neffy

Or employ an excel spreadsheet wielding administrator whose only job is to count the number of publications internally for the entire university and circulate back to the department heads and marketing folks.

And see how much they care about which journal papers are published in.

I think you will find the numbers come from 1491 by Charles C. Mann, which is one of the books that kicked off a reexamination of the entire settlement by Europeans of North And South America, and which also goes into the reasons why the native population had little resistance to the European diseases. The climate change theories compete with Volcanic explanations, but there was certainly an impact, the great swarms of the now extinct passenger pigeon for example are believed to be due to the die off.

It wasn´t in some sense on purpose, smallpox blankets aside, the first contacts from Europe spread disease everywhere they went, mortality rates have been estimated at 90% or more. No coherent society survives that kind of event. Francisco de Orellana or somebody on his expedition probably carried the diseases that depopulated the Amazon, and led to it being empty when it was revisited..

And had that not happened. If the native population had been resistant to the new diseases, then the Europeans would have been thrown back, as the first US colonies seem to have been. The technological advantage was certainly there, but would have been impossible to sustain on a sea based invasion across an entire ocean at that time.

Let me suggest that the reason you label the church as the body responsible for the deep sense of purpose, is that the Church in all societies used to be, and in some cases still is, the Government. Europe's cathedrals were the middle-ages equivalent of work programs. (All those church tithes had to be spent on something.)

It has also done that job spectacularly badly at times.

Veður Stofan, Iceland´s Metrology and Volcano Office is advertising for a PostDoc for the numerical analysis weather group, with a strong background in physical modelling such as NWP (preferably atmospheric dynamics, physical processes, or data assimilation). Experience in high performance computing is advantageous.

Details here:

https://www.vedur.is/um-vi/laus-storf/scientist-in-our-numer...

It's correlated, but the causality may be reversed. That is to say, sleep apnea probably causes and certainly doesn't help, obesity. There is a strong relationship between not getting enough sleep, and appetite control.

There are also a lot of other causes of sleep apnea, physiology being a big one, also obstructions in the nasal canal.

Or perhaps without patents there wouldn't be false monopolisation preventing better standards being contributed by people who can't afford expensive lawyers.

Or a pension.

Honestly, "Windows-isms" especially in the area bitcoin is developed in reeks far more of industry than it does of academia.

The other oddity in the code is that there is a mixture of US/UK spellings being used, which also suggests more than one person.

Oh, and the pizza thing is another myth, the real monetization was the liberty exchange setting up as market for $/bitcoin exchanges.

Both FDR and Churchill are on record as saying variants of "it is permissible to walk with the devil if it gets you to the other side of the bridge" about the alliance with Stalin.

fwiw... there were posts floating around at the beginning of 2020 claiming that the epidemic was well established in Wuhan by December, and that cases were seen back to September, October.

It's unfortunate in so many way - admit a mistake was made, acknowledge the problem, and clean it up is so much more respectful of everybody's time and resources. Between Asian traditions of saving face, and US traditions of lawyers suing anything that moves, that approach never stood a chance of course.

Perhaps the wisdom of advising that is not a good idea. And also that young whippersnappers who think that that is what the majority of old people spend their time doing may not be paying much attention to the world.

Reaching old age is still an achievement, especially for young male motorcycle riders, and experience of society and its history always comes for free. The "locking away" stage is something old people generally try to actively avoid, and mostly generally for those with actual dementia in any case.

Another issue is that it tends to be very bursty. They will often get a big payout, but then nothing for several years. There aren't that many writers who get a reliable pay check, so it is more (in common with acting) a lot of people getting occasional big payouts and then drifting off to be replaced by the next batch of hopefuls.

I doubt average amounts are in any way meaningful in this context.

Pot - Kettle on that.

For a non-scientific case study of 2 - I know one obese person who has had gastric surgery, and complication from it - it hasn't helped them, and one formally obese person who successfully lost 20kg and has kept it off. Consider perhaps that trial participants may in some sense be self-selected from the sector of the population for whom normal diets don't work.

fwiw... the latter person strongly recommended deleting all sugar from the diet.

How I learnt to stop worrying and love global warming.

until the Ice Ages turn up and steal it.

You're actually quite right - fundamentally they were fractional reserve lending institutions. The main difference with banks was somewhat selective membership, and restrictions to loans to their membership to buy property.

What actually killed them was Volker raising interest rates to 18% in a misguided attempt to cause the inflation triggered by the break up of the Bretton Woods accords and the accompanying oil crisis. (That can also be read the other way round as it happens - one of the several things that stressed the fixed rate currency exchange agreement out of existence was the oil trade imbalance and the accompanying flows of dollars. Volker raised interest rates following economic textbook theory to suppress inflation, and it backfired rather spectacularly.

Unlike today - this wasn't strictly a quantitative money inflation (i.e. nobody had just increased the US money supply by 25%), and this is very clear in the M2/M3 figures of that time.

At any rate. Key thing, then and now - the US residential mortgage market is dominated by long term, fixed rate loans. When interest rates rise very quickly, this creates huge issues for the lenders. The S&L's got caught with a lot of low interest rate, fixed rate loans, and couldn't consequently pay their savers enough to keep their deposits. As savers moved deposits into higher rate institutions it pushed the entire S&L (and many banks as well) into difficulty, some compensated for this by making riskier (higher rate) loans, and the whole sector crashed.

One of the unfortunate side effects of this was that it led to Salmon Brothers developing a massive loan securitisation program (to buy the loans from the S&L as a way out, kind of), and that led directly to the Mortgage Backed Security crises of 2000 and 2006. It also somewhat resulted in the South American crisis in the 1980´s since that was another place the US banks went looking for high interest rate loans.

For the unsuspecting computer nerd, a search for latex back at the dawn of search technology was briefly something that could truly open the unprepared mind to unsuspected vistas.

Boy did that one get fixed fast.

But let us spare a moment of thought for the subsequent searchers for interesting items of latex clothing, and how they felt about being exposed to interminable details about an obscure word processing system.

Not really. We also have to put this in the context of US life expectancy being significantly lower than comparable European countries. Britain for example has also had a very high immigration rate for a couple of centuries now, but no comparable difference is seen there.

In the US money (and as proxy college education) is a gateway to a lot of things that influence health outcome, notably access to health treatment. So Occam's razor would suggest that is the simplest explanation - Europe has national health programs that provide access to good quality medical treatment for all levels of society. The US simply doesn't. See the infant mortality statistics.

You might want to think that, but unfortunately foreign born Americans (immigrants) actually have significantly longer life expectancies than American born do.

Part of the reason for that is the much higher death rate in infants in the US, but it is still a very hard thing to explain away. I will also say as somebody who has lived in the US, US food is high calorie, but it is not better on any dimension, than what I can buy in any European street market. Possibly foreign born Americans stick with their original diets more.. who knows. But ops point about trading quality of life for meaningless economic statistics is spot on.

Interest rates are a second order impact on the money supply, high enough interest rates may stop monetary expansion - if they reign in lending. This works fairly well in the states where the fixed rate long term loans provide a huge disincentive to new lending (say moving to a bigger house), but not so much elsewhere (it is actually possible to have both high inflation/monetary expansion, and high interest rates - it depends a lot on details of the local financial system and its regulation.)

So its probably correct to say that the monetary contraction the US is currently experiencing is due to high interest rates, but that doesn't stop the inflation that has already been caused by initial money printing.

The inflation burst was driven by money printing by the Federal Reserve/Government repeated by other governments world wide during the Covid pandemic, in order to prevent the financial system imploding as everybody defaulted on their debt. Attributing it to a "savings glut" - which I know is the mainstream interpretation is darkly hilarious.

Once that has happened, the hard part is predicting how long it will take the impact to bleed out of the system - i.e. the lags - and knowing that inflation is measured over a year, the answer is at least a year after the money supply stabilises.

Said money supply:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

btw. the way its currently contracting... that's bad. Really, really bad. They need to stop that quickly, before it does any more damage.

Failure is far more informative than success. Especially the failures that nobody returns from...

It's shocking to me how many people are treating Google Search as a reliable source given how much we know it silos people into extremist sites, and has been extensively gamed by SEO professionals.

Hopefully they are not quite that stupid. Inflation is a lagging indicator, so expect it to start dropping fairly quickly as the -12 months price delta normalises, against the M2 injection 2 years ago.

M2 continues to drop (this is a bad thing for stability, but will feed into prices dropping over time):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

Correct - once the world saw the Fed dumping $1 trillion into the money supply to prevent a collapse due to Covid in 2020, everybody else did as well. It takes time for that to make its way through the pricing system (bearing in mind inflation is measured over the last 12 months, its a lagging indicator).

There are also demand factors as well, but most of what we are seeing is monetary in origin, raising interest rate is also somewhat "demand" driven, in that the big trigger there was the market for buying MBS (packages of loans mostly made by banks and S&L) market froze and then spiked up significantly.

I disagree, there is building everywhere you look on the main train lines into London. But the population needs to stabilise, and even then it would still take a while to catch up.

British population is up by just under 10 million this century, that's a lot of new houses, and population density in houses is falling - its a far cry from the working class slum conditions of the 19th century, even in London these days.

It's statistical multiplexing essentially. To create a loan a bank performs the double entry book keeping operation:

[debit loan, credit deposit]

Which creates a loan instrument on the asset side, and creates a matching deposit in the borrower's account. When the borrower repays capital on the loan, the operation is reversed.

Old time banks would have a roughly 1:1 ratio of loans to deposits, these days because banks are also borrowing from other entities, that can ratio can get a bit squirrel.

Which is where the capital that is required to create the bank comes in, since that provides the initial (cash) liquidity.

This is the classic description found in the economic textbooks. Unfortunately it is incorrect, the system doesn't work that way. (See comments above).

apropos btw. I've never actually seen a banking system that has a 10% ratio, I think that was Keynes chosing easy numbers. The reserve ratio back in his day was more like 20-25%, these days it is down to about 1-2% in most countries, and being replaced with terms like "required liquidity ratios".

That's another misconception propagate in the textbooks - and you can blame Keynes for this, it was in the Macmillan report that originated the false description. Banks do watch that issue aka "liquidity" very carefully. Part of it is that they work to keep transfers on their books as much as possible, but also borrow and lend to other banks (interbank lending market) to cover short term imbalances.

In the long term... any bank that is careful not to have too many insolvent loans is guaranteed an inflow of money from the capital and interest repayments - some of which will be on their books, and some will be coming from money deposited at other banks, effectively transferring the asset cash back.

It's actually quite an elegant system at this level. Horribly fragile with respect to losses on loans though.