Data or Events?

When I started grad school, the econ profession was in a bit of turmoil. Samuelson and Solow and the gaggle of 'quants' were everywhere. And the event and history brigade was very much in retreat. As any grad student in any field in any school at any time, each will be caught in the internecine battle between the two (sometimes more) cabals fighting for control of the department. And grad students, being essential to profs need to not actually teach, are coveted. I was caught between the history cabal and the quant. I left with a Masters as soons as practicable.

While I've spent my life in the data vicinity, simple observation makes it clear that seeing how the world will be tomorrow is 99.44% determined by events from today and some bit of time before. And, no real surprise, it helps to study the results from similar, or even identical, events from the past. History rhymes. Some times even repeats.

People in power make the decisions based on what events and decisions benefit them. High speed trading and macroeconomic models never understand events. And, even without grifters putting a foot on the scales, macro data is nearly always tender samples, and thus fuzzy. Pick any sector, and watch the market for those companies. What really moves the market cap is news, good and bad. Makes insider trading so alluring.

Which brings us to a new report from an economic historian. Fact is, I didn't think there were any left. He, of course, is at Harvard.

The report presents the results of events on the world economy around WWI. It ain't pretty. He draws inference to Batshit J. Moron's Iran war. While acknowledging the difference in scale, he offers up evidence of events which parallel WWI. WWI because it was the seed of global interdependence that we live in now.

The lessons from history are sobering: In an interdependent global economy, the shock of the outbreak of war can produce long-term instabilities overnight, many of which become apparent only over time.

Well, boy howdy, as Dr. McElhone used to say. May be our Dear Leader and his band of dick suckers don't know much.

Now, there are fertilizer shortages at the beginning of the spring planting season for foods including rice, which means that we may eventually see reduced crop yields and higher prices. As the experience of the Covid pandemic made clear, supply chain disruptions like these can produce inflationary surges with long tails, which, before they abate, can have damaging secondary effects, from higher mortgage rates to fiscal crises to political unrest.

The title on the innterTubes version of his report

I Studied the Economic Fallout From World War I. This Could Be Worse Than We Expect.

Have a nice day. .

Run!! Tsunami's Coming

If you've been keeping track of AI in the compute world, then you've seen/read at least a few reports that AI generated code has eaten the world. Here's a NYT version. All of which makes me laugh out loud. For at least two reasons.

The first, naturally, is that the RDBMS approach to code is to not do any (at least, as little as possible), and let the database manager take care of data integrity. The advantages are well documented here, and some other places. Not having to updage client code every day or two around the world is just one advantage. The other is that data constraints are succinct. Very. Yahoo.

The second, of course is that AI systems are based on the shit that litters the innterTubes; I suspect that what these AI Code generators do is slurp up all that RBAR (do I hear the plaintive cry of COBOL in the distance?) code from 1970 onwards. Back to the future? No, reactionary idiocy. Dr. Codd showed us how to build robust systems built on explicit data logic, not spaghetti code. But, just like AI Agents, doing that reduces the need for a battalion of coders. The difference is that RDBMS eschews code, while AI Agents have unchecked diahrrea. In the Good Olde Days, the coders counterattacked by asserting (and this is a direct quote) "we prefer to do transactions in the client". Keep those fingers typing.

When a financial services company recently began using Cursor, an artificial intelligence technology that writes computer code, the difference that it made was immediate.

The company went from producing 25,000 lines of code a month to 250,000 lines. That created a backlog of one million lines of code that needed to be reviewed, said Joni Klippert, a co-founder and the chief executive of StackHawk, a security start-up that was working with the financial services firm.

This is progress????

Of course, the reporters aren't clued in

Someone has to review the A.I.-generated code to test it for bugs, security and compliance. But it can sometimes be unclear whose job it is to fix issues created by A.I.-generated code. In the past, it would be the responsibility of the person who created the code.

That's not always, or even now, been the case. Back in the Good Olde Days, when COBOL (and earlier when it was assembler) ruled the business world, the programming shop was divided into three parts: systems analysts, coders, and testers. The latter two still exist widely. The first had, until now, been abandoned. But now that function has been split out, again. The purpose of the systems analyst is to define what the programs are intended to do, then assign a coder to make it manifest.

Now, if the AI monsters get their way, they will be the analysts and coders. The humans will be the testers, and of necessity, the second class analysts. "Joe, ya gotta figure out what the fucking AI did!! Your job depends on it!! Get to it."

Fun fact: when the analyst position was made largely redundant, the loudest bitch heard in the programming shop was when a project artifact was moved from one analyst/programmer (yes, that's how the job was often labelled) to another. The reason, of course, is that there wasn't an analyst's document of the code. Worse yet, in the world of C/C++/java coding, lots of folks never, ever bother to work out the code before typing. And, of course, the code never really works, sometimes mostly it does and sometimes it doesn't at all. Either way, the coder then fires up the debugger, and finally gets down to writing a working program.

Now, imagine how that's going to work when the AI machine goes off on its merry way!! You guessed it - KAOS.

Companies are struggling to hire enough people to monitor the A.I. code for risks, a role called application security engineer. "There are not enough application security engineers on the planet to satisfy what just American companies need," said Joe Sullivan, an adviser to Costanoa Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm. The large companies he works with would add five to 10 more people in this role if they could, he said.

Some have faced the Monster

Sachin Kamdar, a co-founder of Elvex, an A.I. agent start-up, said he created a rule around 16 months ago that all of the company's code needed to be reviewed by a human. Otherwise, problems would be harder to fix because no one would understand the work that A.I. had done.

"It's just going to break something, and they're not going to know why it broke," he said.

Well... duh!! The agent halucinates while writing yet another General Ledger. Cool. The smartest, coolest guys in the room have fucked the dog. Even more Cool.

Thought For The Day - 7 April 2026

11:00 AM eastern

And, I guess, some of you thought I was exaggerating. Well... no.
"A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again."

Will the supine GOP grow some balls and a spine and 25^th this lunatic before he and Bibi destroy the world? Not a peep from them as I type.

Thought For The Day - 6 April 2026

Well... I guess it comes down to this:

1 - Batshit J. Moron remains the TACO man
or 
2 - Batshit J. Moron gives the Rapture cult and Bibi what they want -
    blow up the world

Consider how the world will be if Batshit J. Moron does bomb Iran back to the stone ages. He will have pulled off what Goldfinger couldn't - destroy a considerable amount of the world's petro reserves. But, as previously demonstrated, crude is not really fungible just because each type requires a refinery constructed for that feedstock. The United States of Alabame can't use Irani oil. Oh... and that means invading and killing about 90 million Iranis. Won't that be fun? Pete would love that.

The cocksucking GOP really needs to accept that their Dear Leader really is a lunatic and needs be 25^th'd out of the way. JD might not be so crazy. One hopes.

The Totally Unhinged - part the fourth

We told you so:

Smart people vote with their feet. [you betcha]
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D.[statistics, Iowa State]/1975

Yet another, although not near enough of them, example from the NYT on the exodus.

Malik wasn't looking to uproot his life and move abroad. He was married with three children, and his parents lived in Washington. But with President Trump slashing science research, Malik rolled the dice.

"I had friends who lost their jobs," he said. "I saw that happening in real time. I thought, 'Let me entertain this.'"

Of course, those whose ox is getting gored have noticed

Experts are sounding the alarm. A study in September by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.

And, and there's always an and, a recent report from Fierce Biotech on the attack on medical science. "A fucking moron"^©Tillerson, and his toadies, really do want to turn this previously intelligent country into the antebellum United States of Alabama.

This time around, the White House said executing on the AHA would bring about $5 billion of savings by consolidating or eliminating subagency programs that "duplicate other Federal spending, promote radicalized [diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)] ideologies or use taxpayer funds to support radical nonprofits that are not aligned with Administration policies."

"aligned with Administration policies" is just code for Make America White Again. Well... and evangelical (it never has been more than cults), old, rural, and male.

Goldfinger - part the second

Well... more news to support the hypothesis: Bone Spur Samurai^© seeks to corner the market on petro. And now, this (in the spirit of John Oliver):

President Trump declared Wednesday night that other countries should "take the lead" on the Strait of Hormuz in yet another signal that the US may aim to depart Iran with that economically vital issue unresolved.

Shut down Fort Knox, and your pile of moolah just got more valuable. If Bone Spur Samurai^© really, really were "America First", he'd direct an EO (or demand that Congress...) to implement 100% export restriction on USofA petro products. That'd show 'em!! But, of course, he won't do that, since his best buds in the petro bidnezz are reaping scads of excess profit off the blocked Strait.

A couple of oddities, yet unresolved in my brain. MidEast oil is the light sweet stuff, while most of USofA refining is structured for heavy, sour stuff. Venezuela has a lot of that. West Texas Intermediate and shale tend toward light, sweet. So, it'd cost a bundle to make the USofA "independent" in oil, using only/mostly our indigenous stuff. Each type/grade of crude needs a refinery designed to it, so the USofA has a lot of light, sweet stuff, but for historical reasons, the refining infrastructue tilts toward the heavy, sour stuff. Switching is acknowleged to cost a bundle. Go figure. OTOH, one of the talking head pundits on the Lunatic Left MS... noted that the Venezuela crude is too bad for gas refining. Who knows?

But, given Bone Spur Samurai^©'s reptilian brain, doing an Oil Patch Goldfinger is right up his alley. Cut off the feed stocks for our frenemies? Interestingly, most of the countries which import middle east oil are Asian, not European. It appears that Uncle Sugar's Country is the major supplier to Europe's refineries. What will Bone Spur Samurai^© do?

We Told You So - 27 March 2026

The world is not linear.
-- Donald Hughes McElhone, Ph.D./1980

All one need do to see the obvious: look at a graph of global population since AD began. For an even starker image: go back another 1,000 years. Mother Nature isn't linear, either.

David Gelles writes recently that even the scientists find their sphincters clenching. Mother Earth is warming faster than their earlier predictions. Which, naturally, Batshit J. Moron screams is a hoax.

Seas are rising and glaciers are melting — and there's also now a growing debate about whether the rate of planetary warming is actually speeding up. New research published this month found that even after accounting for other phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, solar radiation and natural variability, the rate of global warming has accelerated since 2015.

So, Mother Nature is biting The Stupid (and the rest of us) in the butt when The Stupid are our Dear Leaders. Much like Batshit J. Moron's beloved 19^th century primitive economy and society (wonderful tariffs and clean, beautiful coal, and the like). Killed your farm's soil? Just go a few miles West to get virgin pasture. Kill that in a few years? Just go a few more miles West. And so on. Some time ago I saw a teeVee report with a corn farmer (the 12 foot high silage kind of corn) who observed that the only thing the ground did was hold up the stalk; the soil is barren and without petro fertilizers, nada.