No...THAT would be a crack-headed idea and is absurd to the point it almost doesn't deserve an answer. The thing is the soldiers, the ones with their boots on the ground, THEY are supporting this effort and making a difference.
And they're not the only ones to be answering that question. Of course they're working hard and making progress, and of course they want to finish the job. They're skilled professionals with a commitment to what they do. I watch engineers ask for a little more time to finish a project that should be killed off practically every week. Is it because they're stupid or they don't understand that it can't be done? No. It's because making stuff work is what they do, and they do it well. They're evaluating it as a project that can be completed, not as a business or policy decision. The questions are broader than that.
Of course, the other side of the question is how many Iraqi boots on the ground disagree? How is the opinion of the US soldiers (not a unanimous one by any stretch) to be weighed against those opinions?
They're also tired of the press, like in your NY Times story that works hard to make sure the news is negative.
I'm having a hard time buying into the idea that the snipers and suicide bombers who are killing people are somehow in the employ (or the imaginations) of the NY Times. If you don't want bad news reported, you're not helping any. I hate it when people point out when my projects are behind schedule or over budget or have bugs, but somebody needs to report it in order for the people in charge to make the proper decision.
Here's why that NY Times article was important: If you read John McCain's editorial on how great things are in Iraq, it goes on and on about how great it was. The story he told was of an American Senator who went into a peacful market and saw everything running smoothly. No worries about snipers popping people or car bombs taking out shoppers. It was paradise. And if *somebody* hadn't bothered to run a separate piece pointing out that he had an entire company of soldiers on the ground and attack helicopters overhead, John McCain certainly wasn't going to. People should *not* be making policy decisions based on a rosy picture that doesn't reflect reality when human lives and hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.
Are the merchants frustrated. I'm sure some are.
Yes, I've heard that being killed can be frustrating. Are you sure that you're not looking for a word that does less to belittle the very real problems and informed opinions of Iraqi "boots on the ground" than the word "frustrated"?
But it begs the question, where are the Iraqi police. The Iraqis are going to have to learn to govern themselves. Then again we were in Japan for 10 years after WWII to get them up an running.
You're comparing a rebuilding effort with no insurgency to one with a major insurgency. The costs of the two are not nearly the same in blood or treasure. You simply can't compare years and assume that you have a valid cost comparison.
I disagree totally that McCain was "flat out lying" about conditions. I'm no McCain fan either, but I think the problem is like a lot of politicians that have been in office forever. He goes over and is, of course, under extreme protection. He never gets to see it like it is when the military presence is not there.
That's right. He did not get to see what it was like without the military presence. That was why his editorial was so much bullshit. It was misleading. It was lies. He is essentially saying, "You know the reporters who have been in the country for years and are reporting on what they're observing? They're full of crap. They don't see what I see from my hermetically sealed bubble. I'm the one on the ground. Listen to me!" I lost all respect I had for the man at that point. You just
How is it possible to tell that these bacteria did not have this ability all along, rather than expressing it at some point due to the extended pressure of the changed environment?
So, the first 20,000 generations are unable to metabolize a particular food source and generations after that become able to metabolize that source. What definition of "having this ability all along" are you using that could possibly apply to this situation?
Most of us do not normally eat worms, snails, insects, frogs and other creatures. However, people that have been lost in the wilderness have survived on such and other things.
Are you implying that the bacteria were able to use that food source but did not do so for the first 20,000 generations because it did not suit their palettes? Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part?
Keep in mind that it's the environmental lobby that has essentially caused high gas prices, thanks to bans on drilling off our own coasts and in ANWR, and the difficulty of building new refineries. Guess which party that is?
You seem to have run the numbers. What would gas prices be without those policies? Please, show your work.
The issue with these sorts of situations is that lenders are highly leveraged entities, so losing what appears to be a small chunk of their portfolios can actually cause them to go belly up. Let's take a really hyper-simplified example:
A bank has $50B in home loans payable to it, that's $50B in assets. So far so good. Presumably, that $50B came from somewhere. Let's be simple-minded and call it deposits. It loaned out less than $50B to get the $50B in accounts payable, so let's say that the deposits are $49B. That leaves the bank with $1B of "wiggle room" before it becomes undercapitalized. Let's say that portfolio loses 5% of its value, that bank is now worth negative money and can't cover its deposit obligations, and that's the end of it.
When you have a huge market for loanable funds where everybody is loaning to everybody else and every player is hugely leveraged, a hiccup like this taking down a major player has repercussions through the whole system. Suddenly, that player's debt is no good. Imagine bringing insurance into play: A major debtor tanks, the bond insurers pay out, and then those insurers are in a compromised position and may not be able to pay future claims. Any debt that was insured by those insurers loses value, hitting somebody else's portfolio.
The bottom line is that there are a huge number of possible chain reactions that can happen if a huge entity suddenly defaults on its debts. It can cause a lot of damage to the banking system. At minimum, credit markets seize up and the economy experiences a jarring liquidity crisis and whatever comes out of it. How bad it can get is difficult to predict, but the risks are high enough to be concerned. If pragmatism doesn't take precedence over dogma at that point, you can end up in major trouble.
I agree that we should minimize our intervention and let poor financial decision makers feel the pain of their mistakes, but not at the expense of a major financial meltdown. These are not easy decisions to make. The key is intervening in such a way as to avoid a chain reaction while still making sure that the people who made bad decisions are hurt badly enough that they're unlikely to repeat their mistakes. If you have a proposal, I'm sure that Ben Bernanke would be interested.
I see a whole LOT of people that claim they care about the soldiers, but then want to pull them out and abandon Iraq. You cannot claim to support the soldier and then disrespect their mission.
What kind of crack-headed logic is that? If the soldiers were assigned the task of emptying the Pacific Ocean with measuring cups, would it be disrespectful of the soldiers to point out that their mission is a bad idea? Why do our leaders get to hide behind the soldiers whenever somebody calls them on a bad decision?
McCain's probably gone through some of the worst things a soldier can. You don't see him calling to abandon the war and he knows the tragedy first hand.
Which is why I was so disappointed to see him flat out lying to the public about the state of things. I'm perfectly OK with an honest difference of opinion on war policy. I'm also sort of OK with the minor amounts of spin politicians put out when arguing that policy. That level of deceit, though, is totally unacceptable to me in a time of war.
On the surface liberals think, that is so good, because it means that if I mess around and do not save for retirement or work as hard as my neighbors, then I can live off the people around me." and Ithey clap and cheer for "Oh, Oh, Oh".
You've clearly done a bang-up job of understanding what the people who disagree with you think. Well done.
There still remains little, if any, evidence of random mutations producing MORE and USEFUL genetic information, a key distinction that ID folks like to make.
Considering the fact that the ID folks have yet to come up with an objective way of measuring the quantity of information in a hunk of DNA, I find that distinction decidedly unimpressive.
Yes, there are many complex possibilities -- develop a time machine and go back and check, etc. -- but nothing simple and straightforward that could happen in the here and now.
Any number of observations in the fossil record could potentially turn evolutionary theory on its head. Be careful not to confuse, "Has been tested but not falsified" with, "Cannot, even in theory, be falsified."
But right now, it looks to me like Intelligent Design is actually *more* scientific by Popper's criteria than Evolution, because it is more easily disproved.
I suppose that depends on how you define ID. Its major advocates are incredibly vague (and most of them deliberately so, as they're simply using it as a clever way of getting creationist arguments into schools). I don't think that any hypothesis that amounts to, "Somewhere, at some point in history, some intelligent entity interacted with life to cause its complexity by some unknown mechanism that may or may not be measurable" qualifies as particularly falsifiable, scientific, or even very interesting. If somebody is willing to do the leg work and make some suggestions about the designer, how the designer worked, and what the potential implications may be, then I'll start to see it as science. Almost certainly wrong, but at least they'd be doing science.
I don't see this as the irrefutable proof which will shake the Christian right's spiritual moorings.
I don't think it's expected to. What it does do is completely bury the oft-repeated claim that there are no examples of beneficial mutations. There's a large portion of the creationist community that has managed to deny every example up until now because "it could already have been there" unless the whole thing was observed and recorded from beginning to end. It has now been observed from beginning to end.
I don't think that any single piece of evidence is likely to shake the foundations of creationism, but this is yet another example of another creationist claim that gets dumped into the dustbin of history.
Heck, we are genetically closer to dogs than apes anyway.
Why do people insist on making shit like this up? Seriously?
Creationists believe that there are mutations.
Yes, of course. But no beneficial ones. Or wait... there are beneficial mutations, but somehow those don't count because they were already there. The sound you're hearing is the screeching of goalposts as they're dragged across the floor over the years. Over the decades, we've gone from "all mutations are deadly" to "well, some mutations are neutral" to "OK, well there are some beneficial mutations, but they all differ in some unmeasurable way from the types of beneficial mutations I'm specifically talking about." And every time, it's what they've always been asserting.
Creationists believe that mutations sometimes result in a "net gain" for the organism despite being a "loss" of actual data.
Let's talk about how you objectively quantify that actual data, specifically.
This kind of genetic mistake is well-documented and it's not as if creationists are idiots with their ostrich heads in the sand (despite that constant characterization, which just shows complete ignorance of their position on the part of the speaker).
You clearly haven't seen some of the barking mad assertions that prominent creationists have made about genetics over the recent years. Well, aside from the claim about us being genetically closer to dogs (or pigs, or fish, or bullfrogs, or whatever random nonsense they're spouting today) than apes.
But creationists are still waiting for a single example of a mutation that adds genetic material that was not already there instead of shuffling or removing what they would say God put there to begin with.
I would be very interested in knowing how they define "adding genetic material" and still manage to believe that no mutations ever do this.
There were two options on the ballot, Hillary and an uncommitted delegation.
Crystal clear, then. Any pollster would be proud. "Would you rather have a name you clearly recognize or an uncommited delegation?"
Even if you assume everyone who wanted an uncommitted delegation (which is unlikely given that Obama, Edwards, etc. were still in the race), HRC won. Why they would vote for her and not "none of the above" seems to indicate a refusal to vote for Obama.
There's another factor: That's what people do when presented with a survey whose options are vague. They select the recognizable answer. That hopelessly confounds the data. Nobody with a background in polling or surveys would accept those results as anything more than a very broad indicator. "What's your favorite ice cream? Vanilla, or non-specified flavor product?" Try telling a statistics professor that your survey was worded like that and as a result, vanilla is far more popular than rocky road and see what grade you get.
Also, calling it a poll as opposed to a primary or election seems to be attempting to diminish via symantics what you cannot do via arguement.
It was inadvertant. Given that people go to a "polling place" to cast their votes, I don't think it's that far off base. In fact, come to think of it, the fact that it's full of confounding variables (generating response bias by telling people that their votes don't make a difference, for example) and vaguely worded questions, "poll" may be giving it a bit too much credit as an indicator.
No one's votes for President, or Presidental candidate, will change teh results of an election. Too small an influence.
Let's do a thought experiment: You're electing your governor. You know that your vote is too small to count, but you vote anyway. Now, let's change it. Your vote will be taken and thrown in a box which is dumped in a river. Or, your vote is counted and then the current governor will be reinstalled regardless of the result. Statistically, there is no difference between these for you personally. In aggregate, there is a major difference. Is it likely to change your behavior? Why, or why not? From that perspective, voting is inherently a little bit irrational, but I'm not willing to go as far as to say it's as irrational as you claim.
And no one said their vote would not count. They were told that their delegates would not be seated IF the election was close.
Translation: Your votes are guaranteed by election rules not to make a difference. They will be thrown away if they could potentially matter.
Since delegates do far more things than nominate a president, the vote still counted for all those other reasons.
Which segments of the population care about that? Is an understanding of these things (an interest in them) uniformly distributed across the population, or are there people who come out only because of the presidential primaries? Given that we're seeing record turnouts among demographics that cause interesting results, I'm going to take the leap and guess that there's a huge percentage of the electorate that's turning out specifically because of their chance to affect the fates of the candidates involved. Given that, we're talking about a major change in behavior.
And of course the data is never perfect. But it is more perfect than no data.
How much more perfect, though? We're talking about a very close primary election whose official results you'd like to reverse based on results that seem to have a soft, chewy center rather than hard data. We're not comparing the results of Florida and Michigant to no results at all. We're comparing the result of Florida and Michigan to the sum of dozens of other states and territories that didn't have the survey problems that
Well I was thinking of trying it without any context as you are providing.
Well, I have to ask: What would the point of analyzing a quote context free when the goal is to decide whether the quote was offensive? I mean, I could say that you wrote that geniuses are unbalanced and point out that without context, you were being a real jerk. What purpose would it serve, though? It certainly wouldn't reflect reality.
I wasn't provided any context for Osama's comment.
Not entirely accurate??? CONGRATULATIONS! You've just won the "understatement of the year" award!
You've got to be kidding. What is the major ethical difference between infecting black men with syphillis and simply preventing their treatment and not warning them that they had a communicable disease that they'd likely be spreading? If I was a judge handing down sentences for both crimes, I'd have a hard time being much more lenient on the latter.
Yeah, I see the pattern here - you're deliberately blinding yourself in order to prop up your beliefs. What Wright is doing is painfully transparent - he's no different than the fools who say things like "I'm not antisemitic, I just hate Zionists!".
I'm going to go with you on this one for a moment, but I have to ask: Have you noticed that the "anti-semetic" label is occasionally applied to people who simply don't agree with the policies of the Israeli government? Conflating the two is not helpful. I don't think that assuming that Wright's complaints about a government that has been, by any objective measure, virulently racist, stem from his own racism is very helpful either.
The man hold some seriously crazy views, but I don't see any reason to hold him in any lower regard than other batshit insane religious leaders who also happen to be political king makers.
So a guy running for President worked closely in his early political career with some batshit crazy loons, went to their church, and hooked his horse to their wagon for years, and it doesn't matter? If McCain had spent 20 years in a church just as racist, if his preacher had gone on about how black brains are different from white brains, or about used racist remarks to mention Obama, he'd be gone and the whole world would be denounching him.
It's a good thing that McCain has never spent any time associating religious whackjobs who say crazy things, then, isn't it? I'm glad to be able to vote for somebody who isn't in the the pockets of scary religious cooks.
It's patronizing and condescending because he's saying that if only things were better off for these people, they'd be going blue in droves. God forbid that these people are proud Americans who have values and traditions that they hold near and dear, it's that their values and traditions are a crutch to deal with the fact that the world is too hard for them.
The point of what he said is that those values and traditions are the deciding factor for people because government has repeatedly failed on the issues of economics and infrastructure that should be important during an election. The reality is that those things should not be as important as they are in an election, but they are because repeated failures of both parties to address the real issues makes stuff that's unrelated to governance relevant in elections.
The statement isn't, "You'd vote for me if you weren't poor." It was, "You'd vote for me if I could make you better off, even if I don't agree with you on religion or guns or questions of culture." Was it a stupid way of putting it? Absolutely. If I had been editing his speech, I would have been all over that, and I suck at politics. Was it an invalid point? No, not at all.
Note also that I'm only considering US casualties. If we include allied casualties, this war looks even better in camparison (we were a small fraction of the casualties of the Korean War, not the large fraction here, as an example). And I don't consider enemy casualties to be particularly relevant in warfare.
Where does collateral damage fall on your scale of relevance?
Have you tried the extensive policy papers that every single candidate has had on his or her web site since the beginning of the primaries? I don't think that the policies proposed by any of the candidates should be a secret at this point. The events that pass for debates ("What's your favorite Bible verse?" WTF??) are not the best way to figure out what concrete policies the candidate supports.
And even if you grant Obama all the anyone-but-Hillary vote in Michigan (even though, he likely would have only recieved a portion of it), she won the popular vote.
You seem to be assuming that none of the people who voted for Hillary would have voted for Obama if he had been on the ballot. Frankly, speculating about the results of a poll based on options not given and then assigning meaning to those results is not a particularly good basis for policy.
In fact, I would argue that telling people that their votes won't count will grossly affect the results of an election, even if all of the options are on the ballot. At that point, you're simply measuring the willingness of each candidate's constituency to cast a symbolic vote or that constituency's interest in voting on other issues on the ballot. To give a concrete example, if one candidate dominates among older voters who are likely to turn out to vote regardless of the issues on the ballot, telling all of the voters that their primary vote won't be counted will strongly skew the result toward that candidate.
When lost in the woods, should I abstain from trying to fashion a makeshift compass because I learned how to do it from a work of fiction?
No, but you might want to think twice before assuming that the method you read in that work of fiction will actually work. You should also be willing to concede that the makeshift compass construction method is part of the "fiction" part of the book if you try it and it doesn't work.
This year, all H-1Bs, even the 20,000 in the advanced degree block, are being assigned by lottery.
This makes no sense to me. If the whole point is to get the most valuable skilled labor to fill in positions for which we're deficient, why make the decision by lottery? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to auction them off to employers? As I see it, that would have a few positive things going for it:
1) It essentially guarantees that nobody will be bitching about depressed wages as it would almost guarantee that any difference in market wage rates would be built into the visa price.
2) It would enable us to get the most valuable (in the economic sense) workers. If there's a brilliant worker an employer would gladly spend an extra few hundred thousand dollars to get, would it make sense to send him home in favor of somebody else simply because he didn't get picked in some lottery?
3) It would provide a lot of interesting information about labor rates, what there's demand for, and what the spread is between our capabilities and foreign capabilities. High visa prices indicate a serious deficiency while low visa prices indicate a market with enough labor. It's the sort of data collection we'd normally pay a lot of money for.
The downside to this is that we'd have to be careful to make sure that manipulating the number of available visas doesn't become a revenue generating device.
Anyway, I'm all for stealing the best and the brightest and bringing them over here to work for us. That just makes sense from a policy angle. I don't think that assigning them based partially on random variables seems like a smart way to do it, though.
Teachers also get 3+ straight months out of the year off, plus other vacations that the students take.
There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that they get 3 months of vacation. The second is that they're essentially skilled laborers who are laid off for 1/4 of the year. You can't simply take the annual salary and do some division to get the normalized rate. The fact of the matter is that generally, they can't work the summer at a pay rate commensurate with what they would earn during the normal year, so it's essentially forced unemployment. It might work out OK on an hourly basis, but given the choice between 75% of my salary for 75% of the work and 100% of my salary for 100% of the work, I'd choose the 100% option.
Although I know it borders on a troll to say, but if you don't like what the job pays, don't bother going into it.
That's one way of approaching the problem, and it appears to be the way we approach it. The problem, as you've sort of hit on, is that there are going to be two groups of candidates for that salary range: (1) The people who are good at what they do and are willing to do it for less than they might make elsewhere. (2) The people who are just looking for a job and don't have very good employment prospects elsewhere. Cranking up the salary offering would likely increase the signal to noise ratio. This holds especially true once you get to the high school level and need people to teach classes like math, science, economics, etc. There are simply too many good employment opportunities elsewhere for people skilled in those fields for them to teach for anything other than the love of it.
Your other option would be to figure out some really clever way of distinguishing those two classes before hiring them, but it seems to me that it might be easier to make the target bigger than to get better at hitting a small target.
I don't know of anyone that predicted where, or that LA would peak a full year before Dallas, or that it would be the most popular cities that are hit hardest, and rural land prices would be mostly unaffected, or any of the other such details.
Where were you looking? I don't know that anybody was able to predict peaks (nobody really can in a bubble--that one of the interesting things about them), but that the most popular cities would be hit hardest and rural land prices would remain relatively unaffected was a straightforward result of the work that I had seen done. People really are studying these markets and running the numbers constantly. My adviser, for example, had been noting which markets were experiencing weird shifts in things like the price/rent ratios and price/income ratios in 2002-2003. Blogs like angrybear and calculatedrisk have been going on about this stuff in detail for years.
So "no one saw it coming" isn't true, but then "economists saw it coming" was just speculation on their part unsupported with real numbers and insufficient of a gut feeling to let them calculate any useful numbers. But such is economics. It's the math of voodoo.
I get that a lot, usually from people who haven't really studied a lot of economics and base their opinions on the finance "analysts" on CNN. The reality is that there is very real analysis going on with actual numbers, and the economists usually pick up on it fairly early when something like this is grossly wrong. The fact that there's always a contingent of people who disagree should be tempered by the fact that those people seem to work in places where booms like this are extremely profitable. When the talking heads were saying that the worst was over a year ago, the people I knew who were actually looking at the data were blowing raspberries. Most of the claims that everything was fine didn't hold up to even a simple analysis.
I've seen a lot of these discussions, and the usually go something like this:
A: Random assertion based on "common sense" that prices are just twitching in response to interest rates or some other perfectly normal phenomenon.
B: Points out that historically, interest rates are a relatively weak explanatory variable for house prices and that a rational analysis of interest rates can't explain the increase alone. Suggests that something else is afoot.
A: Trots out, "they're not making land anymore, and property is always a safe investment."
B: Shows that this is false, given the history of prices and explanatory variables. Does a cashflow analysis of monthly incomes vs payments. Points out that they're at their practical limits and any increase could cause a slew of foreclosures. Notes that anything that causes house prices to stop going up will result in a credit squeeze and that this is dangerous when the market is structured like a Ponzi scheme.
A: Buys house to get rich Rich RICH!.
Market: Tanks.
A: "Well, you just got lucky. The stuff you study is voodoo anyway. It's not like all the graphs and statistics amounted to any sort of analysis or data."
Nobody can pick a date when irrational behavior is going to end. Economics not like engineering where it's possible to predict exactly when a bolt is likely to shear off. But economists can point out the irrational behavior, suggest some limits on how far it might go, suggest some stimuli that could cause it to collapse, and then be ignored. That usually seems to be what happens. I know a lot of smart people who simply can't seem to think quantitatively about value, and from the looks of things, most people who don't make a concerted effort to model the problem and do the math don't seem to be able to arrive at the right answers by intuition alone.
Frankly, this was not rocket science, and any paid analyst who was involved in mortgages, property transactions, or investing in mortgage backed securities who didn't hear alarm bells was asleep at the wheel.
Ding! That's exactly why interest rate changes alone don't explain the home price run-up leading to the bust. That's why the numbers don't bear that explanation out in any way. Buyers and sellers were acting on emotion, fear, greed, and variables other than the simple, "Interest rates have gone down %d amount, so I can afford a house that costs %d now" calculation. The fact that a shift in interest rates touched off the inevitable collapse doesn't mean that the price increases were explained entirely by purely financial decisions on the way up.
Well, many times it isn't simple, or it isn't supply and demand. Government regulations can dictate supply, regardless of demand. Some things are inelastic (when the price of milk drops in half, the amount of purchased milk is still roughly the same, when the price of gasoline increases double, the purchased gallons is roughly the same), so "simple" supply and demand don't work.
My point is that those things are still described with the same boring old supply and demand graphs and analysis we do with everything else. The graphs are just shaped differently than the -1 slope and +1 slope that people freehand. Even weird things like the money supply and demand for loanable funds eventually boil down to simple supply and demand. That's not the interesting part, and it doesn't really add anything to the point. It's the special things that tweak the shapes of those curves that make the analysis worth doing.
But in this case, my point was that with a spike in homes offered for sale and a drop in demand for purchasing homes, and the combination will result in a drop in prices.
Absolutely. And I believe that we're seeing here is a significant and relatively long term shift in demand. The combination of a change in expectations along with what I predict will be a relatively long-term crunch on the average buyer's ability to get credit is going to keep demand in check for some time. I also suspect that home prices are sticky downward, so while the initial shock of foreclosures and interest rates will provide a sharp downward jolt like the one we've seen, we're not going to see a fast rebound because part of the slide was kept in check by people who have the option not to sell in the short run deciding not to sell at a loss. I really don't think that we're going to see prices at 2005 levels again any time soon, and if we do, there's something seriously wrong.
I assert that the lenders (mortgage brokers specifically) did not take on risk.
That's certainly true if you define lenders as mortgage brokers specifically. More broadly, we're talking about trillions of dollars in loanable funds in the mortgage backed securities market. Low-quality debt was wildly overvalued. The market was attempting to get a zero-risk high interest rate "free lunch" at a time of low interest rates. It's ironic that those groups, supposedly the most sophisticated investors, were the most naked to this whole mess.
It's these large number of sub-prime loans mixed in that are the highest risk, and the way they were bundled the banks can't tell which is which. So the risk was an unknown risk to the banks until the trouble started, but the risk was generated not by the banks that hold the notes, but by sleezy brokers that leveraged low interest rates to get people to buy that which they couldn't really afford.
I'm simply not buying into the idea that nobody could have seen this coming. In fact, if you run in economist circles, the whole thing was a hot topic for years. Investors were making wildly unwise decisions about the correct price of those debt instruments, spurring demand for even more bad loans and adding fuel to the fire. It was classic bubble behavior with an obvious positive feedback loop: in aggregate, lenders were effecti
Slashdot Mirror
And they're not the only ones to be answering that question. Of course they're working hard and making progress, and of course they want to finish the job. They're skilled professionals with a commitment to what they do. I watch engineers ask for a little more time to finish a project that should be killed off practically every week. Is it because they're stupid or they don't understand that it can't be done? No. It's because making stuff work is what they do, and they do it well. They're evaluating it as a project that can be completed, not as a business or policy decision. The questions are broader than that.
Of course, the other side of the question is how many Iraqi boots on the ground disagree? How is the opinion of the US soldiers (not a unanimous one by any stretch) to be weighed against those opinions?
I'm having a hard time buying into the idea that the snipers and suicide bombers who are killing people are somehow in the employ (or the imaginations) of the NY Times. If you don't want bad news reported, you're not helping any. I hate it when people point out when my projects are behind schedule or over budget or have bugs, but somebody needs to report it in order for the people in charge to make the proper decision.
Here's why that NY Times article was important: If you read John McCain's editorial on how great things are in Iraq, it goes on and on about how great it was. The story he told was of an American Senator who went into a peacful market and saw everything running smoothly. No worries about snipers popping people or car bombs taking out shoppers. It was paradise. And if *somebody* hadn't bothered to run a separate piece pointing out that he had an entire company of soldiers on the ground and attack helicopters overhead, John McCain certainly wasn't going to. People should *not* be making policy decisions based on a rosy picture that doesn't reflect reality when human lives and hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.
Yes, I've heard that being killed can be frustrating. Are you sure that you're not looking for a word that does less to belittle the very real problems and informed opinions of Iraqi "boots on the ground" than the word "frustrated"?
You're comparing a rebuilding effort with no insurgency to one with a major insurgency. The costs of the two are not nearly the same in blood or treasure. You simply can't compare years and assume that you have a valid cost comparison.
That's right. He did not get to see what it was like without the military presence. That was why his editorial was so much bullshit. It was misleading. It was lies. He is essentially saying, "You know the reporters who have been in the country for years and are reporting on what they're observing? They're full of crap. They don't see what I see from my hermetically sealed bubble. I'm the one on the ground. Listen to me!" I lost all respect I had for the man at that point. You just
Are you implying that the bacteria were able to use that food source but did not do so for the first 20,000 generations because it did not suit their palettes? Was that change an indication of some sort of "desperation" on their part?
A bank has $50B in home loans payable to it, that's $50B in assets. So far so good. Presumably, that $50B came from somewhere. Let's be simple-minded and call it deposits. It loaned out less than $50B to get the $50B in accounts payable, so let's say that the deposits are $49B. That leaves the bank with $1B of "wiggle room" before it becomes undercapitalized. Let's say that portfolio loses 5% of its value, that bank is now worth negative money and can't cover its deposit obligations, and that's the end of it.
When you have a huge market for loanable funds where everybody is loaning to everybody else and every player is hugely leveraged, a hiccup like this taking down a major player has repercussions through the whole system. Suddenly, that player's debt is no good. Imagine bringing insurance into play: A major debtor tanks, the bond insurers pay out, and then those insurers are in a compromised position and may not be able to pay future claims. Any debt that was insured by those insurers loses value, hitting somebody else's portfolio.
The bottom line is that there are a huge number of possible chain reactions that can happen if a huge entity suddenly defaults on its debts. It can cause a lot of damage to the banking system. At minimum, credit markets seize up and the economy experiences a jarring liquidity crisis and whatever comes out of it. How bad it can get is difficult to predict, but the risks are high enough to be concerned. If pragmatism doesn't take precedence over dogma at that point, you can end up in major trouble.
I agree that we should minimize our intervention and let poor financial decision makers feel the pain of their mistakes, but not at the expense of a major financial meltdown. These are not easy decisions to make. The key is intervening in such a way as to avoid a chain reaction while still making sure that the people who made bad decisions are hurt badly enough that they're unlikely to repeat their mistakes. If you have a proposal, I'm sure that Ben Bernanke would be interested.
Which is why I was so disappointed to see him flat out lying to the public about the state of things. I'm perfectly OK with an honest difference of opinion on war policy. I'm also sort of OK with the minor amounts of spin politicians put out when arguing that policy. That level of deceit, though, is totally unacceptable to me in a time of war.
I don't think that any single piece of evidence is likely to shake the foundations of creationism, but this is yet another example of another creationist claim that gets dumped into the dustbin of history.
Crystal clear, then. Any pollster would be proud. "Would you rather have a name you clearly recognize or an uncommited delegation?"
There's another factor: That's what people do when presented with a survey whose options are vague. They select the recognizable answer. That hopelessly confounds the data. Nobody with a background in polling or surveys would accept those results as anything more than a very broad indicator. "What's your favorite ice cream? Vanilla, or non-specified flavor product?" Try telling a statistics professor that your survey was worded like that and as a result, vanilla is far more popular than rocky road and see what grade you get.
It was inadvertant. Given that people go to a "polling place" to cast their votes, I don't think it's that far off base. In fact, come to think of it, the fact that it's full of confounding variables (generating response bias by telling people that their votes don't make a difference, for example) and vaguely worded questions, "poll" may be giving it a bit too much credit as an indicator.
Let's do a thought experiment: You're electing your governor. You know that your vote is too small to count, but you vote anyway. Now, let's change it. Your vote will be taken and thrown in a box which is dumped in a river. Or, your vote is counted and then the current governor will be reinstalled regardless of the result. Statistically, there is no difference between these for you personally. In aggregate, there is a major difference. Is it likely to change your behavior? Why, or why not? From that perspective, voting is inherently a little bit irrational, but I'm not willing to go as far as to say it's as irrational as you claim.
Translation: Your votes are guaranteed by election rules not to make a difference. They will be thrown away if they could potentially matter.
Which segments of the population care about that? Is an understanding of these things (an interest in them) uniformly distributed across the population, or are there people who come out only because of the presidential primaries? Given that we're seeing record turnouts among demographics that cause interesting results, I'm going to take the leap and guess that there's a huge percentage of the electorate that's turning out specifically because of their chance to affect the fates of the candidates involved. Given that, we're talking about a major change in behavior.
How much more perfect, though? We're talking about a very close primary election whose official results you'd like to reverse based on results that seem to have a soft, chewy center rather than hard data. We're not comparing the results of Florida and Michigant to no results at all. We're comparing the result of Florida and Michigan to the sum of dozens of other states and territories that didn't have the survey problems that
Surely you don't mean Osama, do you?
I'm going to go with you on this one for a moment, but I have to ask: Have you noticed that the "anti-semetic" label is occasionally applied to people who simply don't agree with the policies of the Israeli government? Conflating the two is not helpful. I don't think that assuming that Wright's complaints about a government that has been, by any objective measure, virulently racist, stem from his own racism is very helpful either.
The man hold some seriously crazy views, but I don't see any reason to hold him in any lower regard than other batshit insane religious leaders who also happen to be political king makers.
The statement isn't, "You'd vote for me if you weren't poor." It was, "You'd vote for me if I could make you better off, even if I don't agree with you on religion or guns or questions of culture." Was it a stupid way of putting it? Absolutely. If I had been editing his speech, I would have been all over that, and I suck at politics. Was it an invalid point? No, not at all.
"Bob is a typical American man. He has a job, a wife, two kids, and a dog."
Flip to...
"Bob is a typical American man. Just a war-mongering cowboy who doesn't appreciate good wine or international travel."
Context is key. What is the context of the quote in question?
Have you tried the extensive policy papers that every single candidate has had on his or her web site since the beginning of the primaries? I don't think that the policies proposed by any of the candidates should be a secret at this point. The events that pass for debates ("What's your favorite Bible verse?" WTF??) are not the best way to figure out what concrete policies the candidate supports.
In fact, I would argue that telling people that their votes won't count will grossly affect the results of an election, even if all of the options are on the ballot. At that point, you're simply measuring the willingness of each candidate's constituency to cast a symbolic vote or that constituency's interest in voting on other issues on the ballot. To give a concrete example, if one candidate dominates among older voters who are likely to turn out to vote regardless of the issues on the ballot, telling all of the voters that their primary vote won't be counted will strongly skew the result toward that candidate.
1) It essentially guarantees that nobody will be bitching about depressed wages as it would almost guarantee that any difference in market wage rates would be built into the visa price.
2) It would enable us to get the most valuable (in the economic sense) workers. If there's a brilliant worker an employer would gladly spend an extra few hundred thousand dollars to get, would it make sense to send him home in favor of somebody else simply because he didn't get picked in some lottery?
3) It would provide a lot of interesting information about labor rates, what there's demand for, and what the spread is between our capabilities and foreign capabilities. High visa prices indicate a serious deficiency while low visa prices indicate a market with enough labor. It's the sort of data collection we'd normally pay a lot of money for.
The downside to this is that we'd have to be careful to make sure that manipulating the number of available visas doesn't become a revenue generating device.
Anyway, I'm all for stealing the best and the brightest and bringing them over here to work for us. That just makes sense from a policy angle. I don't think that assigning them based partially on random variables seems like a smart way to do it, though.
That's one way of approaching the problem, and it appears to be the way we approach it. The problem, as you've sort of hit on, is that there are going to be two groups of candidates for that salary range: (1) The people who are good at what they do and are willing to do it for less than they might make elsewhere. (2) The people who are just looking for a job and don't have very good employment prospects elsewhere. Cranking up the salary offering would likely increase the signal to noise ratio. This holds especially true once you get to the high school level and need people to teach classes like math, science, economics, etc. There are simply too many good employment opportunities elsewhere for people skilled in those fields for them to teach for anything other than the love of it.
Your other option would be to figure out some really clever way of distinguishing those two classes before hiring them, but it seems to me that it might be easier to make the target bigger than to get better at hitting a small target.
I get that a lot, usually from people who haven't really studied a lot of economics and base their opinions on the finance "analysts" on CNN. The reality is that there is very real analysis going on with actual numbers, and the economists usually pick up on it fairly early when something like this is grossly wrong. The fact that there's always a contingent of people who disagree should be tempered by the fact that those people seem to work in places where booms like this are extremely profitable. When the talking heads were saying that the worst was over a year ago, the people I knew who were actually looking at the data were blowing raspberries. Most of the claims that everything was fine didn't hold up to even a simple analysis.
I've seen a lot of these discussions, and the usually go something like this:
A: Random assertion based on "common sense" that prices are just twitching in response to interest rates or some other perfectly normal phenomenon.
B: Points out that historically, interest rates are a relatively weak explanatory variable for house prices and that a rational analysis of interest rates can't explain the increase alone. Suggests that something else is afoot.
A: Trots out, "they're not making land anymore, and property is always a safe investment."
B: Shows that this is false, given the history of prices and explanatory variables. Does a cashflow analysis of monthly incomes vs payments. Points out that they're at their practical limits and any increase could cause a slew of foreclosures. Notes that anything that causes house prices to stop going up will result in a credit squeeze and that this is dangerous when the market is structured like a Ponzi scheme.
A: Buys house to get rich Rich RICH!.
Market: Tanks.
A: "Well, you just got lucky. The stuff you study is voodoo anyway. It's not like all the graphs and statistics amounted to any sort of analysis or data."
Nobody can pick a date when irrational behavior is going to end. Economics not like engineering where it's possible to predict exactly when a bolt is likely to shear off. But economists can point out the irrational behavior, suggest some limits on how far it might go, suggest some stimuli that could cause it to collapse, and then be ignored. That usually seems to be what happens. I know a lot of smart people who simply can't seem to think quantitatively about value, and from the looks of things, most people who don't make a concerted effort to model the problem and do the math don't seem to be able to arrive at the right answers by intuition alone.
Frankly, this was not rocket science, and any paid analyst who was involved in mortgages, property transactions, or investing in mortgage backed securities who didn't hear alarm bells was asleep at the wheel.
Ding! That's exactly why interest rate changes alone don't explain the home price run-up leading to the bust. That's why the numbers don't bear that explanation out in any way. Buyers and sellers were acting on emotion, fear, greed, and variables other than the simple, "Interest rates have gone down %d amount, so I can afford a house that costs %d now" calculation. The fact that a shift in interest rates touched off the inevitable collapse doesn't mean that the price increases were explained entirely by purely financial decisions on the way up.
My point is that those things are still described with the same boring old supply and demand graphs and analysis we do with everything else. The graphs are just shaped differently than the -1 slope and +1 slope that people freehand. Even weird things like the money supply and demand for loanable funds eventually boil down to simple supply and demand. That's not the interesting part, and it doesn't really add anything to the point. It's the special things that tweak the shapes of those curves that make the analysis worth doing.
Absolutely. And I believe that we're seeing here is a significant and relatively long term shift in demand. The combination of a change in expectations along with what I predict will be a relatively long-term crunch on the average buyer's ability to get credit is going to keep demand in check for some time. I also suspect that home prices are sticky downward, so while the initial shock of foreclosures and interest rates will provide a sharp downward jolt like the one we've seen, we're not going to see a fast rebound because part of the slide was kept in check by people who have the option not to sell in the short run deciding not to sell at a loss. I really don't think that we're going to see prices at 2005 levels again any time soon, and if we do, there's something seriously wrong.
That's certainly true if you define lenders as mortgage brokers specifically. More broadly, we're talking about trillions of dollars in loanable funds in the mortgage backed securities market. Low-quality debt was wildly overvalued. The market was attempting to get a zero-risk high interest rate "free lunch" at a time of low interest rates. It's ironic that those groups, supposedly the most sophisticated investors, were the most naked to this whole mess.
I'm simply not buying into the idea that nobody could have seen this coming. In fact, if you run in economist circles, the whole thing was a hot topic for years. Investors were making wildly unwise decisions about the correct price of those debt instruments, spurring demand for even more bad loans and adding fuel to the fire. It was classic bubble behavior with an obvious positive feedback loop: in aggregate, lenders were effecti