mjohn

The author is Max Roser, the economist behind the Our World in Data website (https://ourworldindata.org/). The data is all sourced from that site and seems to be well researched when I have casually browsed the datasets.

I have a lot of respect for his work, but I can't really judge it's accuracy without diving more into the data.

> What does happen is that the profits of such movement are globalized, so even though at world-level its more efficient, there could be locals that dont profit from it.

It's not just globally more efficient, usually each country benefits (although I wouldn't want to over commit by saying each country always benefits). But the gains from trade are often not distributed evenly within a country, for example manufacturing employees might lose their jobs while the owners have higher profit margins and/or consumers benefit from lower prices. Furthermore, diffuse gains such as lower prices are felt less than acute costs like losing a job.

Time and transition costs are also very important. In some cases transition costs may be very high, e.g. a whole generation of miners might not be able to transition to other types of work such as software development. In the long run the economy as a whole should benefit, but those miners are unlikely to be convinced.

There are several reasons why inflation might be lower than the rate of depreciation. For example not everything is imported, not all cost increases will be passed onto consumers and some retailers will try to recoup costs by having less sales and offers.

The CPI is also unlikely to be able to capture hidden inflation, such as using cheaper ingredients in food to offset currency depreciation.

These are just off the top of my head. Calculating inflation is complicated.

Yes, in the UK high school starts in year 7 (age 11-12)

Python 3 has async coroutines built-in, and there are a number of libraries for Python 2 (e.g. twisted, tornado). Python 2 & 3 also have threading and multiprocessing for concurrency.

Java, Rust & Ruby have built-in support for concurrency, but I haven't used those languages that much.

Why? If corporations are taxed to the point where there are negligible profits they will cease to do business in Britain. As corporations leave for other markets (or simply go out of business) so will the jobs.

That's not to say corporations should not be taxed (although a coherent argument could be made for zero corporation tax), but certainly taxing corporations out of existence is a bad idea.

That is a big if. Nobody has data for all transactions occurring in real time and nobody knows all the socioeconomic factors for all the actors.

Even if you did have all of that data, you would still be missing a lot of data. For example, an important factor in economics is asymmetric information. An actor's decision may be optimal given the information available to them at the time even if the decision is suboptimal given perfect information. So for an even more accurate model, you would also need to have data on what each actor knows at any given point in time.

Furthermore, an actor probably does not have the ability to calculate the optimal outcome given the information available and there are innumerable subjective factors in economic decision making.

Big data will help you find some kind estimate, but it will not suddenly make economic modelling simple.

Economic models that don't claim to predict real world behaviour are like thought experiments (with more maths). Their purpose is to help people understand that small isolated part of the whole, because a model that includes all the complexities of the real world would be incomprehensible.

Nonetheless, many of these models are still falsifiable. For example, the textbook model of the benefits of trade due to comparative advantage only contains two countries and two goods. Although extremely simplistic, the theory does have falsifiable predictions and there is good empirical evidence supporting the broad theory. But this simple model will not be able to accurately predict how much a particular country will benefit from free trade.

Where do these rights come from?

Another possibility is that they already have one of the better jobs, and most jobs do not offer a competitive salary.

There are plenty of professionals who would be able to contribute, but are not academics affiliated with a university.

It's not that economists ignore human psychology / behaviour, rather economists are interested in finding simplified models that provide some kind of generalizable insight. The models will include varying levels of complexity depending on what question the economist is trying to answer and what data the economist could reasonably access.

In many cases what motivates a particular individual provides little insight into what happens in the economy as a whole. For example, a model of start-up success that included founder education level and sci-fi movies watched by founders would provide little, if any, greater insight than a model the model that looked at just education level. It's similar to over-fitting in machine learning – the extra parameter is probably harming the usefulness of the model by making it less general.

On the other hand, CEO cocaine addiction might be a very good predictor of company profits, but you would have a hard time getting accurate data for that regardless of how good your AI is. Furthermore, I could reasonably hypothesize that some CEO's would respond to cocaine by out-performing non-cocaine users while some would under-perform depending on physiological factors. Again, without massive invasions of privacy, economists will not be able to factor this into their models.

I've recently been thinking of using some kind of reading comprehension test during interviews. Other than poor craftsmanship, the biggest disappointments among developers I have hired are the ones who seem to struggle to quickly read and absorb information. I think having good reading comprehension skills is essential for code as well.

Also if the company ends up being a bad fit, then it looks less bad on the person's CV than if they join as a perm and then leave after a few months.

Fantastic! Do you have any tips for getting children into programming? Or did he pick it up by himself?

Plentific | London, UK | Backend & DevOps

We are a small startup, based near Old Street in London, aiming to bring innovation to the home buying process. Beyond property listings we offer tools for financial decision-making and listings for professionals that home buyers might need, such as surveyors, mortgage brokers and architects.

We are growing and have some exciting projects coming up. We are about to launch a partnership with Zoopla and we are also working on a project with LendInvest, the world's largest peer-to-peer platform for real estate mortages.

We are looking for backend & devops developers who are comfortable with:

    - Python (we are using Django)

    - Postgres, ideally with some exposure to Postgis

    - Elasticsearch

    - AWS

    - Bonus points for experience with Python data libraries such as NumPy, Pandas & scikit-learn.

For devops, we have experimented with Ansible & Docker, but haven't settled on anything yet.

Get in touch even if you don't have experience in everything listed above, ultimately we are looking for good developers who are interested in learning and having a big impact in a small team.

If you are interested, please email jobs@plentific.com with your CV or have a look around https://plentific.com/jobs.

Awesome thanks! Look forward to seeing your project when it's online.

Is there a link to your project? I've recently been thinking of trying something similar for UK law.

There is nothing stopping you using a flux-like architecture with RxJS or BaconJS. For example, instead of action creators you can push to a Bacon.Bus that is listened to by your store, which can be a Bacon.Property.

I found using BaconJS much nicer if I needed to transform data from asynchronous requests because you end up with a much more functional approach.

Sounds interesting, look forward to seeing it.

I recently used React + Bacon + Immutable in a small project and I haven't come across any issues yet. I haven't seen any larger-scale examples yet, but this blog post[0] was interesting and has links at the bottom to implementations of todomvc and the flux-chat example.

[0] http://blog.hertzen.com/post/102991359167/flux-inspired-reac...

I really like Reflux as well. In a recent project I used Bacon.js[1] to create my own implementation that ended up looking similar to Reflux.

The project involved asynchronous requests triggered by the actions, and transforming & aggregating the returned data. Compared to Reflux, Bacon made it very easy to do this by composing small functions that are applied sequentially to a stream of actions.

[1] https://baconjs.github.io/

Interesting, I've been playing with React/Flux a bit lately. I enjoy them more than other JS frameworks, but agree it doesn't feel like it's quite right yet.

This blog post from the same author gives a bit more detail than the presentation slides: http://futurice.com/blog/reactive-mvc-and-the-virtual-dom

Looking forward to seeing the presentation video

This came up recently on a Python project at work. I think the approach in the article is nice but most Python libraries seem to make use of exceptions for these kinds of scenarios. Working against that trend in Python doesn't seem worth it.

In other languages I would probably prefer to follow the approach in the article.

Doesn't work. "This app is in development mode and can't accept more users. Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to apply for production status."

It's used in the favicon and on the home link, so I suppose it's the distributions logo.

To me it looks like a Debian swirl transformed to look like a brain.

Very nice, well done! Giving it a go today.

Love the use of Counter & requests, but you get 76 li elements with your regex - one of which contains another occurance.

The same reason that pie charts are not very effective - it's relatively hard to make comparisons between angles instead of lengths like in a bar chart. It's probably even harder with a doughnut.

Here is a PDF article by Stephen Few about pie charts: http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf

I have never commented before, but I had to reply to this. I assume you are being serious, but hope you just have a twisted sense of humor, or perhaps you have just read too much Schopenhauer recently.

I believe that just because someone is born with a disadvantage or have health issues does not mean they are defective. Everyone has as much a right to life as anyone else.

In support of your beliefs, I would be interested to know your responses to the following questions:

At what point does a person's suffering cause a sufficient decline in the global "average level of suffering" to imply they should not be allowed to reproduce or continue living? Should all sick people be left to die?

Should we serve the depressed arsenic instead of offering counselling and medication?

Should we just execute people of higher than average IQ, since ignorance is bliss?

We all have defects, should we all die to spare the planet?

How do you calculate average suffering? What is the unit of measure?

Does the momentary joy of seeing the birth of a child outweigh years of chronic pain?