We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
People voted "for an agenda very different from what they want and need."
Sen. Bernie Sanders
Quite different, perhaps, from what his poor Vermonters "need and want" which seems mostly to be free stuff, no jobs, single mothers on welfare, and plentiful meth and heroin. Thank God for our moral and intellectual superiors. We would be lost without them, just like the Pilgrims and the American pioneers were.
How to Lie With Statisticswas the first book I was required to read when I was studying for my Master's in Economics. The book wasn't designed to show us how to lie, but to make a point. It's easy to lie with statistics. 100% of the time. 60% of the time, lying works all the time. It's all about positioning. Al Franken cut his teeth by showing how Republicans lied using tricky graphing techniques, then started using his own special brand of lying to continue to hoodwink his constituents.
The book was really designed to get students to think about context. When I present data, I never present just data, I present context. It's not enough to say that Man-Made Global Warming correlates with the reduction in pirate activity. We all know correlation is not causation, the context of why the lack of piracy is causing Global Warming is critical.
I recently posted about why interest rates won't rise. Part of that discussion continued on in the comments section, regarding inflation and savings. Normally, interest rates are slightly higher than inflation (positive real interest rates), and typically fall below the rate of inflation when the economy is in a rut (negative real interest rates, when people spend more than they save, driving up inflation but eventually causing interest rates to rise in order to attract savings). Yet we have not seen a general rise in inflation or interest rates in the last few years. There are many reasons for this, and those reasons are helping to keep real interest rates negative and low. If we knew the truth, we'd probably see more consumers behave differently, and it's likely the Fed couldn't continue engaging its policy of printing more money. But hiding inflation is exceedingly easy to do. Especially if you utilize hedonic adjustments, which is one of many methods used to delude the populace.
Hedonic adjustments can be justifiable. For example, if a regular banana costs $1, but a banana that keeps you full all day and meets your minimum daily health needs is only $5, it would appear the 'cost' of a banana is 400% higher than it should be, if you want to live. However, if it takes 10 regular bananas to match what you can get from 1 $5 banana, then you've actually realized a 50% decrease in price! Hedonics DO make sense,when in the realm of productivity gains for the consumer.
However, as the linked article from Zero Hedge points out, you can use 'enjoyment quality' to make a 400% increase actually appear to be a 7.1% decrease. You get no real additional value out of a 42 inch plasma TV that you didn't get from a 27 inch LCD. But the government can quantify and justify that the price you paid was actually LESS for the big screen plasma, even if it wasn't. Voila! You've saved money by spending more! Looking at the list of areas where hedonic adjustments are applied show a variety of useless of price decreases, simply so the government can imply regularly that you are spending less than you really are. It helps our politicians maintain "the money illusion." This benefits them, allowing them to engage Keynes' famous quote, “Lenin (the founder of the former communist Soviet Union) was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose”.
So yes, technically our inflation rate has been far higher than you realize, and the Fed has been making your savings worth less and less each year. No, it probably won't end well, so enjoy it while you can, and remember to try and find the contextual support for any government data. There usually isn't any.
What Democrats said to Republicans when Democrats were in charge of Congress: We don’t have to listen to you any more.
What Democrats will say to Republicans now that Democrats are no longer in charge of Congress: Bipartisanship forever!
Bipartisanship to get what "jobs done"? Oh, it's about "progress." Althouse:
I'm uneasy at the word "progress." It assumes the existence of a road and knowledge of where it leads. I see no reason to believe in President Obama's idea of "progress." America rejected it yesterday.
When progress means more Federal money, power, control, and force, it's not progress: it's regression towards feudalism. I have some ideas about "jobs to be done" on the federal level which would mean progress to me:
Fix tort law, install a universal flat tax with no deductions and maybe a negative tax for the very poor and hopeless and helpless (or should that be left to the states?), secure the US border, deport illegals and be more welcoming of valuable legals, revise Obamacare to voluntary with a meaningful mix of options, eliminate the useless Federal Dept of Education, eliminate Death Taxes, make unionizing federal employees illegal, get rid of the failed war on drugs, eliminate the Dept of Homeland Security, shrink the EPA back to its original purpose, eliminate all farm subsidies including the ethanol scam and the sugar scam, eliminate all federal subsidies for flood insurance, eliminate the Dept of Commerce (except for NOAA), eliminate the ATF, tighten oversight for Disability, quit funding the UN, put a tight leash on the NSA, ban all government drones domestically along with banning the militarization of police, put NASA back in space - or privatize it, find a way to felonize crony capitalism, eliminate the Dept of HUD, restructure Social Security, get our military out of Europe and Japan and let them fend for themselves, get the federal government out of the mortgage market entirely, eliminate corporate taxes and make the US a corporate tax haven for the world (economic effects would be amazing), shut down the Fed and let markets work freely for better or worse without central efforts at control...and that's just for starters.
Let's get all those jobs done in a nice bipartisan way, ok? If there was ever a time to reach fearlessly, it's now. It might be a narrow window for real progress.
It's a difficult subject to study because people are not likely to reveal their more taboo fantasies. Furthermore, in my field we tend to believe that most of our fantasies (sexual and otherwise) are kept safely beneath our own awareness.
As a Psychiatrist, I can tell you that quite normal people commonly contain all sorts of aberrant and "abnormal" fantasies which they would never act on or tell even their spouses about.
The study found that one of the most common sexual fantasies, after the five “typical” ones, is submission, with approximately 65 percent of women and 53 percent of men fantasizing about being submissive. More men than women fantasized about dominating their partners. Still, there remains a distinction between fantasy and reality. Of the women who fantasized about being dominated, half said that they wouldn’t want to actually be dominated in real life. Reading 50 Shades of Grey, for example, could be an outlet to imagine these fantasies without acting on them.
Like some of you, I've been reading about the election from all corners of the web: Left, Conservative, MSM, etc.
One take-home I get from it all is that the Dem core, on which they rely for votes and/or money, consists of single women, billionaires and multi-millionaires, "old money", crony capitalists, Wall St. millionaires, unionistas, Hollywood and its allies and sycophants, black Americans, government-dependent Americans, and urban white Liberals (including nice gentry Liberals, and academics, students, and college townspeople).
That's not news, but I just find it interesting. I can't really relate to any of those bloc-voting components.
The other take-home I get is that those people have an incomprehensible hatred and contempt for ordinary hard-working and entrepreneurial people like me. Why? I do not hate them, and it is unlikely that they would hate me if they met me. I happily work 14-hour days to build our business and to employ and supervise the new people we need.
Our major challenges to continuing growth are competition (good) and government (bad).
Scott Walker: "In America, we take a day off to celebrate the 4th of July, and not the 15th of April, because in America, we celebrate our independence from the government, not our dependence on it."
We're told regularly that, at some point, Quantitative Easing will end and interest rates will rise. Zero Hedge provides a window as to why this is unlikely to occur in any meaningful way.
It's not uncommon to hear Fed officials and politicians deny that we are monetizing debt. Technically, we are not. We issue debt, the debt gets purchased, and the Fed (which is essentially a private institution, though it's really a quasi-governmental institution) buys it back. Normally government debt is held by the public, which is why economic analysis of the old "crowding out" problem was so prevalent.
By keeping interest rates low, and repurchasing debt, the appearance of private ownership is maintained, but it is a roundabout method of monetizing debt. Allowing rates to rise to any meaningful degree will have severe negative impacts, in the short term. Since we are in a politically driven economy, this cannot be allowed to occur, so interest rates must remain artificially low.
Of course, the long term ramifications of monetizing debt are inflation (followed by deflation) and severe misallocation of economic resources. In other words, bankruptcies, unemployment and a financial morass. Not to mention the end of an expectation of comfortable retirement (how can you retire on a fixed income if interest rates are below 1%?).
Don't expect interest rates to move up any time soon, and don't expect any reporting of realistic inflation. Just vote for the guy/gal who will shovel the most tax money toward you.
Except in the small ways (eg the color of a moth's wings, or different kinds of finches), I am a skeptic about evolution, possibly because I do not really understand the theories behind the theories. I do get the part about development of related species, but I do not get the adaptive advantage of an elephant over a bacterium or an algae colony. I am told we live in the Age of Bacteria, a world in which bacteria are the largest (by volume) and most populous organisms, and thus the most successful and best-adapted to current times (and for multi-cellular critters, the bugs win). Thus it is difficult for me to view humanity as the new, improved crown of creation any more than elephants.
No, I am not talking about intelligent design and all that. Also, I understand that evolutionary theories (of which there are several) say nothing about "progress," just adaptation to current conditions. It's just that I find the science and the logic of it all puzzling.
This is an open letter urging you to stop money printing immediately. It has created worse economic inequality and tremendously hindered the economic recovery from the longest recession in history...
We who have never been racist, and who will still not be racist, are beginning to wonder why we shouldn’t adapt to this new reality and accept the fact that perhaps we are not all alike in our desire for peace, that we do not all want the same things, and that what is wanted from us is our surrender and conviction for crimes we have not committed. What is being lost is the heretofore beneficial presumption that we are more alike than we are different.
That's a wow. I have never seen any racial discrimination in my personal life, or any racial tension either so I suspect politicians and media gin it up to keep an old narrativelooking alive.
Do not vote unless you understand the issues at hand. Too many low-info voters in the USA who should stay home.
I will vote, although I know my small vote makes no difference. I enjoy seeing my neighbors at the polls at 6 am, with my Dunkin in one hand and my photo ID in the other.
Is the photo below true? And, if so, why? From Rick Moran:
The Democrats’ real problem is that they apparently think most women support the radical feminist agenda and care more about their sex lives than who can best lead the country. Trying to sell the idea that most Republicans oppose contraceptives was never going to fly and only made their candidates sound ridiculous. And abortion is not an issue uppermost in most women’s minds — especially married women. But the issues were secondary to finding a way to scare women into going to the polls by painting the Republicans as misogynistic Lotharians who don’t care about women being raped or assaulted, and who prefer women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
Fielding’s older brother, the novelist Henry Fielding, had already, in “Joseph Andrews” (1742), explained “those little Spaces between our Chapters” as “an Inn or Resting-Place, where he may stop and take a Glass, or any other Refreshment, as it pleases him.” Chapter titles, Fielding proceeded to explain, were like the inscriptions over the doors of those inns, advertising the accommodations within.
23:1 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples,
23:2 "The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat;
23:3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it; but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach.
23:4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them.
23:5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.
23:6 They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues,
23:7 and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have people call them rabbi.
23:8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all students.
23:9 And call no one your father on earth, for you have one Father--the one in heaven.
23:10 Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Messiah.
23:11 The greatest among you will be your servant.
23:12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted.
As someone who is relatively young in business but now occasionally asked to interview possible new hires, I have developed a list of general information questions which I like to use. Math, history, religion, scope of reading, current events, art, etc. After all, unless somebody is a genius in our field, you really want to hire people you want to be around and to work with, and secondarily people who you think can help make money because they are young and that can be hard to predict.
If they don't help you make money you can just let them go, but they at least have been good company for a while.
Here.
Election results, 
Our 
How