So you're saying Amtrak is worse than Comcast. Yes?

If psychic ability were real, it would be an enormously successful survival trait.

The fact that *everyone* doesn't have it is 'kinda suggestive...

You're obviously more familiar with economics than I am - I've got a question, help me out.

What's the best value for inflation?

Meaning, what's the numerical value that we should be shooting for, for best results?

If it's complicated, then what's the formula for the complicated value? If you have time, how "flat" is that calculation? (Meaning: is it a spike or a gently rising/falling mesa? How important is it to hit the best value exactly?)

The calculation of inflation doesn't depend on human behaviour, does it?

So tell me - what's the best value for inflation?

Also, looking at this graph of Q-ratio, I notice that Q-ratio does not predict the 1992 crash or the 2009 crash (reputed to be a bigger crash than the great depression).

For this hypothesis, what observations would invalidate the predictions made by this theory?

But maybe I'm not spending enough time looking at the numbers, maybe I'm not reading deeply enough.

Perhaps we should look at the "percent from its arithmetic mean", or maybe the "change from its geometric mean", or the "real S&P composite and the Q-ratio adjusted to its arithmetic mean", or the "net worth over market values outstanding"...

All of which can be found on this fine article.

If we look at the numbers in enough ways, I'm sure we'll find something that has a P < 0.05, then we can publish!

Economics is a weird and wonderful science.

Always looking backwards, always telling us *why* something happened, never making future predictions.

In the days since Adam Smith penned his first thoughts on economics, engineers have taken us to the moon, physicists have split the atom, doctors invented antibiotics, philosophers invented human rights, chemists invented plastics, farmers quadrupled the per-acre food yield, programmers invented the internet, and much *much* more.

And economists, always backwards looking, now think that the Q-value might explain past crashes.

What a world we live in!

I've often wondered if we are the first species to achieve intelligence on Earth.

Bonobos are pretty smart, and a rough estimate might put them about 5 million years behind us on the evolutionary scale.

Taking that as a rough guide (no more rough than the Drake equation), suppose humans decided to leave the planet, and suppose Bonobos evolved to our level of technology. Would they find evidence of us?

Five million years is a pretty long time: everything on the surface would be eroded away, the seafloor would get covered in quite a bit of muck, any underground bunker would collapse. Overall I don't think there's be any reason for them to suspect that we were once here.

Then reverse that and suppose that some *other* species evolved into intelligence more than 5 million years ago and left. Would we see any evidence?

The results of non-natural nuclear reactors might indicate something was happening, but note that we haven't examined all the radioactive ore deposits on the planet yet - maybe we haven't found their "Yucca Mountain" installation yet. (Or then again, maybe we did.)

If we wanted to leave a message for the next round of intelligent life, the best bet would be somewhere in space. The Lagrange points perhaps, or maybe the moon. Or maybe on a large asteroid - something that's big enough to be seen by early astronomers, and small enough to land and take off from without much difficulty.

Note in the image of Ceres from the link there's a crater that comes up before the white spot that's distinctly hexagonal in nature. In fact, it 'kinda looks like a regular hexagon. It's visible at the 10:00 position starting in the 3rd frame, and sweeps by before the bright spots come into view.

Just sayin'.

Thanks - that led to some interesting links.

So it's actually 1600 square miles of solar panels, at an estimated cost of about $1T.

The reason I did the calculation was a result of wondering: suppose we had an automated robotic factory that made and installed solar panels. At what point is the system self-sustaining?

In other words, could we have a self-assembling system that kept building ever more solar panels, and after a time allocate a portion of the output to the rest of the country?

If you could do that, you could have a huge self-sustaining automated factory and allocate a monthly allowance of the production to every person in the country. Each month everyone gets to order $1000 worth of the factory goods.

Over time, the system ramps up production to cover all the consumption in the country, and do recycling as well.

It's an interesting concept.

I once tried to calculate the total solar panel area needed to supply the entire US, and decided that it would fix comfortably in a square 20 miles on a side. Hence, 400 square miles. For the entire country.

Was my calculation off? I'm pretty sure that 1000s of square miles is an exaggeration.

(This was a "back of the envelope" calculation, so didn't take into consideration transmission lines. And as to "where to put it", I'll note that there's lots of area in Nevada East of Reno and the west side of Utah (valleys in the "Great Basin" section of the US, and uninhabitable salt flats) whose ecosystem would benefit from shade. Also, there's plenty of area in the medians of our national highway system (only counting areas protected by guard-rails, of course). And those medians run straight to the areas where power is most needed.)

I'm all for sensible precautions, but is this really a problem?

We can imagine all sorts of things happening and require enormous levels of bureaucratic process and safety procedure for just about everything, but without evidence of likelihood that'll just be wasted effort.

In the manner of Bruce Schneier's movie plot security, this is "movie plot safety". We *imagine* what *might* happen, then burden it up with preventive measures.

What we should be doing is looking at what *actually happens*, and then analyzing *why* it happens and making sensible requirements from that.

Cue the idiots who have personally seen one ("I've actually seen two, so it's definitely a problem") tied-down item come loose, thus proving that excess bureaucracy is required.

As nice as communism sounds, there's an inherent problem with rentals.

Anyone who's been a landlord knows that people don't take care stuff they don't own. Rental cars are abused, apartments are damaged and left uncleaned, taxis are smelly, public toilets are filthy and broken down.

I can't think of any rental system off the top that consistently presents clean and well-maintained equipment without enormous amounts of time and effort.

There's a thing in economics called "unequal knowledge" which explains why used cars have little value. The seller knows whether the vehicle is robust, but the buyer has no realistic way to tell. You can't tell whether the transmission needs replacing or the engine oil was ever changed or if other expensive repairs are needed. Because the buyer can't verify whether the vehicle is good, he will only pay "average" price. Because buyers will only pay average price, sellers won't sell vehicles which have above-average value. This in turn drives down the average price and eventually the expectation drops to zero.

Rentals are the same. You can never know whether someone damaged the rental until it's too late, and renters have no incentive to tell.

Construction equipment costs upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't see someone renting out a bulldozer and taking a chance that the renter didn't run it without oil for a weekend.

(To be fair, a more interesting statistic would be the percent of files in each language that contain ugly hacks.)

Perl was last on that list?

For those people who say that Perl coders only write incomprehensible gibberish, I say:

BWA HA HA HA HA!

But but... I was just scolded a couple of days ago about the differences between languages!

I was told that different languages will force me into different modes of thought!!!

I'm so confudded, I don't know *what* to think any more.

That's a pretty-good description of what an *adult* brain does, but it's not a good description of intelligence - artificial or otherwise. Your adult brain learned the rules from its environment with no assumptions about what those rules were.

Try writing an algorithm that can learn to play either chess or checkers, depending on what game it sees.

Make that same algorithm be able to play asteroids, or drive a car, or OCR.

Make that same algorithm be able to recognize a tune ("row row row your boat") even if it's played in a different key, at a different speed, with variations in tempo, and even variations in key.

Any time you know beforehand what the rules are you are not simulating intelligence - you are simulating the *results* of intelligence. You are just writing down whatever it is that the intelligence in your head has decided.

The intelligence never makes it into the program - it stays in your head.