Warmist climate models do a fine job of retrodicting the climate, yet a woefully bad job at predicting the climate.
Their prediction tends to be doom in the next few years, while their modeling of the past is perfectly spot on. Thus their predictions grow old fast. Read the rest of this entry »
But what is having disastrous consequences is not open borders by themselves, but open borders combined with democracy and the welfare state.
Even if the government had the will to stop the flood of low IQ migrants, the effect would be limited. Does not stop drugs. Read the rest of this entry »
I watched an old 2003 movie, “The Barbarian Invasions” which the right love, because it depicts the ruling progressive left elite as decadent, corrupt, hypocritical, incompetent and destroying the civilization that they rule, and the ruling progressive elite love, perhaps because it is about their favorite topic, themselves.
Why do governments tax beyond the Laffer maxium?
You have probably read about the California’s Amazon tax. Amazon said it would flee the tax, promptly did so, and so, predictably, instead of gaining two hundred million, the state lost taxes on something like one hundred and fifty million of income.
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The reason the battle in Wisconsin is so bitter is that the Wisconsin Republicans are doing what Reagan attempted to do and failed to do: Defund the left.
Previously schools were required to buy health insurance through the teachers union. Being free to shop around for health insurance appears to save over half a million dollars per school The dissenting opinion, The Stratasphere, Public School Spending
That is over a half a million dollars a year of taxpayer funded left wing activism in every school district, some of which appears to have been spent on rentamobs.
In the comments, some have disagreed with my proposition that BLS statistics are unbelievable because the US is becoming dirtier and shabbier. Dirtier and shabbier is rather subjective, so reasonable people can disagree.
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QE2 was supposed to end, and it has. However, as it ends, the federal reserve opens up open ended dollar lending to foreign central banks. Supposedly there is no risk, since these are central banks, and we all know central banks always repay their debts.
A little of the violence is real, indeed more and more of it is real, but the vast majority of it is still imitation violence by astroturf, which I conjecture is imitation riot theater instigated by the government against itself to dramatize its imitation austerity theater.
Observe the trash fires at 0:14. Real rioters burn stuff more valuable than trash, and light bigger fires.
Observe at 0:24 the group of protestors armed with white sticks, all the sticks identical, and all rather small and light, suitable perhaps for disciplining a woman or a small boy, but definitely not the sort of thing that one should strike a man with, particularly a man wearing armor. That the sticks are light, indicates pretend violence. That the sticks are identical, indicates astroturf. Someone has got in a big batch of mass produced sticks, and handed them out. The sticks are white, for maximum visibility, to make a good image, rather than to shatter the bones of one’s enemies.
At 0:51 , observe some real violence – directed, of course, at a non state enemy.
At 1:06, observe the police detonate a noisy teargas canister a couple of feet downwind of their own feet, rather than at the protestors. Similarly at 1:16, where the police are almost teargassing themselves.
At 1:42 observe a little petrol unsurprisingly fail to set a stone building on fire – someone has thrown a tiny little molotov at a target that it cannot possibly harm. Indeed, places where it is so obviously safe to place a molotov are few and far between. Someone set this molotov for the least possible risk of damage.
At 2:10, another white stick, absolutely identical to every other white stick we saw in the video. The whole riot evidently has a single weapons supplier, a strong indication that this is an astroturf rent-a-mob riot. Observe the way he is carrying the stick, revealing how light it is.
“You can’t trust bankers” says Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”
Taleb is an econometrician and trader – meaning he makes his money betting on financial instruments, like a professional poker player. Read the rest of this entry »
There is precision, and there is accuracy. It is unwise to attain more precision than accuracy, for one is apt to fool oneself, and worse still to attain precision at the cost of accuracy.
You cannot measure inflation on goods that are changing, without making questionable subjective judgements. Goods that are not changing are stuff like food and fuel. An accurate measure of inflation would not include goods that apt to change, which measure would understate the difficult to define or measure improvement of standard living, but accurately state the cost of living.
So how is inflation going on stuff that we can measure accurately?
It is starting to look a lot like hyperinflation:
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