Monday, July 30, 2018

July 30th Links

  • Then there is this other little problem called interest rates. Only the future knows how far the Fed is truly behind the curve at present, but our work suggests 100 basis points, if not more. The Fed has decided to focus on average hourly earnings, which have been distorted by compositional shifts with regard to industry, skills, and demographics. [Rosenberg]
  • I think he saw me earlier, or ATC pointed me out as traffic, and he just decided to see who was at 9500' flying fast (relatively speaking, of course!). He probably just wanted to see closeup that beautiful RV-8. And once he saw the patriotic Red, White, and Blue with Stars paint job, he knew I couldn't be up to anything nefarious! [link]
  • The P2 pier of the Millau Viaduct is the tallest structure in France, 23m taller than the Eiffel Tower. [Wiki]
  • Bernd and his sister had no other playmates, and he spent long days exploring the forest on his own. His father, a top entomologist specializing in wasps, was marginalized in postwar Germany, and he could be tyrannical. Once when Bernd was five years old and collecting beetles, he found a prized rare specimen at the base of a stump, and his father confiscated the insect to punish him for being "overstimulated," as he put it, when the boy leaped for the bug. [link]
  • White (heterosexual) gentiles absolutely positively must not be allowed to have their own stuff–schools, country clubs, neighborhoods, nations. It can't be about "oppression" because if it's about oppression, then all these people would not be clamoring to get *in*–to get all cosy with their supposed oppressors. Rather they would be happy–actually prefer–being in their own schools and country clubs, neighborhoods and nations doing their own stuff. [Sailer]
  • Whereas Trump is quite overweight and hasn't gotten any work done on his face. His face is quite bloated and he gets that terrible makeup for appearances where his entire face except for his eyes is caked with orange makeup. Trump also gets very little sleep every night and gets by by drinking 12 cans of Diet Coke every day. And he's constantly monitoring cable news and social media. While Putin wakes up late and eats breakfast at noon, and presumably pays no attention to TV news or social media and doesn’t have to since he's in an authoritarian state. Lack of sleep, caffeine, and cable news and social media all elevate stress hormones. [Sailer]
  • In his 1970 book, The Passing of the Modern Age, the conservative historian John Lukacs wrote, "Bismarck was supposed to have said that the most important fact of the twentieth century would be that Americans speak English; it is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white." Both here and elsewhere, Lukacs argued that as white nations, America and Russia might profitably work together to prop each other up against a planet where they were a racial minority. [New Republic]
  • For America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is the minority race and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don't band together, we are going to end up as farmers—or, worse, mere entertainment—for more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics. [Gore Vidal]
  • Blast Deflectors, Inc. HAVING A BLAST SINCE 1957. For over 60 years, BDI has been finding innovative solutions for the aviation industry. We have become a world leader in designing, manufacturing, delivering and installing Jet Blast Deflectors (JBDs), Ground Run-Up Enclosures (GREs), and Visual Screens. By focusing exclusively on jet blast and run-up noise, BDI has earned a reputation for its expertise, integrity, and long-term customer commitment. [Blast Deflectors]
  • We now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia's recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent's worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle. [New Yorker]
  • Because there is very little redundancy in the transportation infrastructure of the Pacific Northwest, and because that infrastructure is so vulnerable, the Cascadia earthquake will turn countless places within the region into towns like that. (Nor do you even need a given town's access points to be destroyed for it to be rendered inaccessible. If a single bridge or highway section two or twelve or twenty miles east fails, emergency crews can't get there anyway.) So a better analogy than toast is this: the Cascadia earthquake is going to hit the Pacific Northwest like a rock hitting safety glass, shattering the region into thousands of tiny areas, each isolated from one another and all extremely difficult to reach. [New Yorker]
  • Pytheas called the place he encountered Thule, as in ultima Thule—the land beyond all known lands. That is one of three names the Greeks gave us for the Far North. The second is Arctic, from Arktikos—"of the great bear." The reference was not to the polar bear, unknown in Europe until the eighteenth century, but to Ursa Major, the most prominent circumpolar constellation in the northern skies. Whatever the original meaning, "far-away land full of big bears" turned out to be an apt description of the Arctic. But the third name the Greeks bestowed on the north was considerably less accurate—and considerably more important for the future of polar exploration. That name was Hyperborea: the region beyond the kingdom of Boreas, god of the north wind. Somewhere above his frozen domain, the Greeks believed, lay a land of peace and plenty, home to fertile soils, warm breezes, and the oldest, wisest, gentlest race on earth. [New Yorker]
  • "If Germany is strong, it's because Bavaria is strong," Mr. Söder intoned from the stage in his Frankish lilt, to approving cheers. "There should be big signs all over Berlin saying 'Thank You, Thank you, Thank you, Bavaria!'" "And because we're strong," he roared over more cheers, "we take the liberty to have an opinion!" [NY Times]
  • A dictator relies on his military's support; shocks to this support can threaten his rule. Motivated by this, we find that lower rainfall, along the north-eastern Roman Empire, predicts more assassinations of Roman emperors. Our proposed mechanism is as follows: lower precipitation increases the probability that Roman troops, who relied on local food supplies, starve. This pushes soldiers to mutiny, hence weakening the emperor's support, and increasing the probability he is assassinated. [link]
  • Lake Clark was declared a National Park in 1980 as part of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, in an effort to protect "multiple values," including the waters that flow into Bristol Bay, site of the world's largest salmon fishery, said Megan Richotte, Lake Clark National Park's program manager for interpretation. The park is a veritable greatest hits of Alaskan landscapes and wildlife. It would take many lifetimes to hike all of Lake Clark's glaciers, mountains, volcanoes and tundra; paddle all of the park's lakes and shoreline; and spot the wide range of wildlife large — bears, lynx, eagles and wolves — and (very) small — collared pika and tundra shrew — that claim the area as home. [NY Times]
  • If you find yourself passing parameters and adding conditional paths through shared code, the abstraction is incorrect. It may have been right to begin with, but that day has passed. Once an abstraction is proved wrong the best strategy is to re-introduce duplication and let it show you what's right. Although it occasionally makes sense to accumulate a few conditionals to gain insight into what's going on, you'll suffer less pain if you abandon the wrong abstraction sooner rather than later. When the abstraction is wrong, the fastest way forward is back. This is not retreat, it's advance in a better direction. Do it. You'll improve your own life, and the lives of all who follow. [Sandi Metz]
  • "Alcohol-related liver cirrhosis used to be considered a disease that would happen after 30 years of heavy alcohol consumption," Shah says. "But this study is showing that these problems are actually occurring in individuals in their 20s and 30s." "There has been a shift in the kind of patient we're seeing," agrees Dr. Sumeet Asrani, a liver specialist practicing in Dallas who did not contribute to the study. "It fits with what we see in practice. We're seeing younger and younger patients with alcoholic liver disease." [NPR]
  • The argument, I guess, is "well, this CBP agency is terrible at running a web service, but they're great at everything else they do." But usually when an enterprise is good at one thing they are pretty good at everything and when they're bad at one thing it is usually because management has low standards for pretty much everything that the enterprise does. Can we infer from their inability to run a decent 1995-style web service that CBP is never going to be able to screen refugees and asylum-seekers? [Phil G]
  • The Venue. This was actually pretty freaking easy. Most offices LOVE hosting meetups. We cold emailed a few co-working spaces and they all said yes. I can't emphasize this enough, but the key in these emails was to appeal to their interests. NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU...THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT THEMSELVES. Remember this. We would email the office manager and tell them how we were going to have 150 entrepreneurs in one room and this would help the work space land a new client or two. [Anti MBA]
  • I'm reminded of the fine 1986 book about Mexico by the NYT's Mexico City correspondent Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors. Riding took it as a given that Greater Mexico City's population, then about 18 million, would grow to 30 million. But instead, Mexico City got so awful as its population kept going up that Mexican peasants moved to the United States instead, and Greater Mexico City is around 21 million today. [Sailer]
  • Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" [Diamond]
  • Now that private primary care tele-systems have become popular in metropolitan England, they are competing on how quickly they can get amoxicillin delivered to your door. There is already a mixed economy in the USA, such that only 60% of antibiotic prescriptions originate from doctors' offices or emergency departments. The remaining 40% come from retail clinics and urgent care centers. Using a huge prescribing database, this study found that antibiotic prescriptions were linked to 39.0% of 2.7 million urgent care center visits, 36.4% of 58 206 retail clinic visits, 13.8% of 4.8 million ED visits, and 7.1% of 148.5 million medical office visits. [BMJ]
  • This is the reason that if I could give a prospective creative only one piece of advice about platform, it would be this: Build a list. Specifically, an e-mail list. Why? Imagine that, for reasons entirely outside of your control, there was a media and industry blackout of your work. Imagine that, due to some controversy or sudden change in public tastes, you were suddenly persona non grata. Imagine if no publisher, no crowdfunding platform, no retailer, no distributors, and no investors would touch what you've made. [Ryan Holiday]
  • In May 2009, I sent an email to a friend. I'd been posting book recommendations on my website for the last couple years, but what did he think of the idea of doing it as a monthly email instead? It was a bad idea, he said–because people wouldn't be able to share the blog posts anymore. People are protective of their emails, so who would want to sign up for that? [Ryan Holiday]

1 comment:

League of Women Voters said...

Sadly, Ryan Holiday is a shitlib:

https://ryanholiday.net/heres-smart-people-believe-nonsense-trump-might-win/