ChrisLomont

Here's but one of many papers https://www.jstor.org/stable/29794227.

Dig through google scholar using terms like "confidence" and "recession" to find many more.

>Here's an article from 2008 talking about the 2 quarter rule of thumb. Apparently it's been around since 1974.

That article states exactly what I did: "Ignorance about recessions has taken hold because of a simplistic idea that a recession is two successive quarterly declines in gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of the nation's output."

It states the 1974 rule was not two quarters, but over time people forgot to use the rest of the rules. So this completely backs up the "it is not simply 2 quarters" definitions.

>Here's one from 1998 using the 2 month definition.

That's not two month, and it's also not using GDP, which is what people keep wanting it to be. It states "commonly defined as two consecutive quarters of economic contraction" - what is contraction? Decline in many variables, which is what the NBER uses - GDP, and/or GNP, and/or labor markets, and/or sales/purchasing, .....

>Here's the NYT defining it the same way in 1974.

That article also explicitly states that the NBER defines the start and end: "Generally, the designation of recession periods and the beginning and ending dates established by the National Bureau of Economic. Research, a private research agency, are accepted, by both Government and private economists." It then goes on to say how NBER has managed this since the 1920s.

Did you even read those links you posted?

They pretty much back up that the NBER has been the arbiter of recessions in the US.

>politicians, their news allies and political operatives push whichever one is most convenient

Yes politicians do push things that are not true because people ignorant of the correct nuance follow their tribe. But that does not change the truth or underlying fact of the matter.

>Assume a company has gross margins of 100%,

First, gross margin is not net profit, which more accurately represents what a company could possibly absorb. Second, no industry has even gross margins near 100%; more accurate is around ~35% [1] .

Assume a company has actual net profits of 5% (more in line with actual net profits), and cost of goods (or labor) goes up 10-20% (and same for all their competitors, since all are sourcing goods in the same markets).

Then they pass cost on to consumers or go out of business.

This is a more accurate model using real world numbers from the current economy.

[1] https://cfohub.com/what-is-a-good-gross-profit-margin/

First you claim

>So high profits and high inflation suggests an economy dominated by monopolies,

then pivot to

>Competition has decreased throughout the economy.

Competition decreasing is a far cry proving "an economy dominated by monopolies," which is simply not true.

>Or, to take another measure, in 1999 there were 8,000 companies listed on USA stock markets, but now there are only 3,400 companies

That says more about stock markets than number of companies. Fortunately the Census Bureau tracks relevant facts (and there are more at the BLS), and their data puts literally millions more businesses in 2019 [1] (the last year they have data) than in 1999 [2].

And nothing in their data supports "suggests an economy dominated by monopolies".

Care to explain how you measure dominated? As is most of consumer money is spent there? As in the majority of businesses? As in what?

[1] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2019/econ/susb/2019-sus...

[2] https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/1999/econ/susb/1999-sus...

>used for as long as I remember

Not in the US. Your memory doesn't trump facts.

Here's [1] a 1980s report on it.

Here's [2] the Jul 31, 2002 Nevada Daily Mail newspaper, stating the same thing: "The National Bureau of Economic Research, the recognized arbiter of when recession begin and end,....."

Here's [3] a 1983 news paper article explaining it again, same thing.

Here's [4] the NBER on the 1970s recession.

Here's [5] a modern Bloomberg article saying the same thing.

Here's [6] the current NBER page with the definition. Here's [7] the same page from 2020 (saved at internet archive). Same definition then.

Here [8] is the NBER definition from 1999, cached from their website as it was shown in 1999: "he NBER does not define a recession in terms of two consecutive quarters of decline in real GNP. Rather, a recession is a recurring period of decline in total output, income, employment, and trade, usually lasting from six months to a year, and marked by widespread contractions in many sectors of the economy."

Where did you learn your standard, and when did you learn it?

In fact, if you spend much time looking through old newspapers (the google link I gave you allows it) you can find that the NBER has been the arbiter for a long, long time.

Do you still not believe this is how it's been done a long time?

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c0688/c0688.pdf

[2] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1908&dat=20020731&id=...

[3] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=348&dat=19830711&id=H...

[4] https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9101/c9101.pdf

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-12/no-us-rec...

[6] https://www.nber.org/business-cycle-dating-procedure-frequen...

[7] https://web.archive.org/web/20201101011155/https://www.nber....

[8] https://web.archive.org/web/19990221024645/http://nber.org/c...

Yes, this can be modeled mathematically, but you need a lot more details/conditions to get to an answer you'd like.

If you know exactly the relations, you can simply write down the functions. If you're trying to guess or build a function from lots of data points, then you need to select a class of functions and optimize/minimize to get the best fitting one.

There is not in general a way to avoid divide by 0. If your function is f(x) = 1/x, then at x=0 you will divide by zero.

In some cases you can take limits (calculus) to "remove" divide by zero if there is a simple removable singularity. For example, if your functions looks like f(x) = x^2/x, then it has a 0/0 at x=0, which may trigger code crashes, but if you simplify that function to f(x)=x then the divide by zero is gone. Other issues may arise from floating point representations of real numbers. Note this problem is a huge, deep field with lots of nuance.

The NBER, founded 1920, has been the call for recessions for around a century. That is, and has been, the definition in the US for that long.

>definitions "have to be changed" for bidens words to be "true"

I think that's backwards from reality.

The definition used in the US for decades (the NBER one, founded 1920) would say no recession yet. The naive, yet incorrect, definition some people want to change to (2 quarters) would make it a recession.

>So high profits and high inflation suggests an economy dominated by monopolies

Low unemployment points is a tight labor market, meaning there is also competition to get workers.

And the economy is hardly dominated by monopolies. Take a moment to tally where all of your money is spent, and see how many of those companies are anywhere near a monopoly. The vast majority of people's expenses is spent in competitive markets: housing, food, energy (no company is a monopoly in any of those markets - largest housing company has < 10% of market share, largest bank has < 20% of market, largest energy company has < 30% of market share).

There's historical evidence that calling something a recession, if it is not, tends to push it into a recession.

Yet the people were vastly worse off than under the current system.

Which would you prefer to live in?

Here's some of what it was like to live then for comparison https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4577070/

No, it doesn't. You can look up historical Fed rates and "massive recessions," and check this yourself.

Both companies that develop games and individual programmers are correctly called developers, and have been since the start of gaming.

Those companies develop games. And for a long time, almost no programmer develops a whole game - they provide code, artists provide art, producers direct, investors fund, and so on.

So while a large group develops the game, most of which aren't generally called developers, programmers have shrunk in scope from when they did do most of the work (say in the 70s and early 80s).

If anything, game companies are more correctly labeled developer, and programmer should be programmer.

For example, search for top game developers... Not an individual in the list... Such uses go back as far as gaming.

The word simply has multiple meanings.

The system did not work for the 1800s. Inflation and deflation boom and busts in the 1800s were so severe and destructive that it led to central banking to avoid those problems.

Here's where you can start looking at the data

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Un...

>working does not create money

Working creates value (well, working on something others value...), which is priced and then traded using money as the medium, correct?

>The hole is simply shifted around while it grows infinitely.

I'm not sure what this means.

>An historical example of needing more money because an economy ran out it and people couldn't get any to do financial transactions

Yes, an economy can hit a liquidity crisis, but it's not because the reasons the article claims.

And deflationary spirals are also not because of there is not enough money to pay old interest.

These are two completely different things.

The reason modern economies do not want fixed monet supplies is because the other problems it causes: the GD taught the world the problems of a deflationary spiral, which is why all modern central banks target slight inflation. This has led to more stability than previous systems.

And, as money inflates, and as economies grow, there is need for more money to allow trade to function efficiently.

But none of these reasons are due to there simply not being enough money to pay old debts plus the interest.

The article above seems vastly far from this understanding of modern economies and why things are done the way they currently are.

This article makes many claims which are demonstrably not true. For example, this claim, used in many articles like this, is simply wrong:

>Borrowing money and the ability to pay it back depends on an economic system with future growth,

The common "argument" for this type of thinking is that if you borrow $100 and have to pay back $110, then in the future there has to be more money. This ignores the time value of (labor/money/invention...) as follows:

Fix money in the world at $200, owned by B (representing the external system to actor A).

A borrows $100 from B, owes $110 in a year. Now A,B = 100, 100

A then works (say even for B), earning $50 over the year, and used $40 to live on (spent wherever, say to B if you like). Now A has 100+50-40 = $110, B has 100-50+40 = $90.

Now A pays off B, returning the 110, and the state is back to start A,B = 0,200.

There is no need for more money to pay off interest, because time and labor and other things have value.

This articles uses this misunderstanding as proof for needing infinite growth then extrapolates to the system has to fail.

It's simply not true. Over the years I've had to explain this to many, many friends under the same thinking, and most of them get it and stop the "we need infinite growth!" mindset (at least for this type of argument).

Crypto: speedrunning millenia of financial failures.

> for BWT-related hypotheses has been overstated

Overstated does not mean the hypothesis is invalid, does it?

Also you realize this paper is not about the BWT as a hypothesis for more crime, which is the BWT hypothesis, but is instead applying BWT to health outcomes, right? Seems a bit odd that this is what you select.

If you want some recent papers actually about the BWT, try [1]: "The findings reported here lend support to propositions derived from broken windows theory to a major extent."

>And yes, I trust the word of a large scale meta-analysis over individual studies as a general rule

Good. Maybe read the next sentence after the one you quoted that you conveniently forgot:

"Even where there is evidence that BWT impacts outcomes, it is driven by studies that measured disorder as the perceptions of the focal individual, potentially conflating pessimism about the neighborhood with mental health."

So there is some evidence that BWT impacts outcomes, even health ones, in some situations?

When you select a paper not on topic, pull a quote out of context to make it look on topic, ignore the following sentence, that level of dishonesty is not worth dealing with. Looking at the 14 of your posts (out of 32 total posts) in this thread so far, you are not being honest with anyone here. So I'm done.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07418825.2017.13...

That paper is not about the BWT, but about BWT applied to health outcomes. And the next sentence you didn't quote states that even in that case BWT has truth to it.

Such dishonesty over and over...

>Zimbardo demonstrated the principle by interfering with his "study"

After he broke the car window, he noted that others would jump in and do the same. And he is by far not the only researcher to test the hypothesis on many, many areas.

As to how recent work is, the Google scholar literature is more recent than any on Wikipedia. I provided a link. Look at some.

There are thousands of papers on Google scholar, a huge amount form this year, about where the hypothesis applies. Almost none claim it is not a valid effect. The research centers around where it shows up and detailed causal effects.

A criticism of some hypothesis is not an invalidation, especially when the majority of the literature overrides.

There's published critiques of a everything from general relativity to climate change. It doesn't invalidate the overriding evidence in those cases, nor does criticism invalidate this.

>Anecdote is not a study nor is it generalizable to a large population.

The page lists many actual studies over large populations with links to read more of the research. OP may have felt since you don't believe the actual studies which were listed and are pretty conclusive, that you can test it yourself to get a feel of the phenomenon.

Don't like that, here's [1] google scholar on the broken windows theory, with scads of papers you can read to satisfy your request for studies.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C15&q=bro...

Very nice puzzle game

Did you read the article title? "A literature review"

It was not proving anything - it was listing things in the literature, of which it listed a significant amount of studies that did conclude significant adverse long term effects.

No where did it claim those studies were invalid - and it went to great lengths to list all the problems I listed above and more.

A literature review doesn't get to the end and say "Eureka! We proved it!" It gets to the end and says "we have listed current research, and we recommend further stuff for the following reasons".

It's a literature review - not a meta study, not a new study, not a critique of the previous papers - so it's not the proof you want it to be. The evidence of the paper is in the papers it cited, with key points pulled into this one.

>Read the "Discussion" and "Possible future research" sections.

Yes, it starts with the phrase "Our literature review...." As does the conclusion section, which continued "This literature review found studies that reported the components of road dust particles to be associated with multiple health effects, in particular on the respiratory and cardiovascular system."

I guess we're done at this point. The conclusion clearly states it's a review, and that road dust particles are associated with multiple health effects (which effects? The ones I quoted above, quite serious), which you claim the article does not state.

For those interested, the reason places charge high rates on some exchanges is to cover risk. Here [1] is USD versus INR - look over the past year.

Look at USD to CAN or GBP or EUR on the same site for comparison.

Another factor is liquidity in the markets allowing those doing exchanges to offload unbalanced books efficiently.

[1] https://www.exchangerates.org.uk/USD-INR-exchange-rate-histo...

Button debouncing is useful for all sorts of stuff like this, but it requires much trickier code to get right, including tracking some form of history.

"They reported that insoluble lead compounds were associated with respiratory tract inflammation, which could lead to respiratory tract cancer"

" lead and chromium compounds in road dust were present in human body fluids, indicating that exposure to road dust carries certain risks. Lead is known to be responsible for deficits in neurobehavioral and cognitive development in childhood"

"Franklin et al. established an association between PM2.5 and cardiovascular mortality."

"Bell et al. [25] found that elements of PM2.5 road dust particles such as aluminum and silicon were associated with low birth weight (LBW)"

"Long-term exposure to aluminum was found to be associated with Alzheimer disease . Aluminum was found to be associated with respiratory allergies such as asthma in aluminum industry workers. The accumulation of aluminum can cause cardiac hypertrophy leading to cardiac failure."

"the health risks of road dust and found that a higher risk was associated with the presence of lead, chromium, ... Chromium is known to be carcinogenic. In human subjects, chromium has been found to cause allergic reactions and respiratory distress after short-term exposure. Long-term exposure to chromium has been proven to be associated with lung cancer. "

Increased incidence of: cancer, cognitive development deficits, increased cardiovascular mortality, low birth weight, Alzheimer's, caridac failure, lung cancer - these are not long term enough for you? These are not adverse health effects?

There are so many more statements like this that I don't even care to list them all. Yet you claim others didn't read the article, then summarize it as having no "long-term" health risks.

What in the paper supports your claim of no long term adverse health effects, compare to the (partial) list of items I quoted? Have a quote?

>because it found no evidence linking road dust to long-term adverse health affects

From the abstract:

"Road dust was found to have harmful effects on the human body, especially on the respiratory system."

The entire conclusion:

"This literature review found studies that reported the components of road dust particles to be associated with multiple health effects, in particular on the respiratory and cardiovascular system. The review also found a need for a complete risk assessment of the effects of road dust on human health. We recommend a thorough meta-analysis as well as a 4-step risk assessment process, including a multi-source epidemiological study on road dust particles to identify chronic health effects, with a particular focus on PM2.5 and the inclusion of sources in both urban and rural locations."

Which of those led you to claim "it found no evidence linking road dust to long-term adverse health affects"?

> I think you're saying that all physically measurable quantities are rational numbers with terminating decimal expansions.

No, this most certainly isn't true.

For example, take a meter defined (as SI does) as a fraction of the speed of light.

Now, for every length in the universe to be a rational fraction of this length is most certainly not true, because lengths, under relativity, form a continuum. Any speed is possible, so any length (via contraction) is possible.

There'd be no physical reason all physical processes would be constrained to a subset of rational grid points - things can move freely.

Heck, if all physical quantities are rational, are you claiming velocities only occur as rational numbers? That time is only rational numbers?

It's far more likely that they'd be irrational, and our man made units are the weird things.

Suppose two diagonal corners of a square with rational sides are somehow physically exact.... What is the physical diagonal length?

Oh yeah, irrational.

So no, physics isn't formed from rational numbers.

> uniquely in finite space.

If this is your definition, it falls to the barber paradox.

In finite space, if we're this sloppy, I can define the simplest real number not definable in finite space.... But I did it in finite space.... This this notion needs to be made more precise ... Then the next one falls... And so on.

Go ahead, you seem to know enough math to know what constitutes a solid definition and a proof. Try to define the set you're talking about, making sure it's not circular nor excludes any numbers you think it should contain. It's not trivial, nor even perhaps possible.

This is what I mean by you're going to have a very hard time making your definition precise enough to be a true statement.

People have tried your path many, many times. From my poking at the lit on it it never works. Chaitin has spent decades on these things, and the result always falls just outside precise enough to make a proof.