1,055 karma · joined April 1, 2012
Find me at http://tullo.ch and github.com/ajtulloch.
Email is andrew@tullo.ch
A simple way to see how silly this argument is - replace "0.5% wealth tax" with "2% VC fund management fee", and see how that changes the conclusion!
linear transformations : matrices :: multilinear transformations : tensors.It’s essentially an example of duality in numerical optimization (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duality_(optimization)#Dual_...).
* the State, contracts, corporations, right-to-work law, at-will employment law, etc - all good, natural parts of the market.
* employee unions - bad, unnatural, rent-seeking, deviations from the market.
It's untenable.
Given Australia is a substantial producer and exporter of coal (responsible for around 7% of global production [1]), and that coal (+ natgas + oil) power generation are responsible for around 30% of global greenhouse gas production [2], and assuming that coal is responsible for between half and all of GHG emissions from power plants [3], you could ballpark that Australian-produced coal is responsible for an incremental 1-2% or so of global greehouse gas emissions (0.3 * 0.07 * [0.5~1]).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Australia [2]: https://www.c2es.org/content/international-emissions/ [3]: https://www.worldcoal.org/coal/uses-coal/coal-electricity
> At that point the ultrawealthy will seek to form an alliance with the growing popularity of the far right and seek to annihilate the left.
This is the third stage of Paxton’s five stages, the first three being:
> 1. Intellectual exploration, where disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor
> 2. Rooting, where a fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage
> 3. Arrival to power, where conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite fascists to share power
That passage rendered there looks like (roughly):
> Kalkys, reassured, takes a nervous gulp and blurts: “The real reason that Apollo’s shooting us down is that Agamemnon insulted his priest! The old man came to ask for his daughter Chryseis back. He asked nice and politely, in the name of the god, which he’s entitled to do as a priest! Brought the proper ransom, and a wreath!”
> All the men grunt and nod. They knew it!
> Kalkys feels their approval and goes on, more loudly and accusingly: “But Agamemnon purposely insulted him! Threatened him! Laughed at the poor old man! Wouldn’t give his daughter back even though he asked politely!”
> Everyone nods and tells each other, “I told you that was it! That damn Agamemnon! Gonna get us all killed!”
> Kalkys concludes, “So we have to give her back! To her father, the priest! Or Apollo will kill all of us! And not ask any ransom for her or anything!” More nodding and grunting from the crowd. They knew it’d come to this.
> Kalkys pushes his luck now, brave like nerds are when the crowd’s egging them on: “And we have to send a sacrifice with her! Treasure, and gold, and calves and sheep, ones with no spots or scars! Perfect specimens, the kind Apollo likes!”
> More grunts and nods. Kalkys is drunk on public approval now, delighted with his own courage—and then he turns and sees Agamemnon and sits down very suddenly.
> Agamemnon stands up, with the hate pouring from him like heat from a rock on a hearth. The crowd goes quiet. It’s odd, how they fear Agamemnon. He isn’t all that tough in battle. And he’s nowhere near as big as Akilles, or as strong as Ajax, or clever like Odysseus. Doesn’t even fight in the front rank most of the time. But he is hands down the meanest man in the army, maybe the world. He never forgives, never forgets the tiniest slight to himself or his precious relatives.
> Him and his relatives! That’s what this whole army is doing here, avenging Agamemnon’s useless brother Menelaos, who married a woman way too beautiful for him—half goddess, in fact—and got dumped for a younger, hotter man. Who happened to be a Trojan prince.
> That’s why they’ve all been camping out here for nine slow, deadly years: Defending the nonexistent honor of Agamemnon’s blank of a brother, the fool Menelaos, Menelaos the cuckold.
> And now Kalkys has blurted out the one thing they’re all thinking: It’s Agamemnon’s fault we’re here! It’s his fault we’re dying under the magic virus arrows! And we didn’t even get any booty out of it!
> Agamemnon stands, sneering, letting the crowd vent a while, then drags out the silence so they can feel his hate. That’s where Agamemnon really shines—the best hater in a world where hate is much respected.
> When he’s made them all flinch away from his stare, he turns to poor old Kalkys: “You, Mister Science! You just love giving bad news, don’t you? You little coward, egghead. Did those entrails you claim to interpret ever once, even once, tell you anything good about me? Did those dead goat guts of yours ever tell, even one time, that I, your king, had made a good decision? No! No, because you only want to tell me what I’ve done wrong! Because you’re a cowardly little whiner!!”
> It was a good test to attempt. But Messrs Foote and Goetz have inspected the authors' computer code and found the controls missing. In other words, Messrs Donohue and Levitt did not run the test they thought they had—an “inadvertent but serious computer programming error”, according to Messrs Foote and Goetz.
> Fixing that error reduces the effect of abortion on arrests by about half, using the original data, and two-thirds using updated numbers. But there is more. In their flawed test, Messrs Donohue and Levitt seek to explain arrest totals (eg, the 465 Alabamans of 18 years of age arrested for violent crime in 1989), not arrest rates per head (ie, 6.6 arrests per 100,000). This is unsatisfactory, because a smaller cohort will obviously commit fewer crimes in total. Messrs Foote and Goetz, by contrast, look at arrest rates, using passable population estimates based on data from the Census Bureau, and discover that the impact of abortion on arrest rates disappears entirely. “I am simply not convinced that there is a link between abortion and crime,” Mr Foote says.