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lusmd

39 karma · joined February 8, 2019

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lusmd··on Decreasing human body temperature in the U.S. since the industrial revolution
They do a few checks for this in the article. For example, one of their subsamples is Union Army veterans, and they detect the same trend within those cohorts (0.03 C lower per decade), which used the same instrumentation, as when comparing across the subsamples (e.g., Union Army vs today).
lusmd··on Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
Paper is not really environmentally unfriendly. Those are farmed trees. No one is turning virgin rainforest into paper. The shipping is far and away the worst part of that.

On the other hand, ereaders use electricity. Tablets use more. So not much of an environmental angle here.

lusmd··on Publishers Determined to Kill E-Books
Streaming revenue is about the same as box office revenue, so the disparity isn't as big. But still, that's a lot of gaming revenue.
lusmd··on Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?
He was added as a foreword author after the main author had already died, just FYI.
lusmd··on Lectures in Quantitative Economics with Python [pdf]
A lot of people I know at various departments are switching their undergrad stats/econometrics classes from Stata to R. That's the beginning of the end of Stata.
lusmd··on In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything
Some people attach more emotional value to items like that. Some don't. I did for a long time. After a lot of big changes I kind of stopped hording things as much and it was very freeing.
lusmd··on Clair Patterson's Battle Against Lead Pollution (2006) [pdf]
Not an article, but the Seth McFarlane Cosmos has an episode that's largely about Clair Patterson.
lusmd··on She was the “queen of the mommy bloggers”
A coder broke into a new genre of website and very successfully monetized it. Yes, why indeed would HN be interested in this /female/ part of Internet culture and commerce?
lusmd··on Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)
> This dearth of reaction to such a critical work...

It's a five year old book, of course no one is talking about it specifically anymore. (And when it came out, everyone was talking about it.)

And "nobody is talking about inequality" is ridiculous. I've been to three major conferences in the last six months and there were multiple whole sessions on inequality. And not just income inequality. Educational, environmental even. It's not the only thing economists talk about, but far from "no one" is looking at it.

lusmd··on Why Are Economists Giving Piketty the Cold Shoulder? (2017)
Yes, that paragraph is very, very bad, because it's not people of equal education that would have equal wages, but equal productivity---which will vary depending on what firm you're at! Not just because of sorting and poaching of talent, but some firms' production and capital structure will be such that the marginal worker will be more productive.
lusmd··on Tips and tricks to write LaTeX papers in with figures generated in Python
\usepackage{mathpazo}

Or

\usepackage[utopia]{mathdesign}

Some people like garamond (also a mathdesign font).

lusmd··on Tufts expelled a student for grade hacking. She claims innocence
Student loans are not dischargeable under U.S. bankruptcy law, but this girl is Canadian. Apart from any lawsuit she may be able to file against Tufts, she may have an out there.
lusmd··on On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”
It is indeed a common literary device in 19th century Russian lit. Usually with proper names to make them more "anonymous" but contemporary readers would know exactly what was being referenced.

For example, most of the place names in Crime and Punishment are redacted, but it's so clear where everything happens there are walking tours in St Petersburg.

lusmd··on Incentives to Attract Firms Induce Bad Selection [pdf]
This looks like very, very early work.
lusmd··on Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said
> most likely taxed away

Yes, most UBI proposals (as designed by economists) tax earnings with little to know exemption. That is, we give you $15k per year, but start taxing you the very first dollar you earn rather than only taxing income about , say, $20k.

lusmd··on Basic income in Finland did not lead to finding work, researchers said
But labor force participation rates are still very, very low. If you'd like a job but don't have one, you don't get counted in any unemployment stats except the aggregate labor force participation.