Money For Nothing - part the third

One of the persistent themes in these endeavors: asserting continuity, especially over time, in a dataset is fraught with danger! Will Robinson! The sole situation where it makes sense, unambiguously, is when the data generation process is owned by God, which is to say the hard sciences: physics, chemistry, and in a pinch biology. God doesn't change his/her rule set on a whim to gain advantage over Man. Some religions posit that God rewards the loyal and destroys the disloyal, but that's bunk. God didn't flood the earth (well, the region over which each particular religion had hegemony) to punish non-believers. Jim Jones killed those folks. Just Jim Jones.

The last version of these missives had something to say about totally crackpot 'data analysis' in macro data. One of the pet exercises among the macro-analysts is predicting booms and busts. Buy at the bottom and ride the wave up. Sell/short at the top and make money (or, not lose any) on the way down. Money for nothing.

Today brings a trenchant condemnation of the financial industry. A writer after my own beating heart. If his text sounds a bit like, "house prices can't possibly continue to rocket into the sky forever"; well, yes it does. You have been warned. Whether there's as much moolah at risk of crashing the entire economy is the Big Question.

Each boom and each bust develops from specific actions/events. Some are repeated in later periods. Most not. Each boom or bust has had a unique driver. It ain't explained by Elliot or Kondratieva. Not that simple. Ya gotta look for the new scam. It's always a new scam, scurrying under the radar of regulators. Or, one might suspect, in cahoots with regulators. That way be dragons when Right Wingnuts 'regulate'.

It Is Rocket Science

Happy birthday (40th) to the NYT 'Science Tuesday'. In my dead trees version are a bunch of ~half-page articles on science questions "still out there". Here are some excerpts.

Dennis Overbye on Einstein:

Dr. Hossenfelder argues that physicists have gone off course by exalting mathematical elegance. "They believed that Mother Nature was elegant, simple and kind about providing clues," she wrote. "They thought they could hear her whispering when they were talking to themselves."

Not just physicists. Here's a blog post I saw recently that takes econometrics into dragon country. There have been crackpot time-based notions of macro-economics for some decades. One is the Kondratiev waves. Another is the Elliot Wave, favored by the Gordon Gekko club. Those interested in how economic growth happens, and doesn't, read Solow for the mathy/technical analysis or Gordon with an historical argument.

Nicholas Bakalar on living forever:

Dr. Nir Barzilai, a professor of medicine at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, is planning a study of metformin, a drug that has been used for 60 years to treat diabetes and has been shown to be effective against several age-related diseases.

According to the Wiki, metformin was first isolated in 1922; wouldn't it be a kick in the pants of big PhARMA if a 2 cent pill keeps us upright forever?

Kenneth Chang on warp drive:

The key is that relativity does not impose a speed limit on the expansion of space. "Space can expand at any speed it wants," Dr. Alcubierre said.
...
Negative energy has the effect of antigravity, pushing space apart, which you would need for the aspect of the warp drive that expands space.

Well, The Manchurian President presents with an infinite amount of negative energy. Ship him off to Alpha Centauri.

Gina Kolata on the fattening of the American Herd:

In 1976, 15 percent of American adults were obese. Now the it's nearly 40 percent. No one really knows why bodies have changed so much.

Umm... too many RC and a Moon Pie for breakfast, lunch, and suppa?? Me thinks?

The Amazing Spitting Man

OK. Let's bet how long The Manchurian President will take to trash Amazon for the disloyal act of putting the two new HQs dead center in the middle of Educated Coast Land. I don't twit, so it may have already happened. Certainly before the sun goes down. Go Blue!

Whose Numbers Do You Believe?

One of the more interesting episodes in Pharma is whether Vascepa's brand new trial results would be positive or negative. And whether the share price would rocket up or plummet down respectively. Adam Feuerstein has been something of a skeptic on the fish oil, and now that the results of the trial have been made public over the weekend, great argument has ensued.

You can find all you want to know about Vascepa and Amarin, its maker, with a quick innterTubes search, so I won't go into all of that. But what is of interest here: being a blinded, placebo controlled trial, the efficacy numbers for the fish oil are measured relative to the patients getting the placebo. Almost all the time, there is no dispute over the placebo (the substance itself, not other factors such as administration or detection), but not this time. There's reasoned question whether the placebo used was really inert. When is the data just bad?

Here's a sample of the argument courtesy of Feuerstein. One might not be surprised to see battling forces. It's funny. And demonstrates that something as seemingly simple as testing a compound for efficacy most likely isn't. You would think that totally hiding which compound the patient gets is the first order of business, and that the placebo is truly inert (at least, for the indication under study). Guess not. The capsule used as placebo needed to look like Vascepa, so mineral oil was chosen. Turns out now that this is widely known, it is also widely known that mineral oil has been shown (in other studies) to be a bit of an anti-stain. Oops. Evidently, neither Amarin nor the FDA made the content of the placebo widely public, or all those who should know better ignored the issue. Let the jousting begin. Will FDA now change its mind?? Will the company go bankrupt?? And so on. All because the yardstick might be a foot short. Measure twice, cut once.

Goodbye Tony

The mainstream pundits are finally figuring out that the issue driving the country into pieces is the urban/rural divide. The former is plastic, while the latter is concrete. Very white concrete. If you remembered to watch the very last "Parts Unknown", which ended a few minutes ago, about the Lower East Side of NYC, the divide is clear as day.

Bourdain spent the early part of his restaurant career there in the 70s and 80s. The episode interviewed people and places from that period. Nearly all those he talks with say, in one way or another, "if you can't stand change, you can't live here." Of course, in old, fat, white flyover country nothing changes. And they want it that way. Or, if possible, the way it was ante-bellum. If you know a way to get through to such folks, let me know.

New Gold - part the seventh

Yet another laggard in the mainstream media figuring out that the Buck's New Gold status has some implications. This piece deals with the Trumpian (lack of) intelligence manifest in tariffs and the like. Of major concern, although not the lede alas, is this:

In some ways, sanctions are the perfect American weapon. They are cheap, put no American lives at risk and elicit no equivalent response. Thanks to the centrality of the dollar to the global financial system, only the United States has the power to fully wield them.

In other words, if the US Buck were just another currency, Trump's sword would just be a wet noodle. Kind of like his dick.

Quit Bitchin

Do you get sick and tired of the fat, uneducated, shitkickers in flyover country's continued whining about how unfair it is that the Coastal states get all the good jobs??? Do you?? White grievance manifest. When I've typed about that situation in the many times past, the conclusion is obvious: they're in the situation just because they have always in years past, and continue to, elect right wingnut politicians who see to it that the shitkickers remain uneducated, unhealthy and generally unemployable beyond "do you want fries with that" or lawn boy. At some point tough love has to tell them the truth: it's your own damn fault; don't blame the highly educated Coastal Cabal.

So, it was with a warm heart, that Emily Badger provides lots of meat on those bones in the context of Amazon headquarters 2/3. The lede:

In the end, even Amazon has behaved according to this rule: In the modern tech economy, cities that already have wealth, opportunity, highly educated workers and high salaries will just keep attracting more of them.

This situation mirrors the Red/Blue divide, which I (and an increasing number of Others) have been saying is really a Rural/Urban divide.

Between 2010 and 2017, according to Brookings, nearly half of the country's total employment growth occurred in just 20 large metro areas (places that are home to about a third of the population). The Washington and New York regions alone accounted for about half of the net increase in business establishments across the country between 2007 and 2016, according to the Economic Innovation Group, which tracks economic inequality across the country.

Keep in mind: the GOP's middle class tax cut (snark) doubly penalized Coastal Blue states by cutting the deduction of state taxes, which taxes are used, in large part, to support education and healthcare of the folks the likes of Amazon wants to find. You won't find many in flyover country, just because the flyover folks don't want to learn anything useful, but want a 90210 Lifestyle. They ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Numerous studies, here and here for example, have been driving a stake in the lie that small business drives job growth. Certainly not high-skill, high-education jobs. Nope.

Also, we see, again, the minority dictatorship by the shitkickers, in the person of The Manchurian President, who's convinced them that he's their savior. Yeah, right.

There is some hope that flyover folks are beginning to find some sense. Some Red state voters got Medicaid expansion and a raised minimum wage.