kapitza

You jump straight from the condition "America makes worse cars" to "America should stop making cars and buy Japanese and German cars."

A mercantilist or protectionist would jump straight to "Americans drive worse cars."

So there is a policy choice: under free trade, Americans get to drive cute Beetles and sporty little Civics, instead of giant Pontiac boats. Under protectionism (assuming version 1), Detroit remains a city, not a bandit-infested wilderness.

Human beings (the Guardian would call them "neoliberals") made this choice. So, they're responsible. This does not constitute an apology for the '72 El Camino.

Wow. To paraphrase Walter Sobchak: say what you want about Marxism. But at least it's an ethos.

I don't know this, but let's suppose that by your use of this term "exercise of economic power", you imply some moral sense in which the action is unrighteous or unjust. Right? (Bear in mind that, of course, from the opposite perspective, it sounds a lot like "blaming the victim.")

Consider a not hugely dissimilar migration that happened around the same time: the migration of French Algerians to metropolitan France. Here's a short Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oran_massacre_of_1962

Totally serious, non-rhetorical question: would you categorize this historical event as "exercise of economic power" or as "ethnic cleansing?"

Also, is there any generalization that can be drawn across the political systems in which these two events happened (decline of Detroit, independence of Algeria)? Or is it just a coincidence that they both go down in the '60s?

Version 1 (unless broadened) does not explain why exactly the same symptoms (if not always as extreme) appeared in many other American cities, not specializing in auto production, at the same time.

"Due to foreign competition" is also contentious -- an equal and opposite contentious statement would be "due to free trade," ie, attributing these events to an human political decision, rather than an abstract force of history.

Version 2 still contains the passive voice. Notice that both these versions trail off into "no one is responsible." This is consistent with a political memory hole.

It also seems deeply problematic (in a number of respects) to argue that Detroit declined because African-Americans moved there. Surely the proximate cause of the decline is not that a new population arrived, but that the old population departed?

Here's a clarifying thought-experiment. Imagine that Detroit was a city-state, and you were its absolute monarch, crowned originally in 1965. Then deliver the explanation as if you were talking to your bondholders. Extra points if you can use the phrase "our incredible journey."

You illustrate the point exactly. Maybe it would be clearer with a little more detail on the "potato blight" analogy.

Here are two kinds of statement:

"Potato blight" has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including rainy summers, witchcraft, overworked soils, and God's wrath at our tolerance for rampant homosexuality.

"Potato blight" is the common name for a plant disease, usually caused by the organism Phytophthora infestans.

The first statement, just in its form, is essentially pre-scientific, pre-rational thinking, which has been the norm for most of human history. Parts of it may be true in some sense. Pretty much none of it is in any way testable.

The second is a scientific statement at least in form -- it may or may not be accurate, but that's easy to check.

Occam's basic point was that when you propose a complex, multi-causal explanation of a discrete syndrome, against an alternative hypothesis which is parsimonious, precise and uni-causal, the Bayesian prior of the complex hypothesis should be very low.

In this case, we have a multi-causal explanation of a historical mass migration. To my mind, the causal null hypothesis for any urban decline or mass migration, past or present, is: the city fell into ruins because the people who lived there left. The people left because, due to political or military forces, they became afraid for their physical safety. In short, ethnic cleansing.

This simple uni-causal explanation is amply confirmed by anecdotal evidence from the period. Or you could accept Wikipedia's multi-causal explanation, which to my eye is basically zoning changes, the phase of the moon and maybe even God's wrath.

But, sure, there are a ton of papers. Bear in mind: in 1405, there were a ton of papers as well.

No -- what's strange is that a monumental historical event, which happened in the lives of those now living, and caused immense destruction and immense sorrow to many human beings, is not attributed to any clear cause, or human institution, or organization, or even ideology.

Unlike potato blight, which is caused by one or more well-described organisms whose DNA can even be sequenced.

This is very much the kind of intentional forgetting practiced by many post-genocidal societies. It's very similar to the way Indonesians remember the 1965 massacres, or even the way Chinese remember the Cultural Revolution. There's simply a broad social agreement that "we don't talk about these things."

But here, let me help you out with that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Ground_(book)

https://www.amazon.com/Slaughter-Cities-Renewal-Ethnic-Clean...

It's very reassuring, however, to note that Detroit is now "one of the hottest food cities." I'll be sure to check out one of those New American bistros next time I'm on Linnhurst.

From your link:

Urban decay (also known as urban rot and urban blight) is the process whereby a previously functioning city, or part of a city, falls into disrepair and decrepitude. It may feature deindustrialization, depopulation or changing population, restructuring, abandoned buildings, high local unemployment, fragmented families, political disenfranchisement, crime, and a desolate, inhospitable city landscape.

And:

Urban decay has no single cause; it results from combinations of inter-related socio-economic conditions—including the city's urban planning decisions, tight rent control, the poverty of the local populace, the construction of freeway roads and rail road lines that bypass the area, depopulation by suburbanization of peripheral lands, real estate neighborhood redlining, and immigration restrictions.

Highly elucidating, I'm sure you'll agree! Imagine a page on potato blight that read:

Potato blight has no single cause -- it results from combinations of inter-related agricultural conditions, including...

In related news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

What's so remarkable about this piece is that it says nothing at all about this "disease of blight." What is blight?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blight

The article reads as if everyone was expected to know. But in fact, no one seems to know. Or talk about it.

It seems pretty clear that Detroit was not reduced to ruins by a plant chlorosis. So what happened? Did the same leaf fungus attack elsewhere, or was this a Detroit-specific disease? Is there a cure -- some kind of pesticide? A gene? Will a new GMO Detroit rise again?

In the medieval world, the Roman Forum became known as the Campo Vaccino -- "cattle field." Perhaps if you'd asked the medieval Romans how the center of the civilized world became a cattle field, they'd have given the same answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum#Medieval

As Jennings Wise (a legitimate historian from the '30s, his Wilson biography is quite good) said: "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."

The Germans were not exactly in a position to promote the Bolshevik cause in 1919 (eg, at the proposed Prinkipo conference). Or in point 6 of the Fourteen Points.

The top thread above is giving the Soviet (and American) party-line interpretation of the American "anti-Bolshevik" intervention in the Russian Civil War. Actually if you read enough primary docs (for instance, the memoir of Graves, who commanded the Siberian force) it quickly becomes clear that the actual goal of the policy was to sandbag the Whites (and, in Siberia, also the Japanese). The American forces involved are all full of bureaucratic duplicity and all swear up, down, left and sideways that they're enemies of godless Bolshevism. And some of them actually are.

"this stuff leads" -- sure. And reading the NYT leads to Castro-worship, "hands up, don't shoot," Haven Monahan, and other fake news of a sinister persuasion. If you let it.

Wise's Wilson book is quite good. It was written in 1937. The only people who care about it today are anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. So what? Who cares? They will all die, and the book will still be there. It's a book.

https://archive.org/details/WoodrowWilsonJenningsCWise

(This is a badly transcribed bootleg.)

My word, no!

When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested in judging sources yourself, by all means stick to the Economist! It's not that bad.

Yes, Schiff's role is relatively minor. But that's also a far cry from "nothing to see here, move along, the October Revolution is purely a product of the legitimate revolutionary aspirations of the Russian workers and peasants."

Unless you're actually concerned with whether the problem is the Jooze, or this one guy Schiff, or whatever, the larger and broader point that the Bolsheviks had strong support from influential East Coast circles is basically correct and extremely relevant. It's easy to use a small factual error to disguise this broader and more interesting truth.

When you're filtering water from a swamp, the fact that the swamp has moose turds in it shouldn't bother you that much. Of course it has moose turds. It's a swamp. That's why you brought your filter. I do wish there was a better source of water, but there really isn't.

The Russian Revolution is a remarkable event in history because almost everyone who has written about it since WWII has followed what's essentially the mainstream American or Soviet lines (which are not at all that different). You simply can't get out of this box without going into the swamp. Harvard University Press is not publishing any Czarist accounts of 1917 by Czarist history professors.

Mr. Zuckerberg was even more optimistic about the possibility of using the same tool to suppress fake news in the US. "China is a beta-test with a billion users," he said.

What's great is that they can use the same exact tool in the US, to weed out "fake news"!

It's like the end of _Animal Farm_. Only more perfect...

I suspect most of the CS researchers in the room were, in a sense, lying. I'm going to guess (a) they could all understand the notation if they tried; (b) they were in fact taught the notation in some undergraduate class, math camp, etc, etc; and (c) what happened is that they intentionally forgot it.

At least, this is the case for me! I think one of the dirty secrets about the CS distaste for many areas of math, including conceptual areas like category theory that are in fact quite closely related to computing and directly applicable there, is that when judged as CS, they don't seem like very good CS.

For example, a programming-language designer who uses symbols that aren't on any keyboard deserves to be laughed out of the room. What are these weird 19th-century squiggles? I see what you're doing, sort of, but why are you doing it?

This is obviously a petty example. But computer scientists, at least ones with a certain kind of systems background, have put a lot of work into designing abstract logical structures for human beings to use. They've learned a lot of rules about how to do this well.

The corpus of pre-CS math that gets applied to CS doesn't seem to care about any of these rules. It takes a lot of work to come up with a CS aesthetic, and when you have one, your brain only has room for "good" systems that play by your rules. If a system doesn't map to your rules, it's almost physically painful to have to contemplate it.

Practicality is not quite the issue. TLA+ seems to be a very useful thing and Lamport has produced a large, large, body of extremely useful work. At the same time, I can't help feeling it would be neat if someone did for TLA+ what Ousterhout did for Paxos.

This is inconsistent with Hausfather's numbers, which you can see at the link above. Net global and US temps are both adjusted lower.

I can't explain the discrepancy. Someone is being clever, that's for sure.

The data quality in natural "experiments" like ice ages are as dubious as the GCMs, in the sense that you're simplifying very complex systems into single numbers. You'd never take this data set seriously next to the data you could get if you could mount a scratch planet and actually control the inputs.

That's a good point. On the other hand, the SST measurements are a lot lower impact (in terms of the number of times they're used in graphs that get into your newspaper) than air temperatures.

Which may be not be logical. But humans aren't logical.

For that matter, increases in air temperature in the 20th century by no means constitute definitive evidence of anthropogenic warming, since the planet has been warming for about four centuries. Finding the anthropogenic "signal" is a matter of number-massaging statistical wizardry, not at all unlike general circulation modeling.

If we had a sample of about 20 independent planets we could experiment on, it'd be no sweat. But science is hard. There's no law of nature that says the definitive experiment actually has to be practical. The definition of science is "we know," not "this is the best we can do."

I don't know how they came up with this sentence. I'm sure it is true in some sense of the word "true." But just look at the data:

https://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments...

Perhaps OP is talking about some older data before the cutoff of this graph.

Edit: the Guardian article posted elsewhere shows the opposite:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

Amusingly, the Guardian illustration is credited to the same person who wrote the article I cite: Zeke Hausfather.

Welcome to the world of climate statistics. When bar charts drive trillions of dollars in public policy, they tend to get pretty wonky, pretty fast...

I think you're missing the point.

The negative adjustments of past temperatures are neither the work of one scientist, nor even one scientific organization. Let's say for simplicity that they're the result of ten entirely separate confirmed hypotheses about systematic errors in old data.

Each of these was produced by an honest researcher who followed the scientific method: formulate a hypothesis, test it, etc. Let's say their technical work is perfect. All the hypotheses are correct.

But all ten researchers, faced with the choice of what hypothesis to formulate and/or investigate, naturally chose high-impact hypotheses -- ones that, if confirmed, adjust past temperatures downward.

We would naturally expect historical errors in temperature measurements to be evenly distributed. Like errors in cheap thermometers. If they are evenly distributed, we would expect there to be ten other such hypotheses, involving upward corrections in past measurements, which were not studied because of their low impact if confirmed.

This hypothesis explains the data that we ourselves see: that past temperatures are continuously being lowered as the data evolves. And it requires no one to be a bad, incompetent, or dishonest researcher.

You don't need dishonest researchers to see this effect. You just need researchers who care, personally and/or professionally, about the impact of their work.

I'm sure Mr. Spock is a professor somewhere. If you talk to real working scientists, you'll find very few Spocks. Also, there are not a lot of Victorian gentleman-scientists; they all need to be funded...

This is actually an excellent illustration of how organizational incentives seep into data.

Imagine you have a historical temperature series record. You have an bureaucratic incentive to find and justify an argument as to why past temperatures should be adjusted downward, making the curve of global warming look steeper. You have no bureaucratic incentive to look for the opposite.

The result is that, overall, modern corrections adjust past temperatures downward -- what we'd expect if these biases exist. But this doesn't mean any specific correction is based on "fabricated" research. It's probably perfectly valid. It's just that downward corrections are more attractive to research, because they produce research that has a social impact that the field finds desirable.

(Edit: here's a picture of the net adjustments: https://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments...)

This is slightly misleading. What we've understood for a century is the thermal forcing due to CO2, which is a logarithmic function of the CO2 concentration (ie, forcing == O(log n) in CO2 concentration).

What we don't understand (unless we decide GCMs are predictive and can be validated) is the impact of a given thermal forcing on planetary temperature. This is the "climate sensitivity." Unfortunately, this is the number we actually care about.

If climate sensitivity is low (negative feedback), Earth is thermally buffered and we have to worry less. If climate sensitivity is high (positive feedback), the opposite.

(Note also that Arrhenius, the discoverer of this effect, and pretty much everyone through the '60s, assumed that global warming was a positive side effect of burning fossil fuel, just from the preindustrial assumption that warm winters and high crop yields are good for humanity.)

That's actually the point. You've defined "being a dick" as "supporting Emmanuel Goldstein, who wants to reverse all the great work the Party has done for the proles."

I understand how you get there, logically. But perhaps Emmanuel Goldstein actually thinks the Party is bad for the proles? Maybe it's not that he hates the Party, because he hates the proles? Maybe you could ask him why he hates the Party, which as we know has done so much for the proles?

But if Emmanuel Goldstein is actually an asshole in the normal sense of the word -- someone who's rude and unpleasant to the actual people around him -- it's hard to argue that there's a difference between these very different concepts.

Pretty much guarantee you Peter Thiel is never, ever rude and unpleasant to the people around him. That's the difference.

Usually when people make this argument they're wrong, but not in this case. I'm disturbed by OP's low-quality trolling.

When you're a dissident or ideological minority in any context, it's absolutely essential at all times to be the kindest, gentlest, sweetest person in the room. That way, when they ban you for "feeling unsafe," it's obvious to everyone what's going on.

Obviously OP wasn't actually a danger to anyone. That's ridiculous. But there isn't any world where you can be a dissident and also be a dick, and get away with it.

Some of the confidence of this article (which one could describe as a remarkably, um, self-confident explanation of basic accounting identities in international trade) seems a little misplaced 20 years later. Especially if you've spent much time in the burned-out areas of America.

As an economic doctrine, running a country as if it were a company (in economic terms) has a name. It's called "mercantilism." Adam Smith coined this term to describe, essentially, normal economic policy before Adam Smith.

You don't need a time machine to investigate the effects of mercantilist economics, since the entire modern Far East is run on basically mercantilist principles. Just visit Harvard, ride the Amtrak to DC (looking out the windows), then fly to Shanghai. Cost, about $2K. This should give you a good gut feeling for whose econ professors are on the money.

On the other hand, Adam Smith sure could turn out a sentence. And so can this guy. Not clear that this is the best way to judge economics professors, however. For a classic text in mercantilist economics, try Friedrich List, _National System of Political Economy_ (1844):

https://books.google.com/books?id=4uuc7tdk0Z8C

Here's a great picture of "families who have understood that the press is a civic calling" (what is this supposed to be, the Venetian Republic?) in action:

When bloomberg was having problems w the times he called Arthur [Sulzberger] and asked for coffee. He made the case that they were treating him like a billionaire dilettante instead of Third term mayor. It changed the coverage moderately but also aired the issues in the newsroom so people were more conscious of it. But Arthur is a pretty big wuss so he's not going to do a lot more than that.

Hillary would have to be the one to call.

He also thinks the brown and women pundits can shame the times and others on social media. So cultivating Joan Walsh, Yglesias, Allen, perry bacon, Greg Sargent, to defend her is helpful. They can be emboldened. Fwiw - I pushed [Philippe Reines] to do this a yr ago.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/31954

TLDR: "Bryan Cantrill is not a racist or a sexist. But he's still an asshole, so can't we purge him anyway?"

"Have you ever kissed a girl?" was a jerk move, there's no doubt. He's apologized for that. On the other hand, Cantrill has not (to my knowledge) posted any long collective denunciations of another human being on the public Internet. Butter, no doubt, wouldn't melt in OP's mouth.

I sometimes wonder if anyone these days has any idea why it isn't illegal (or at least tortious) to be an asshole. If there's someone you know, even someone you work with, who's an asshole, why can't you get them arrested? Or at least sue them? "Your honor, we believe the record will more than amply reflect the reality that defendant is a total dick."

Every time I see the word "diversity" used in this tone, I'm reminded of Vaclav Havel's brilliant essay, The Power of the Powerless:

http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=eseje&val=2_aj_e...

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

This writer translated Havel's essay into modern American. Very few words had to change:

https://paworldandtimes.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/the-office-...

Georgia O'Keefe has already contacted her attorneys...

Here's what our current VP said in 1979, in a secret conversation with a Soviet official:

> Unofficially, [Senator Joseph] Biden and [Senator Richard] Lugar said that, in the end of the day, they were not so much concerned with having a problem of this or that citizen solved as with showing to the American public that they do care for “human rights.” . . . In other words, the collocutors directly admitted that what is happening is a kind of a show, that they absolutely do not care for the fate of most so-called dissidents.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/hidden-history-evil-13281.h...

So a vote for Obama-Biden was a vote for someone who secretly collaborated with the KGB in repressing dissidents. Sounds like cause for firing to me. Granted, the KGB no longer exists. But do the Nazis? The KKK?

The good news: in the future, robots will do all the jobs. We can all fire each other for our historical and political sins, and spend our time worrying about the KGB, the Nazis and the KKK, while our Roombas peel grapes for us.

Irritatingly, a lot of the docs on the Milagro site are stubs. For the user experience I found this most explanatory:

http://docs.milagro.io/en/mfa/getting-started/milagro-mfa-ov...

> That's not how things are done in this country.

Tocqueville, almost 200 years ago, begs to differ:

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.... in America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases; but woe to him if he goes beyond them." [1]

What's changed this year isn't that Americans are being purged for having the wrong political ideas. That's been happening not for 200 years, but well over 300. Roger Williams, anyone? [2]

What's changed this year is that the major candidate of one of the main two parties holds beliefs that would get any normal American purged. Added to this is the velocity of change: 50 years ago, most normal Americans held these same beliefs. (Heck, not 10 years ago, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were swearing up and down that "marriage is between a man and a woman.")

So you're seeing two processes: an increase in the speed at which America's governing class can evolve its beliefs, and a decrease in their ability to drag the rest of America along with them. No surprise that the latter group wants to respond to an existential threat with an existential threat.

[1] http://dailyprincetonian.com/opinion/2001/10/alexis-de-tocqu... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Williams