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Aren't there quite a few historians, anthropologists and so on that study mythology?

This is in line with Pommeranz (a western economic historian) and most of the whole "Great divergence" litterature.

Note that in orthodox microeconomic theory, price is equal to the marginal value of the last exchanged unit. To use the above example of food:

> What's the value of food? If you have none you die, so the value is quit of high, but the price is much lower than that because there are many competing suppliers.

The first calories of the day, the ones that prevent you from dying, have a very high subjective value - but you pay them at the value of the 3000th calorie of the day, the extra drop of ketchup on your fries, which has a very little value.

And thus of course average value x volume is very different from (marginal value of last unit) x volume.

Wrong thread

Would the same system work for other industries, e.g. banks or medical research?

In that scenario, the "throat to choke" would be the primary care physician. We won't think of it as an "ML radiologist", just as getting some kind of physical test done and bringing it to the doctor for interpretation.

If you're getting a blood test, the pipeline might be primary care physician -> lab with a nurse to draw blood and machines to measure blood stuff -> primary care physician to interpret the test results. There is no blood-test-ologist (hematologist?) step, unlike radiology.

Anyway, "there's going to be radiologists around for insurance reasons only but they don't bring anything else to patient care" is a very different proposition from "there's going to be radiologists around for insurance reasons _and_ because the job is mostly talking to patients and fellow clinicians".

If they had absolute perfect performance at zero cost, you would not need a radiologist.

The current "workflow" is primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech that actually does the measurement thing -> radiologist for interpretation/diagnosis -> primary care physician (or specialist) for treatment.

If you have perfect diagnosis, it could be primary care physician (or specialist) -> radiology tech -> ML model for interpretation -> primary care physician (or specialist.

See also [0]

    This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important
    part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks. Ex-
    isting research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, argu-
    ing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument
    breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.
    The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to
    explain about one-third of variations in output growth. This “granular” hypothesis sug-
    gests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular that macroeconomic
    questions can be clarified by looking at the behavior of large firms. This paper’s ideas
    and analytical results may also be useful for thinking about the fluctuations of other
    economic aggregates, such as exports or the trade balance.

[0] https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/granular.pdf

I don't know if it's a joke I didn't, but it's the topic of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Since there are a lot of photographers here - what's the first step up from phones? That is a camera that :

- takes better photos than phones (esp. when printed)

- is not crazy expensive

- is not crazy complicated

The camera you'd buy if you did not want to make photography a hobby but phones don't cut it.

Isn’t “making acceptable tradeoffs” (optimization) while “meeting requirements & constraints” (under constraints) simply optimization under constraints? I fail to see how this is about sufficient _but not optimal_ solutions.

What is the split between aristocrats and bourgeois among the wealthiest Europeans?

Looking at the richest Europeans [0], they all seem to be bourgeois.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Europeans_by_net_worth

> workers by contract workers (luckily found to be illegal here now).

Note that, at least for France, it was not found to be illegal to use contract workers; rather the jobs-as-they-existed were really employment contracts according to the reality of the arrangement and not procurement contracts; merely not calling them "employment contract" does not absolve the parties of the obligation of a work contract.

It is interesting to hackers, even if it is not hacking related.

I mean this seems a solved problem: hand-and-paper written onsite exams + blackboard-and-chalk oral onsite exams. If this is too costly (is it? many countries manage), make students take them less often.

Let’s say you run the most basic regression Y = X beta + epsilon. The X is chosen out of the set all possible regressors Z (say you run income ~ age + sex, where you also could have used education, location, whatever).

Is that not equivalent to a prior that the coefficient on variables in Z but not in X is zero?

For non technical people used to WYSIWYG, yes?

This is an internal tool (which was open sourced) made by the French government digital service to be used by French government employee on French government infra. I do not think it is trying to be a better solution for individuals. It’s trying to be a better solution for gov employees.

Is increasing total consumption something positive?

I mean if the choice is between living with Soviet standard of living and burning in a wildfire, the choice sounds obvious.

Note that no one has argued for a planned economy.

In that case the weed-out course is _after_ the calculus/diff eq/lin alg sequence then, not the intro math course.

Are there "math weed out courses"?

Sure, but then the story is about 1. the Indian heatwave and 2. the transformation; whether the transformation came about through carbon coins or carbon quotas or whatever is a detail. But it's the focus of the book.

Isn't it true?

    f = lambda x: (1/x) * x
    f(1e309)

yields NaN, not 1.

(So I guess Denmark is at least 1e309-sized in some metric).

This is often the justification but in many countries agriculture systems are not oriented towards food security: they produce a large share of export crops/products and thus also rely on imports. If they were an actual national security tool, they would be more focus on not relying on imports and not helping exports, right?

The main thing that irked me is that the book focuses on technical solutions as if that's what we're missing (carbon coin! pumping water from under ice sheets! etc.) but completly glosses over the actual consequences.

To piggyback on the rest of this thread, people like meat and don't want to stop eating lots of meat. People are not going to like things that make them stop eating meats, whether it's governement buying out producers, a carbon tax, a carbon quota, whatever.

"Ministry of the Future" is full of stuff like "and the central bankers could reshape the economy, so they did by doing XYZ" as if "XYZ" was important but barely discusses the fact that "reshaping the economy" might upset lots of people. How were they convinced to give up air travel, cars, etc?

> Everyone has the ability to impact global CO2 emmissions.

I'm afraid most people are smaller-than-Denmark groups, and thus unable whatsoever to impact global emissions. It's just math.

Note that China has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.

Let’s split China population in k Denmark-sized groups, plus one smaller-than-Denmark reminder.

None of the k groups has any ability to impact global CO2 emissions (same as Denmark).

We can reasonably assume that a smaller group has even less ability to impact global CO2 emissions than a bigger group. Hence the smaller-than-Denmark reminder has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either.

Thus China is made of groups that have no ability to impact global CO2 emissions either. And therefore China as a whole has no ability to impact global CO2 emissions. (Otherwise at least one group within China would have to impact global emissions and we just saw that it isn’t possible).

This is known as the CO2 impossibility theorem, loosely based on Arrow’s concept of “(in)decisive” set.

Low carbon farms balance would be: "low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax

High carbon farms balance would be: "high carbon" profit + subsidy - high carbon tax

If ["low carbon" profit - small carbon tax] > ["high carbon" profit - high carbon tax] (e.g. if the carbon tax is high enough), farms have an incentive to lower their carbon emissions.

The subsidy is here to make sure ["low carbon" profit + subsidy - small carbon tax] > 0

That's what the law say anyway:

    Le Conseil d'Etat est la juridiction administrative suprême.

(see: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000...)

Note that's it's not civil matters but matters related to government action (from say, basic rights to labor disputes for State employees or citizenship issues).