Thought for the Day, 31 July 2017 [update, yes so fast]

So, we have the latest spewing from the "Lord of the Flies" White House:

I'm not Steve Bannon. I'm not trying to suck my own cock.

During the election, we had this from HRC:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

Ya think may be she was right?

[update]
Well, he didn't last long

I Still Hate Neil Irwin, part the ninth [update]

Poppy Bush called it voodoo economics. Its zealots call it supply side theory. It's all bogus wealth transfer from the many to the few. If any form of supply side were true, producers would rev up the production lines whenever demand goes slack. They don't do that, of course.

The inevitable inference is that growth is demand driven. Yet, it takes a 'radical' paper to make the point.

It's a chicken or egg problem: Does low productivity cause slow growth, or does slow growth cause low productivity?

The second possibility is the provocative argument of a new paper published Tuesday by the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank. The paper argues that the United States economy is not actually closing in on its full economic potential and has plenty of room for continued growth -- so long as the Federal Reserve doesn't put on the brakes of the expansion prematurely.

The data, and logic, lead one to conclude that capitalists respond to increasing demand, not to decreasing cost. The former impels them to produce. The latter to pocket the savings.

"On Mondays and Wednesdays, economists argue that wages are low because robots are taking people's jobs. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, it's that we can't have wages rise because productivity growth is low," said Mr. Mason, an economist at John Jay College. "Both can't be true."

In other words, instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for the robots to even get a chance.

Foxconn, which may or may not be building plant here, has been doing the robot thing in response to labor costs (that's 2011, and there're lots more recent reports of carrying this out).

Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years.

So, in addition to the segue from actual production in the economy to overhead labor (and the loss in global productivity), we find that we can't get growth if wages don't expand to demand more of what the economy actually produces. The lower and middle classes don't consume financial services to the degree that the 1% does.

[update]
Well, that didn't take long. Hot off today's presses is more info on Foxconn.

The technology futurists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson of MIT recently told Yahoo Finance that the technological change of the last 20 years is nothing compared with the imminent revolution to be wrought by artificial intelligence and machine learning. "We are never again going to have a large, prosperous, stable middle class in this country doing routine industrial-era work," McAfee said. "The assembly line jobs of the 1970s, those jobs are gone. To try to go back to the 1950s, I find that un-American."

Un-American?? A bit extreme. Who's gonna have the moolah to buy the stuff? London Whales?

Neo Nazi Youth

Just when you figure Donald J. Quisling couldn't be anymore transparent a dictator, he goes and turns the Boy Scouts into Neo Nazi Youth. All because 77,900 shit kickers had just enough brain stem activity to fill in the circle.

Divide and Conquer

Well, it does the olde heart a bit of good to realize that the mainstream pundits have finally caught up with Your Humble Servent and figured out that the left/right political war isn't based on Red states and Blue states, but rather on city slickers and shit kickers. The shit kickers are poor and unhappy mostly because they continue to elect right wing fascists to state and local governments. Said legislators, continue, to ill-educate their citizens. God, guns, and abortion being the only subjects. They're competent to be biblical goat herds, but not much else. Once again, go look at the voting results map from last year to see the real truth.

This map tells many particularly interesting stories on which I'll elaborate in future posts, but suffice to say that most of the precinct swing can be explained by one variable: education level, perhaps augmented somewhat by race and ethnicity.

As mentioned here more than once, the flow of money inter-state, is unambiguously Blue to Red (via DC) and has been for decades, perhaps dozens of them. The shit kickers are the moochers. Without medicaid, they'll have nearly no hospitals. And, of course, Medicaid is mostly white. Contrary to the right wing propaganda, Medicaid isn't all about negro ghetto hoes popping out runts. Which brings us to the Constitutional justification of Senate structure to "protect" the small population rural states from the rapacious urban states of the Northeast. Well, that turns out, with just a quick wiki-look to be a totally bogus argument, even at the time.

urban population, USofA/1800: 6.1%
urban population, USofA/2010: 80.7%

So, it isn't surprising that 19th century USofA was run by uneducated shit kickers. And so it will be again, if Donald J. Quisling and Sessions get their way.

Inside Quisling's Brain

The NYT interview went public during the MSNBC (I know, Snowflake News) nightly shows. One of the points of wonderment amongst the groups assembled was Donald J. Quisling's assertion that he wouldn't have appointed Sessions if he told Donald J. Quisling that he'd be recusing himself in the Russian investigation. In sum, "Mueller wasn't appointed yet when Sessions was offered the job." Oddly, there is a way to connect the dots in such a way that such an assertion makes (half) sense.

Here we go.

At the time of considering the appointment, Trump and Sessions knew some facts.

1 - That there was an investigation into Russian meddling, including whether or not the Donald J. Quisling folks had aided and abetted said meddling.

2 - That Sessions was knee deep in the campaign.

3 - That Sessions, at least, knew he had lied about meeting with Russians.

4 - That DoJ protocol required anyone in DoJ and possibly a subject of a DoJ investigation must recuse.

So, Sessions, had he thought things through, could have apprised Donald J. Quisling of the situation, and it's impending implications. But they both have the same voter suppression agenda, above all others, so it just slipped his mind.

And, not mentioned by said pundits (that I heard, at least) was this smoking gun:

Asked if Mr. Mueller's investigation would cross a red line if it expanded to look at his family's finances beyond any relationship to Russia, Mr. Trump said, "I would say yes." He would not say what he would do about it. "I think that's a violation. Look, this is about Russia."

Why is that a Dirty Harry moment, you might ask? All along, Donald J. Quisling has been braying that he had nothing, nothing at all, to do with Russia. But here he admits that he has financial ties to Russia. And some may be quid pro quo for the meddling. Ya think?

So, yes, Donald J. Quisling is in hock to Russians and wants to be the USofA's Putin. A match made someplace.

The half wrong part, of course, is that Donald J. Quisling isn't (yet) Putin and the DoJ isn't his personal enemies unit.

That Horizontal Boogie

It seems to me, perhaps alone, that the venue for Big Data (lots of machines munging lots of data) shrinks as time goes on. 64 bit address space covers lots of cases. And the power of the RDBMS just gets wider. Here's a quote from an AnandTech review of a new crypto motherboard:

Like other boards targeted at mining, there are a plethora of PCIe x1 slots. Having several PCIe x1 slots on mining motherboards make it more cost effective to simply add more video cards into a single system, rather than expanding to additional systems.

The horizontal boogie is fun in some circumstances. Not so much in others.

He Who Is Blessed

An ongoing theme of these endeavors is that data analysis of human-defined processes is fraught with danger. Will Robinson!!! I've had a number of comments questioning the utility of quant in the realm of human processes spiked. Not gratuitous enough, I guess. Well, this post goes so far as to point out that even God's rules, while fixed, can lead to spikes up or down in the series.

In time series analysis, structural changes represent shocks impacting the evolution with time of the data generating process. That is relevant because one of the key assumptions of the Box-Jenkins methodology is that the structure of the data generating process does not change over time.

Take that, you giants of financial quant.