“[T]he broad impact of the reces­sion is clear in hun­dreds of thou­sands of new cases across the judi­cial sys­tem, includ­ing peo­ple chal­leng­ing their real estate taxes, home fore­clo­sures, con­tract dis­putes and fam­ily offenses.”

“There’s a kind of per­verse joy that comes from watch­ing a truly awful movie musical.”

“Look­ing at these, you would hope to achieve a low left­hand start­ing point (low cost), a high right­hand point (high longevity), and a thick line (lots of doc­tor visits.)

The USA line looks like it was drawn by some­one who got the instruc­tions back­wards — a very high left­hand start­ing point (huge cost), a mediocre right­hand point (mid­dlin’ longevity), and a hair­like line thick­ness (scanty doc­tor vis­its, less than 4 per year.)”

“There are a num­ber of ways to “solve” mazes but there’s a wide scope for you to be as straight­for­ward or as clever as you like with this chal­lenge (tip: I’d love to see some clever/​silly solu­tions!). Your “solv­able?” and “steps” meth­ods could share algo­rithms or you might come up with alter­nate ways to be more effi­cient in each case. Good luck!”

“This “highly sophis­ti­cated investor” argu­ment has been used by Gold­man, other banks and a remark­ably high num­ber of jour­nal­ists (in my opin­ion just repeat­ing the crap they have been fed by their sources) as a way of get­ting the banks off the hook. But it is a fun­da­men­tally flawed argu­ment. The CDO bonds that AIG insured were rated AAA. If you have to be a rocket sci­en­tist to under­stand the invest­ment and if any­thing short of per­fect analy­sis of the bonds means you will be blown up – then by def­i­n­i­tion the bonds are not AAA.”

“The point is that there was indeed a huge CA bub­ble in the 80s, which burst painfully. Nor was this an obscure bit of knowl­edge: in fact, peo­ple like Cal­cu­lated Risk and yours truly were quite explic­itly using the great Cal­i­for­nia bub­ble of the 80s as a model for what was going to hap­pen nationally.

This whole episode makes me think con­sid­er­ably worse of my for­mer depart­ment head.”

“Yet this appar­ently unevent­ful trans­fer of power con­cealed pro­found alter­ations in the rela­tion­ship between the Eng­lish crown and its sub­jects, and set into motion the for­ma­tion of a new kind of mod­ern state, whose char­ac­ter­is­tics – vig­or­ous pro­mo­tion of eco­nomic devel­op­ment, broad reli­gious tol­er­ance, and free com­pe­ti­tion among polit­i­cal inter­ests – still define lib­eral democ­ra­cies today.

In his mag­is­te­r­ial new book (for once, this overused adjec­tive is war­ranted), the his­to­rian Steve Pin­cus takes aim at the tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive of the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion, and sets out to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that it was more than wor­thy of the name: a rev­o­lu­tion that was con­tentious, some­times vio­lent and even bloody, that pit­ted two rad­i­cal fac­tions against one another and trans­formed England.”

“Of course, it’s not uncom­mon to see the term “rank hubris” applied in the gen­eral vicin­ity of Larry Sum­mers. But let’s be clear, here: what Sum­mers did could in no way be con­sid­ered a hedge, under any com­mon def­i­n­i­tion of the term. He was indulging in interest-​​rate spec­u­la­tion, just like Robert Cit­ron. I think it’s fair to say that no pre­vi­ous Har­vard pres­i­dent would ever have con­sid­ered him­self qual­i­fied to do such a thing, but Sum­mers never let such con­sid­er­a­tions stop him. And his alma mater is now pay­ing the 10-​​digit price.”

“The use of Graph­ics Pro­cess­ing Units (GPUs) in sci­en­tific com­put­ing is becom­ing increas­ingly com­mon. GPUs are low cost par­al­lel proces­sors that can read­ily be exploited for many types of gen­eral pur­pose com­pu­ta­tion. Recently, the com­pu­ta­tional intel­li­gence com­mu­nity has started to develop for the GPU plat­form. This web page is pri­mar­ily ded­i­cated to the use of GPUs as a plat­form for Genetic Programming. ”

“The eco­nomic elite have launched an attack on the U.S. pub­lic and soci­ety is unrav­el­ing at an increased rate. You may have missed it in the main­stream news media, but sta­tis­ti­cal soci­etal indi­ca­tors are read­ing red across the board. Let’s look at the top 15 sta­tis­tics that prove we are under attack.”

“In fact, there has been only one top nation that ever avoided the habit, and that was the United States. Upon find­ing itself the dom­i­nant power at the end of World War II., the United States had the oppor­tu­nity to impose its own vision of inter­na­tional trade. And it did.
At this cru­cial moment, some­thing spe­cial hap­pened. At the behest of Mar­shall and his advis­ers, Amer­ica became the first power in his­tory to delib­er­ately estab­lish coun­ter­mer­can­tilist com­merce flows. Nations crip­pled by war or mis­man­age­ment were allowed to main­tain tar­iffs, keep­ing out Amer­i­can goods, while send­ing shiploads from their fac­to­ries to the United States. Each admin­is­tra­tion since Marshall’s time, regard­less of polit­i­cal party, has abided by this compact—to such a degree that the world’s peo­ples now sim­ply take it for granted!”

“It doesn’t have to be sci­ence, though that is where I found these refugees from the aris­toc­racy, most often. It might also be the arts, or start­ing a new com­pany from scratch, in a com­pletely dif­fer­ent field. Any way you look at it, this trend has to be viewed with admiration.

Alas, it may also be one of the prin­ci­pal rea­sons that Amer­i­can cap­i­tal­ism is going down the toi­let. Because… who is left behind, mind­ing the store? Oh. Yeah. I already answered that question. ”

“Per­haps by coin­ci­dence, three new papers in this week’s issue of the NEP-​​DGE report deal with fore­cast­ing. Kolasa, Rubaszek and Skrzypczyński says that DSGE mod­els per­form remark­ably well. Bache, Jore, Mitchell and Vahey claim that VAR mod­els with struc­tural breaks do bet­ter, but of course struc­tural breaks can­not be pre­dicted with a VAR. Gupta, Kabundi and Miller show that DSGE mod­els of real estate mar­kets are bet­ter with turn­ing points, which are the most dif­fi­cult sta­tis­tic to forecast.”

“Last month 52,000 temps were added, greater than the num­ber of new work­ers in any other cat­e­gory. Not even health care and gov­ern­ment, stal­warts through the long reces­sion, did better.

“Some­times we’re asked by a com­pany to bring back ex-​​employees as temps,” said Joanie Ruge, a senior vice pres­i­dent of Adecco. Some are even ex-​​employees who have been laid off. “That does hap­pen,” she said.”