safgasCVS

'That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth.' - Unfortunately its not quite true!

Fractional reserve banking (FRB) as is taught in most econ textbooks and courses is a myth. There's a very nice paper by the bank of england debunking this (Money creation in the modern economy). The idea behind QE and bailing out the banks was to create lending and liquidity in the market largely via the FRB mechanism however that failed to materialise for reasons the bank of england paper goes into but basically banks don’t lend out their reserves as the theory expects but it’s the process of lending that creates deposits not the other way around. The money given to banks didn't result in increased lending but instead went into financial markets buying up assets. There was some wealth effect going on so people with some assets got richer and then spent more but overall it was a really trickled down effect.

Still cant believe the economics profession managed to convince people it deserves a seat at the table of the hard sciences

I’m coming at awk & sed from the other side having used R daily for a few years.

R is not made for cleaning up weird text files. Yes of course it can be done but that’s like the joke that everything is within walking distance if you have enough time. I recently had to use R to fix a 50gb csv where 10 of the columns were long json strings and needed to turn that into a data frame. That experience alone made me buy a book on awk and sed

I’ve recently discovered the pipe command allowing R to consume the result of a terminal command’s output (link: https://youtu.be/RYhwZW6ofbI). Quite useful for reading in compressed files and it’s made me learn a bit of awk to fix text files on the fly

Oh and there’s also Rio if you want to explore injecting R into your command line workflow.

The problem is fundamentally caused by overconsumption and the solutions that don’t include reducing consumption will absolutely fail. If this were a school shooting you’re suggesting we be the hopes and prayers guy.

And there we have it. Why nothing will change. The idea of using less is so alien to how we have been brought up to always have more and more. Suggesting we don’t throw so much food away, not eat 200lb of meat per year or drive cars that do 60mpg instead of hulking suvs that barely crack 15mpg is seen as communism. That hardwiring is overwhelming hard to change

Consuming less would definitely rescue the planet but everyone not having a 1.5 ton hunk of steel to ferry a 70kg person from robot to robot while throwing away 40% of food produced goes against our hardwiring of having more and more. instead we hold out for some unproven brilliant technical innovation to save us instead of thinking about using resources rationally.

I first saw this little gem in a stats test in my second year at university. I must say it was a lot more fun deriving it without the time pressure

The problem isnt the handful of hypercars but the hundreds of millions of 1.5-2 ton cars being used to ferry a single occupant from stop light to stop light. Its easy to point to these hypercars as being excessive but remember the reason we can drive a car that has the performance of a mid-80s sportscar that does 50mpg for not much money comes directly from tech trickling down from these machines.

DAMMIT THIS WAS GOING TO BE MY COMMENT :D

No one decides to marry their spouse based on how punctual they are. Cars like these (and just sports cars in general) are things you buy with your heart

Incredible! A celebration of silliness in all its absurd glory. I was not expecting Bugatti would do a top speed run at least for a few more years for the tyres to become available so I think we all expected Koenigsegg to be the first to 300mph. Massive achievement for Michelin as much as VW.

I should be clear by carbon capture I dont mean planting trees (which is clearly an excellent idea) but the commercial co2 -> liquid/solid process.

Firstly it can only be applied to large stationary emitters of co2 so stuff like refineries and gas/coal power stations but that makes up if i remember only 25% of our total emissions so the bigger stuff like transport and agriculture is missed.

Secondly its quite challenging to implement. think about how few plants can be retrofitted with the process, and even so you need a bunch more energy to convert it to a liquid form for long term storage so you need excess power generation in the first place (even more if you want to convert into a sort of brick). Even once its in liquid form thats an enormous volume of liquid we need to store somewhere and just think how much people hate living next to powerstations right now - so people are going to be okay living under like a billion cubic meters of Co2 gas that can start seeping into air in a few years time. So ok we have to start piping this gas far away into giant underground storage containers but even so thats a lot of infrastructure and there arent many places that have these big caverns we can pipe it into. And the volumes must be immense. Like absolutely immense if we want to do it on a large scale. And right now oil is worth like 30-40 USD per barrel? Pumping that Co2 back into the ground who wants to pay for that? It seems crazy to me. Planting trees and stopping the amazon from burning seems like a much more sensible investment

Carbon capture is a completely absurd idea, but agreed on the nuclear.

Man you gonna be so upset when someone tells you how insurance works

Doesn’t sound you’re poor at all

I cant comment on general software engineering but in the data science domain coming to Python from SAS / SPSS feels like being given free superpowers

This comment takes the cake for me

I had the exact same thought. Making credit easier to obtain is taken as 'good' but I only see that as beneficial for something major like a house or car but the idea of going into debt for disposable items seems really weird

Same here! I tried really really hard to make org mode work for me but never managed to get it to stick. I now use workflowy and I am not missing the extra features

And the USA already wastes 40% of the food it produces [ref: http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/14.FOODWASTE.pdf]. Even ignoring the systemic risks monocropping of GMOs already pose the sheer amount of waste shows theres already more than enough to go around

same here. like coming home but someone has moved things around in a way thats subtle enough its not obvious but enough to make it feel unfamiliar

"just like riding a bike" - best summary of Excel I've read!

Wow that’s London-expensive parking.

So the normal congestion charge is around £11 per day but because I’m a resident and live in a congestion zone it’s £1 pound. However the CC only applies to the most central parts of London so many people don’t have to pay it. Daily fuel works out to £4.5 and my office has free parking. My Annual insurance for a newish Mazda 3 is £500 and while I bought my car outright i think a lease on a similar car would be around £220pm. B

I would love to see London do this - I tried biking in London but it’s too scary for me right now

For me to take the train to work every day from London to Sunbury it works out to just over twenty pounds per day. For what I pay in commute fares is less then leasing and insuring a new car (which also won’t decide 5 minutes beforehand that it won’t be stopping at your station because it needs to make up time). I’m very pro getting people to give up their cars but I don’t see it happening In the U.K. until affordable alternatives exist

Hold up. Are we saying the average kid is watching over an hour of commercials per day. If that stat is true (which would be around 4 hours of tv per day give or take) the solution is not Netflix but pumping the brakes on tv. That’s an insane amount of tv

A few points:

- The basis of a p-value is very much aligned with the scientific process in that you arent trying to prove something 'is true' rather you're trying to prove something false. Rejection of p-values / hypothesis testing is a bit like rejecting the scientific method. I am lucky enough to be friends with one of the physicists that worked on finding the Higgs Boson and he hammered it into my head that their work was to go out of their way to prove the Higgs Boson was a fluke - a statistical anomaly - sheer randomness. This is a very different mentality to trying to prove your new wunder-drug is effective - especially when those pesky confidence intervals get in your way of a promotion or a new grant. Its much easier to say p-values are at fault.

- Underpinning p-values are the underlying distributional assumption that makes up your p-value needs to match that of whatever process you're trying to test else the p-values become less meaningful.

- The 5% threshold is far too low. This means at least 5% of published papers are reporting nonsense and nothing but dumb luck (even if they got lucky with the distribution). If the distributional assumptions arent met then its even higher. Why are we choosing 5% threshold for a process/drug that can have serious side-effects?

- p-value hacking. So many sneaky ways to find significance here. Taleb goes into some detail into the problem of p-values here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qrfSh07rT0 and in a similar vein here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6CxfBMUf1o.

Doing stats well is hard and open to wilful and naive abuse. The solution is not to misuse or throw away these tools but to understand them properly. If you're in research you should think of stats as being part of your education not just a tickbox that is used validate whatever experiment you're doing

I can see how it comes across like that but that wasn’t my reading. It seemed matter-of-factly. I think I would much prefer dealing with someone who’s openly arrogant versus someone virtue signaling their false modesty

Not saying I’d like to have him around for dinner though

So the majority of the examples proving the claim rely on fiction books and Netflix shows. Well I'm convinced now for sure