying it are the ones who rushed into buying one before they had a large enough downpayment saved up. I know plenty of people who are in bad shape financially due to losing jobs, yet they were smart and didn't take on tons of debt back when the economy was good so they're still able to get by now.
The problem is people like you think that you can run with no savings and / or massive debt during good economies and then you go "What? How am I supposed to pay for all this???" when the economy goes down.
I just wanted to say thank you for being one of the few responsible people on Slashdot. It's a tad depressing always hearing people whine about how it's not fair that they should have to suffer negative consequences for their actions.
So you wait a couple of years before selling it and moving to Florida - OH NO! Working for another couple of years? Those evil bastards! Planning something like that is again, not very responsible since housing prices fluctuate. You can HOPE to do something like that, but PLANNING on it is downright foolish - because you never know when things will go to shit and your house is no longer worth four times what it should be.
*sigh* Another person who didn't read his bullshit definition of "calibration". He claims that calibration is twisting the data (and flat out changing it) to fit the model - not changing which variables are used in the model. If a model can fairly accurately predict out of sample models on ACTUAL data, then it CAN make fairly accurate predictions once you add that data to the model (thus allowing it to be MORE accurate) and try to predict in the future.
Do you build statistical models for a living? No? I do - so I think my knowledge and experience trumps your bullshit assumptions based off a half-assed and entirely misleading article by some incompetent journalist.
First off, you did not read the article very clearly. His bullshit about "calibrating" the model was using fictitious data and twisting the data until it fit the model. Secondly, I specifically said that you do NOT USE ALL THE DATA to make a model. If you have a data set from 1950 through 2010 and you only use years 1950 through 1999 to build the model, as far as the model is concerned years 2000 through 2010 are NOT historical data because they weren't used when creating the model - thus when you predict those years it has NO CLUE what the actual values are and it's no different from predicting from 2012 to 2020.
Please, learn something about data analysis and statistical modeling before making more stupid comments.
It's possible yes, but rare. Those who saw it coming had literally YEARS to prepare. If you owed that much on your house that you would go bankrupt that quickly after having plenty of time to build up extra savings on top of your current savings and retirement, then you were not a responsible person and did not have good savings. My parents are a great example of good savings and being responsible - they both made fairly similar amounts of money (my dad made about 15% more than my mom), but they made sure that they could pay all the bills and still put a little away for savings JUST with one person's salary - that way when my dad lost his job and could only find a job paying 1/3 of what he used to make, they weren't in danger of losing their home or retirement savings.
That man knows nothing about economic modeling. His whole story about "calibrating the model" is just pure and utter bullshit - so much it makes my head hurt to read that. Sure, someone trying to model who knows nothing about it might try to force the model to fit the data, but that's not how actual Economists do it - you'd get laughed out of grad school if you tried the things he mentioned in his articles in a research paper. I'm currently finishing up my Masters in Applied Economics and do quite a bit of modeling on a regular basis. There is no "calibration" - merely statistics. You include all the variables you consider relevant and then start whittling out the ones that are statistically insignificant in explaining the variation in your dependent variable. When dealing with forecasting, you never use the full time series data set in your model - you use most of it and then leave part of it for testing the accuracy of your model (so you can compare the forecast values with the actual values). If you've done a good job collecting a large enough data set and including the necessary variables, you'll have some pretty damn good predictions for the first part of your time series. Obviously, like with any type of prediction, the farther into the future you try to forecast, the less accurate you'll be. Hence why you continually gather more data and further refine your model and keep redoing the predictions.
The other wonderfully fallacious thing that he had in his article was not pointing out that Finance is NOT Economics. Financial data, such as the stock market, is VERY hard to predict (and actually due to basic financial theory regarding market efficiency, if the market is efficient then you should NOT be able to predict stock prices) due to the obscene amount of variables involved and the fact that there are decisions made based off emotion and not purely mathematical logic (such as bank runs and panics in the stock market).
Quite true, there were plenty of Economists who predicted the crash - the only problem is that you can't force people to listen. So instead those who predicted the crash (and the minority who listened to them) saved up and prepared so that they wouldn't get stuck losing their home when everything went bust.
I'm a cretin for pointing out what Jobs said? Interesting. I wasn't aware that the Apple fanatics had moved from just condemning people who are anti-Apple to condemning anyone who doesn't put "Heil Jobs!" at the end of every post.
If I recall correctly, Lord Jobs (may he burn in hell) used those exacts words (that people are willing to pay more for quality, thus why they buy overprices Apple products) several times in interviews.
They have an even stronger "Well sue you for trying to compete with us" philosophy, including getting bogus patents where prior art has been around for several years.
In the US the majority of ISP's charge based on bandwidth. You pay say $20 / month for a 768K connection up through around $70 / month for a 50 Mb connection where I live. There are no data caps - you can use it as much as you want.
Ah yes, beautiful government, where two legal adults cannot legally have sex with each other without express permission from some old fat bastard hundreds or thousands of miles away....
And I'm looking forward to the drugs / DNA modification that can slow down or even reverse aging. I'd love to be able to go back to being 30 when I'm in my 50's, then age at 1/4 the normal rate so it would take me 40 years just to hit 40 again.
Well you also need to realize that the people who are 80 today still grew up in a time of poorer nutrition and lower quality medical care. Now once the baby boomers start hitting 80, you might see a noticeable jump (if you compensate for the fact that the typical American these days is a lardass who weighs almost twice what they should...but then again, they probably won't live to 80 anyways).
Well if we can start growing replacement organs quickly or find the particular chunks of DNA that has allowed certain creatures such as sea turtles to live for several hundred years, that would lower costs....
Yes, you can fire them over 40 quite easily. You just have to BS it such as "downsizing" or "eliminating an unneeded department". My dad is in his 60's and everyone over 55 was cut from his company a few years back - their excuse was "eliminating unneeded positions / departments", which is how they avoided a lawsuit. Legally, you can't prove that it's not just coincidence that people over 55 just happened to be working in the wrong departments.
Nor should it. It used to be that people only retired for the last 15-20 years of their life. Now that it's not uncommon for people to live another 30 - 40 years after they retire, not to mention that people are aging better, it's massively throwing off the pyramid schemes that are public pensions.
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I agree. I can also say, as someone who changed majors and fits this description somewhat (my change of major was due to medical reasons that caused me to transfer back to a local university so I could live at home) that the part I found most infuriating wasn't the science classes, but some the unrelated general ed course that we were forced to take. At my first school, Comp Sci majors were forced to take biology classes designed for mid degree level pre-med students as part of their general ed science requirement. I know several people who changed majors there not because they couldn't do the math or the Comp Sci / engineering / physics / etc, but because they weren't good enough at biology or chemistry (completely unrelated to their degree) and it was either change majors or flunk out.
He then used the first model to produce another segment of data (2011-2020), and found that the second model did not predict this 'new' data at all.
Seeing how that data for those years has yet to be recorded, he cannot possibly compare the forecasted values to the actual values to test the accuracy. Regarding actual data versus fictional data? It's entirely relevant to the accuracy of the model. You cannot use fictional data to try to understand the causes and variation in a real world variable. I'm well aware that what he's doing is over fitting the data - hence why I called out his "calibration" as bullshit. Perhaps if you knew something about what the article was talking about, you might understand why you're wrong.
Care to tell the class what you do for a living and your educational background? We've already established that I have reason (both educationally and career-wise) to know WTF I'm talking about - how about you provide your credentials?
Bull. The only people who bought reasonably priced houses (and there IS no such thing in a city - suburbs of a city, sure, but not in the city itself) that are having problems paying it are the ones who rushed into buying one before they had a large enough downpayment saved up. I know plenty of people who are in bad shape financially due to losing jobs, yet they were smart and didn't take on tons of debt back when the economy was good so they're still able to get by now.
The problem is people like you think that you can run with no savings and / or massive debt during good economies and then you go "What? How am I supposed to pay for all this???" when the economy goes down.
I just wanted to say thank you for being one of the few responsible people on Slashdot. It's a tad depressing always hearing people whine about how it's not fair that they should have to suffer negative consequences for their actions.
So you wait a couple of years before selling it and moving to Florida - OH NO! Working for another couple of years? Those evil bastards! Planning something like that is again, not very responsible since housing prices fluctuate. You can HOPE to do something like that, but PLANNING on it is downright foolish - because you never know when things will go to shit and your house is no longer worth four times what it should be.
*sigh* Another person who didn't read his bullshit definition of "calibration". He claims that calibration is twisting the data (and flat out changing it) to fit the model - not changing which variables are used in the model. If a model can fairly accurately predict out of sample models on ACTUAL data, then it CAN make fairly accurate predictions once you add that data to the model (thus allowing it to be MORE accurate) and try to predict in the future.
Do you build statistical models for a living? No? I do - so I think my knowledge and experience trumps your bullshit assumptions based off a half-assed and entirely misleading article by some incompetent journalist.
First off, you did not read the article very clearly. His bullshit about "calibrating" the model was using fictitious data and twisting the data until it fit the model. Secondly, I specifically said that you do NOT USE ALL THE DATA to make a model. If you have a data set from 1950 through 2010 and you only use years 1950 through 1999 to build the model, as far as the model is concerned years 2000 through 2010 are NOT historical data because they weren't used when creating the model - thus when you predict those years it has NO CLUE what the actual values are and it's no different from predicting from 2012 to 2020.
Please, learn something about data analysis and statistical modeling before making more stupid comments.
It's possible yes, but rare. Those who saw it coming had literally YEARS to prepare. If you owed that much on your house that you would go bankrupt that quickly after having plenty of time to build up extra savings on top of your current savings and retirement, then you were not a responsible person and did not have good savings. My parents are a great example of good savings and being responsible - they both made fairly similar amounts of money (my dad made about 15% more than my mom), but they made sure that they could pay all the bills and still put a little away for savings JUST with one person's salary - that way when my dad lost his job and could only find a job paying 1/3 of what he used to make, they weren't in danger of losing their home or retirement savings.
That man knows nothing about economic modeling. His whole story about "calibrating the model" is just pure and utter bullshit - so much it makes my head hurt to read that. Sure, someone trying to model who knows nothing about it might try to force the model to fit the data, but that's not how actual Economists do it - you'd get laughed out of grad school if you tried the things he mentioned in his articles in a research paper. I'm currently finishing up my Masters in Applied Economics and do quite a bit of modeling on a regular basis. There is no "calibration" - merely statistics. You include all the variables you consider relevant and then start whittling out the ones that are statistically insignificant in explaining the variation in your dependent variable. When dealing with forecasting, you never use the full time series data set in your model - you use most of it and then leave part of it for testing the accuracy of your model (so you can compare the forecast values with the actual values). If you've done a good job collecting a large enough data set and including the necessary variables, you'll have some pretty damn good predictions for the first part of your time series. Obviously, like with any type of prediction, the farther into the future you try to forecast, the less accurate you'll be. Hence why you continually gather more data and further refine your model and keep redoing the predictions.
The other wonderfully fallacious thing that he had in his article was not pointing out that Finance is NOT Economics. Financial data, such as the stock market, is VERY hard to predict (and actually due to basic financial theory regarding market efficiency, if the market is efficient then you should NOT be able to predict stock prices) due to the obscene amount of variables involved and the fact that there are decisions made based off emotion and not purely mathematical logic (such as bank runs and panics in the stock market).
Quite true, there were plenty of Economists who predicted the crash - the only problem is that you can't force people to listen. So instead those who predicted the crash (and the minority who listened to them) saved up and prepared so that they wouldn't get stuck losing their home when everything went bust.
I'm a cretin for pointing out what Jobs said? Interesting. I wasn't aware that the Apple fanatics had moved from just condemning people who are anti-Apple to condemning anyone who doesn't put "Heil Jobs!" at the end of every post.
AFAIK, none of those companies have a record of repeatedly filing bogus lawsuits to prohibit competition with their mediocre products.
If I recall correctly, Lord Jobs (may he burn in hell) used those exacts words (that people are willing to pay more for quality, thus why they buy overprices Apple products) several times in interviews.
They have an even stronger "Well sue you for trying to compete with us" philosophy, including getting bogus patents where prior art has been around for several years.
In the US the majority of ISP's charge based on bandwidth. You pay say $20 / month for a 768K connection up through around $70 / month for a 50 Mb connection where I live. There are no data caps - you can use it as much as you want.
Ah yes, beautiful government, where two legal adults cannot legally have sex with each other without express permission from some old fat bastard hundreds or thousands of miles away....
Teachers can legally have sex with their 16 year old students. Wow, in the US you'd get 20 years for that.
If I were a high school teacher, I'd be on the first plane to Italy right now.
And I'm looking forward to the drugs / DNA modification that can slow down or even reverse aging. I'd love to be able to go back to being 30 when I'm in my 50's, then age at 1/4 the normal rate so it would take me 40 years just to hit 40 again.
do you stay married for over 100 years for example
Now THAT'S a depressing thought - sex with just one woman for 100 years. I suspect that the rate of infidelity would increase massively.
Not necessarily true. If the younger looking one ate a healthier diet, then their heart should be in better shape.
Well you also need to realize that the people who are 80 today still grew up in a time of poorer nutrition and lower quality medical care. Now once the baby boomers start hitting 80, you might see a noticeable jump (if you compensate for the fact that the typical American these days is a lardass who weighs almost twice what they should...but then again, they probably won't live to 80 anyways).
Well if we can start growing replacement organs quickly or find the particular chunks of DNA that has allowed certain creatures such as sea turtles to live for several hundred years, that would lower costs....
Not to mention horrible politicians such as Ted Kennedy and FDR...
Yes, you can fire them over 40 quite easily. You just have to BS it such as "downsizing" or "eliminating an unneeded department". My dad is in his 60's and everyone over 55 was cut from his company a few years back - their excuse was "eliminating unneeded positions / departments", which is how they avoided a lawsuit. Legally, you can't prove that it's not just coincidence that people over 55 just happened to be working in the wrong departments.
Nor should it. It used to be that people only retired for the last 15-20 years of their life. Now that it's not uncommon for people to live another 30 - 40 years after they retire, not to mention that people are aging better, it's massively throwing off the pyramid schemes that are public pensions.