Yup - I was quite a ways down the path to creating YAC (yet another cryptocoin) when I decided against starting a "greater-fool" based business.

Yes, we are figuring it out ... but, like radioactivity from nuclear power plants much of our political angst is 50 years out of date with the technology, so we are being driven by unreasoned fear by our political activists to overreact.

Calling it a lost month is a political statement by the editor, not a factual statment by someone who knows.

In particular: (1) what test were available when, and (2) what were their alleged sensitivity and specificity at the time that decision were made, and (3) what were incidence and perceived case fatality rates at the decisoin points ...

I hope you realize that my point is that most of the blaming that is going on is being done in a low-information environment.

When I taught decision theory at the Air Force Institute of Technology I often used historical or current events like the downing of an Iranian airline, and similar, to point out how miserable the hind-sight pundits were at helping effect real changes in decision processes.

The bookie does not want you to repay the loan - he wants you to pay the interest.

Current national debt policies are a way for the wealthy to make a living off the rest of the people. Oh, sure, they'll point to pensions and widows and orphans - but in the end, we are just paying them for not making us pay off the principle.

I heard Neel Kashkari tell a room full of the rich that when US debt gets to $30T on top of a $20T economy, we'll just print more money.

The press will never get it right - if your training data is not balanced then the AI will not learn to distinguish well.

But I bet there's no business model for making a living off finding the anti-Celt biases in our systems.

Which is itself an anti-Celt bias in our politics of outrage culture.

Logically, it won't take long before deposits to a bank account are considered spending. The object is just to know where Greeks are putting their income, not that they are actually spending it.

Sorry, until we start pushing back on this loose language we are doomed to only polarize.

Refugees are not automatically immigrants.

At the 2019 National Convention of Better Angels (a national, deliberately bi-partisan, group dedicated to depolarizing America, https://www.better-angels.org/...) I rose during a debate to ask a question of the speaker. In the highly stylized form of an Oxford debate, I introduced myself by saying ...

My name is Bob, I am from Rochester, and, in the spirit of the convention, my preferred gender pronoun is "his Majesty". Without missing a beat, the speaker turned to me to answer my question, starting off with ... "Well your Majesty, ..."

Compare this with a similar attempt later to similarly keep the conversation lite, when a speaker strode to the microphone and on the way boomed out, "Ladies and Gentlemen and Genders ..." Within minutes, an outraged person took the mic to complain about this micro-aggression. All this outraged person wanted to do was to hijack the conversation, claim victimhood and silence the useful conversation the speaker had started. That postmodernist behavior is why I am a conservative (actually, an Enlightenment Liberal, but you get my drift), and it is why I still caucus with Republicans, where I may be argued with, but I am not demonized for my beliefs.

Yeah, a lot of spurious reflections off of atmospheric layers (think mirages) seemed to move faster than any known airplane - as did meteors etc. Much of those "sightings" went away when the algorithms were told that nothing of interest could exceed some fast threshold.

So, a simple

IF speed > [some upper limit] THEN ignore event

did away with lots of wasted time and energy chasing reflections and the like.

By the time we average schmoes heard about cryptocurrency, the big guys were exiting taking their profits from our enthusiasm.

This does beg the question ... what criteria should we use when deciding whether an AI has progressed enough to have standing in a discussion about whether to turn it off or not?

I might argue that if the AI has a state vector that cannot be replicated by simply re-running the training and experiential data of the system through the same algorithms - then that AI has a value that might justify some sentimentality.

But then again, maybe it would take something more than complexity/irreproducibility.

I run an R-based URL fetcher to run Google searches all night long and during idle time.

The searches are all for unicorns, leprechauns, and UFOs. I use the 42nd displayed word, whatever it is, to pick the next search. I vary the depth of this recursion when I am whimsical.

I figure flooding the system is better than trying to block all the accesses.

It's called "chaff".

It's not about Red Dawn.

It's about lynch-mob NGOs that come in the night, with the tacit support of sheriffs and courts who look the other way.

I see pictures of people hung from trees.

It's about dying with dignity rather than dying like victims, thinking here of Warsaw and Auschwitz.

I see pictures of rooms full of shoes of the gas chamber victims.

It's about standing against collectivist fanatics who do not value the individual, thinking here of Cambodia's killing fields.

I see fields full of skulls.

A carbon tax (a Pigovian tax) is the method preferred by most economists.

Keeping the tax to pick the winners is a sure fire way to create the political will to block it.

Citizens' Climate Lobby (Carbon fee and dividend) and others (Climate Leadership Council) propose a revenue-neutral carbon tax and dividend similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund - but such that the tax collected is fully refunded. This makes the tax progressive, revenue neutral and politically sustainable.

Australia's carbon tax scheme is often held up as an example of what happens if the crony capitalist types hold out some of the tax to fund their pick-the-winner favorite businesses.

Once again, the crony capitalists (this time on the left) demonstrate their basic failure to understand human nature (and the politics that derive from that nature). Once again, they are selling unicorns.

I'll promote this from an AC - we need a filter that lets me hide all AC, even though I would have missed this.

The initial comment was

Because of red state socialism. In other words, most of the red states (except Texas) could not afford to exist without the blue states transferring vast amounts of wealth to them.

I've removed the link because I have no reason to trust an unverifiable source.

Th AC then noted correctly ...

It depends on what "wealth transfers" you choose to count.

For example, if you counted the Federal state-tax income credit, then California jumps to the #1 beneficiary of Federal transfers, with New York #2 right behind them.

But nah, you choose to count only those tax credits and payments that produce the outcome you like.

I use my statistician chops often to make this point - the superficial analyses that our politicians feed us are often biased, and seeing the full data only helps if you are willing to replicate the analysis in question (it's called, scientific method peer-review).

We used to be able to count on the press to do this, but now that they are all about speed and no vector, they only add to the general disinformation.

We need to figure out how to see that deeper data all the time, but bumper stickers are so much easier, and they make great dog whistles.