voluntaryXchange

Still Here

Well … didn’t the last 15 months suck?

I say 15 months, since 15 months ago today … the first Sunday of February, 2020, was the last really free and good time we had. Birthday dinner at a steakhouse for the VXyoungman (wish the vXteenager had been in attendance, but she had to work, and she’s not a steak person anyway).

I was already worried about COVID-19 at that point; weeks before most people. I had already started covering it in my advanced macro class with this here post, and I had 6 posts up there by February 2nd. I was primed, since we’d covered SARS-COV-1 in that class 18 years ago.

A week later, with the vXyoungman away at school, living too far from campus to rely on public transportation, we advised him to maybe by some extra staples on each trip to the grocery. Four weeks after that I was picking him up to come home on less than 24 hours notice. He’s moving back this month.

Anyway, I have continued posting a lot at SUU MacroBlog, and on Quora over the last 15 months.

Libertarian PBS Video

Loved this:

Did Not See This On National News

This happened for real on Monday:

Yep. That’s a pickup truck hanging off a bridge over a (seemingly) bottomless pit.

Living out west, you imagine this sort of thing every time you drive over a canyon.

Cuomo

The New York Post notes that:

• Cuomo had a policy that led to hundreds of excess deaths, and
• Cuomo is accused of sexually harassing female underlings,

But only one of those led to sustained calls for his impeachment within the body that can take that forward.

WTF?

Hey New Yorkers: consider voting people out of office for moral incompetence.

Via Cold Spring Shops.

Marking Time

It was a year ago, just about right now, that my son and I threw all his perishables into a box, grabbed a few things, and abandoned his college apartment.†

He doesn’t have a car, so he needed a ride. I-15 was congested going north: lots of Alberta plates, cutting their snowbird season short. Coming south, the road was deserted.

Less than 10 weeks before that, I’d first heard of the unusual cases of pneumonia in China.

Less than 8 weeks before that, I’d first told my upper level macroeconomics course that they needed to start paying attention to what was going on in China. Putting together that first Monday lecture took non-stop work from the time class had ended on Friday. I started it by noting the pandemic “might be economic if it gets bad enough”.

Less than 6 weeks before that, we’d flown him down here for a fancy birthday dinner.

Less than 4 weeks before, we’d told him to start buying extra pantry stuff on each trip to the grocery.

Less than 2 weeks before, the University of Washington was the first one to close down for the remainder of the Spring semester.

The week before I picked him up had been spring break at his school. He’d stayed (like he usually does). As his break progressed, he shifted from I’m not coming back, to maybe next week, till after this thing I have to do early next week. By Thursday he was saying Sunday might work. Early Friday afternoon, he said come within 24 hours. He’d been in his favorite professor’s office when the calls started, one-by-one cancelling his travelling engagements for the next several months.

It was our last week before spring break. I literally told that advanced class on Monday that it would take a “basketball player or a game show host” getting sick to convince people this was real. On Wednesday night, the former happened. Best and worst prediction I’ve ever made.

I knew the death rates. I ran the math. At that time, the odds were better than 50/50 that someone in my immediate family would die.

It’s a year later. That college student is still living with us. For him, remote learning is actually an improvement. Not one of us has gotten COVID-19. Another kid moved out, but she stays healthy and safe. Two of us have been vaccinated.

† I’m going by the 365 day calendar. It was a Saturday that I’d made that trip. He paid rent on that empty place. Two months later, we drove up there together and put all his stuff in a storage unit.

Jalen Hurts Makes the Most of It

Given his first big chance in the pros, Hurts led the 3-8-1 Eagles over the 10-2 Saints.

And umm … the Saints have the best defense in the league.

And Hurts had almost 300 total yards. Over 100 yards of that was on the ground: the first time the Saints have let any rusher get that much since early in 2017.

I have tried to support Hurts before. He’s an amazing story: the first quarterback to ever take 2 college football teams within sniffing distance of the national championship.

When Container Shipping Goes Bad

Zero Hedge is following the story (here and here) that a ship may have had the biggest “gone overboard” loss of containers ever this past weekend. Mostly posting to show this photo:

The loss from the one ship appears to be larger than the average annual loss from all ships over the last few decades.

Whoops.

Tom Toles Has Retired

Most people know Toles as a long time political cartoonist for The Washington Post. But before that he worked for the Buffalo News (which I read daily up through 1989), and before that for the Buffalo Courier-Express (which I only read on Sunday, when my parents got it back before I was buying my own). Here’s his last cartoon, forwarded by a friend:

In my view, Reagan was his muse, and Toles peaked when he left office.

Whenever Russian students saw this one they’d burst out laughing at the stylized birthmark.

Black Swans, the 2020 Election, Biden’s Win, and the Importance of the Wisconsin Recount to Democrats, and Yet Another Dog That Isn’t Barking

The evidence being touted in the media and the legal system that Biden won the election is … mostly nonsense.

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Digression

It’s going to be hard for me to say anything that could be interpreted as being in Trump’s favor without getting jumped.

Let me be perfectly clear. I didn’t vote for Trump. I also couldn’t bring myself to vote for Biden (I happen to think the evidence that he’s a crooked stooge is pretty strong).

I also recognize that both parties engage in a lot of low level cheating in elections. I think it’s fair to assume that Republicans took their shots, and came up short.

So I’m happy with the result. But this also means Democrats should be worried if people like me are suspicious.

I also think Trump has zero chance of overturning the election, so Democrats could and should be a lot less defensive about this. You won; get over it.

Anyway, here goes.

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Statistics is hard.

And the nature of hard topics is that people invent explanations that seem believable … and then shut themselves down to other evidence.

Here’s the thought experiment. If it helps, find a friend. You’re going to need a container and items you can draw in three colors. The textbook metaphor is usually marbles in a sack, but who the heck has marbles or sacks these days?

Have your friend hide these actions:

• Put zero or more red marbles in the sack,
• Put zero or more blue marbles in the sack, and
• Put a large quantity of white marbles in the sack.

Now select a marble from the sack. It will probably be … white. Choose another. It will probably be white as well. Keep choosing.

And, as far as I’m concerned, you should probably put some marbles back in the sack, and leave others out.

Here’s two questions: are there any blue marbles in the sack, and are there more blue than red marbles in the sack?

In statistics, we call this a black swan. The observation there is that no amount of observations of white swans can ever prove black swans don’t exist. But seeing one black swan does prove they exist.

Now back to the marbles in the sack. This mimics media coverage of the election results: white marbles are bits of information that tell us nothing about cheating in the election, red marbles are bits of information that suggest more votes should go towards Trump, and blue marbles are for stuff that goes towards Biden.

What the media keeps repeating over and over are claims that some aspect of the election was fair, and because there’s a lot of them, the whole election must be fair. That’s a non sequitur. It is the equivalent of drawing white marbles and asserting that they tell you something about blue marbles. They don’t.

Statistics is hard. And for want of a better word, let’s call the typical persons level of understanding statistically-retarded. Frankly, most of what we are seeing is the statistically-retarded people in the media preaching to the statistically-retarded public. And it works.

Instead, what we should be looking at is the number of draws of blue marbles versus the number of draws of red marbles.

Now, back to the real world. The Trump people have been able to produce some honest-to-god red marbles. They’ve also produced a lot of questionable marbles, that the authorities eventually determine are white.

Note that once again the Democrats are making the statistically-retarded argument: no amount of judging questionable marbles as white changes that there are some unquestionable ones that are red.

And frankly, in Georgia, the Republicans came up with 3 incontrovertibly red marbles very quickly, and very easily. These were not enough to change the election result. Fair enough.

Even so, the word for this is … dismaying.

The reason is that someone … anyone … has got to find a blue marble (a mistake or cheat that moves the dial towards Biden).

This makes the limited recount in Wisconsin a huge win for Democrats when taken in historical perspective: it shows that election issues can cut both ways. Smart Democrats should be thrilled with this.

Here’s the problem: America’s presidential elections amount to the combination of 51 separate winner-take-all elections. And only 7 of them were close, and Biden appears to have won six of those. Except that the Democrats are defending those with weak evidence, and a reliance on the statistical-retardation of most people:

• In each of those states the Democrats are pointing to the preponderance of white marbles.
• In each of those states the Republicans are trying to ferret out some red marbles, and have actually produced them in Georgia.

Democrats get the idea that they need to rein in the search for red marbles.

But what Democrats seem clueless about is that they just look like cynical cheaters if they don’t start producing some blue marbles of their own.

People are OK with there being some issues and mistakes in an election. What they aren’t OK with is all the issues and mistakes breaking towards the Democrats.

The Republican dog is definitely barking, whether or not they are antagonizing it. The Democratic dog wasn’t barking at all, until late last week when it let out a single woof.

The Democrats need a lot more of those, and they don’t seem to know it. Or they do know it, and they don’t care, which is worse.

The Big City Red Herring Is the Dog That Didn’t Bark

Do not fall for the red herring that big cities are inherently slower at counting electoral ballots.

Oh … and excuse me for mixing metaphors, but I think there’s two things going on here: one metaphor for each.

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Digression

It’s going to be hard for me to say anything that could be interpreted as being in Trump’s favor without getting jumped.

Let me be perfectly clear. I didn’t vote for Trump. I also couldn’t bring myself to vote for Biden (I happen to think the evidence that he’s a crooked stooge is pretty strong).

So I’m happy with the result. But this also means Democrats should be worried if people like me are suspicious.

Anyway, here goes.

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America is divided into voting precincts. These precincts are all of roughly the same population. They can be of different physical sizes.

All of this points to the conclusion that there is zero reason for vote counting to be slower in cities. If anything it should faster, since precincts tend to be denser. If anything, it should be faster because cities have more money to do this right.

Unless of course, someone in control wants it to be slower. The someone in control would be the local managers of the precincts.

Now think of all those voices you hear in the media that it would be ridiculously hard to cheat in a U.S. national election since there are so many precincts with local precinct-level control. Or are there?

The dog that didn’t (and isn’t) barking should be howling about this contradiction: cheating supposedly isn’t possible because of decentralized decision-making, and yet if that were true it would be impossible to have geographically correlated slowness in vote tabulation.

The lawyers have a name for this. The fact that all the slow places are cities … typically with histories of Democratic control … and in swing states … is prima facie evidence of a problem.