voluntaryXchange

I’m a Nerd, and It Will Always Be a Soft G

Jif peanut butter has a new tongue in cheek ad campaign to get people to stop pronouncing GIF like Jif, and instead pronounce it as in “gift”.

If you’re not a nerd, the GIF filetype is quite old, and was always intended to be pronounced as a homophone with Jif.

Political Bubbles

Emma Green:

The stat that stuck out to me most was that 45 percent of Democrats said they would be unhappy with their child marrying someone from a different political party, and 35 percent of Republicans said the same thing.

From the NPR interview about the article in The Atlantic entitled “These Are the Americans Who Live In a Bubble”.

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For my part, I’d like to know how non-economic social science faculty would feel about working with an economist.

FWIW: an honestly great person I know actually displayed outright bigotry towards me about 15 years ago when they found out I was a business school professor. Yes, they have one con, but a million pros, and I’m not an iconoclast about these things.

Why Are So Many Nail Salons Vietnamese?

Vietnamese dominance of the today $8billion manicure industry can be traced back to actress Tippi Hedren who in 1975 got her manicurist to teach 20 Vietnamese refugee women how to do nails bc she wanted to help them develop a skill so they could support themselves in resettlement pic.twitter.com/gyyiemu8Q2

— Audrey (@auderdy) January 10, 2020

I’ve looked for evidence that this is an urban myth, and I can’t find any.

Yeah Online!

My university is trying to go big online. This is starting out with 2 graduate programs and a long-term alliance with a private firm. Mixed feelings everywhere about this (we’ve had 3 people strike out with MBA managerial economics, so I think that qualifies as a new inning or something).

Here’s a piece from the Chronicle entitled “Purdue Global Has Had a Rocky Start. Is It Growing Pains or a Sign of Trouble?” about Purdue’s experience after buying Kaplan.

Two and a half years later, the audacious deal is showing signs of trouble. Daniels, who had predicted that the deal would produce a “very substantial revenue stream,” has said that Purdue University Global, as the former Kaplan online programs are now known, is not “achieving the growth we thought we might.” The university’s annual financial report, released this month, shows that Purdue Global suffered a $43-million loss last year …

Hat tip to the vXassociatechair.

Modeling SARS-CoV-2 on a Cruise Ship

A cruise ship has been anchored in Tokyo harbor for a few weeks. Onboard was a passenger infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVD-19 epidemic in China.

Japan quarantined the ship.

But it turns out they were mostly interested in keeping the virus from getting off the ship. On the ship … not so much.

That makes this a pretty good natural experiment for how virulent SARS-CoV-2 actually is

Political Calculations has posted a tool to explore how an epidemic grows with the passage of time.

A way to think about this is that the passengers on the cruise ship are a population in a closed environment. Unfortunately, the population of the planet is also living in a closed environment.

Political Calculations determined, using a variety of epidemic models, that all the passengers would catch the virus within about 60 days.

Uh-oh.

Contemplating Daylight Savings Time

Most people know when the shortest day of the year is.

But most people don’t know that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not fall on that day.

It turns out, the earliest sunset (December 5th) is about 16 days before the shortest day (December 21st), and the latest sunrise is about 15 days after (January 5th).

So honestly, I started thinking about this in late January. I was noticing the “days getting longer”. By this, most of us mean we notice that it’s light for longer after work.

I did some mental math, and realized that it was about 8 weeks after the earliest sunset.

And so I thought … oh … sunset changes are symmetrical … so late January has the same sunset as mid-October. And I thought about how nice those cold evenings are in mid-October.

I decided quickly that daylight savings was a bad thing, and we should move the clocks back right now, so I could have those cold, beautiful evenings full of light until after 7 in late January.

I have been laughing to myself at how dumb I was for about about a week now.

Moving the clock back also moves the sunrise back. And the sunrise was not 8 weeks into transitioning towards summer, but more like four.

And in Utah, most of us live hard up on the west side of the mountains. Twilight in the morning is long: the sun is up, but it remains blocked by the mountains. On the shortest day, it comes over the mountains about 8:35 (even now on February 20th, I was watching rays of sunshine peek through a canyon at 7:45, 30 minutes after sunrise, but the sun wasn’t visible yet).

Why laugh at myself? If we got rid of daylight savings time here, on January 5th, the sun wouldn’t come over the mountains until 9:35. I think maybe I’d like to keep avoiding that.

Measuring China’s COVID-19 Recession

This may be the best real time estimate yet on what COVID-19 has done to the Chinese economy. China’s power plants run mostly on coal. China’s coal consumption appears to be down between 20 and 45%.

This is measured in days since the Chinese New Year, which fell on January 25 this year. So, they’re usually down for about 10 days after that, and this slowdown has stretched on for almost a month now.

To get that to GDP we need to know China’s energy elasticity. A plausible value for any country is around one, estimates from 15 years ago suggest 1.5 is more suitable for China. Here’s the back of the envelope calculation:

• Choose a round number for China’s GDP like $20,000B/yr
• Coal consumption is down 20% to 45%
• The elasticity suggests a hit of 30% to 70% for GDP
• That’s $6,000B/yr to $14,000B/yr if it’s a discrete jump. It isn’t, so looking at that typical slope showing recovery by about day 25 in most years, that slope suggests effects so far that are perhaps half of that as China built up to a sustained shortfall.
• This shortfall is new and gradual, let’s say it’s about 1/25th of a year so far (about 2 weeks). That converts to a GDP loss of between $120B and $280B so far, or –0.6% to –1.4% of annual GDP in total.
• China’s economy in 2020 is roughly the size of the U.S. economy in 2008-9. During the worst parts of that recession, the U.S. economy was off $20B in 2008 III, $85B in 2008 IV, and $45B in 2009 I.

All of these numbers are sketchy, but the suggest that the effect of COVID-19 on China over a few weeks is already comparable to what a large recession did to the U.S. in a few quarters.

Amusing Scholarly Article to Mentally File Away for Later Use

“Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases” by Lilienfeld,Sauvigne,Lynn,Cautin,Latzman, and Waldman is available online.

Entries include:

• Inaccurate or Misleading Terms like “autism epidemic”, “chemical imbalance”, “hard-wired”, “hypnotic trance”, “lie detector test”, and “love molecule”. P-values rounded to zero are also on the list.
• Misused Terms like “acting out”, “closure”, “denial”
• Ambiguous Terms like “comorbidity”
• Oxymorons like “observable symptom” and “scientific proof”
• Pleonasms like “empirical data” and “mental telepathy”.†

† Pleonasms are things that you use extra words for … who knows.

Favorite Excel Tricks

There’s a Quora thread asking what your favorite Excel trick is.

Self-recommending, and it only has 29 entries so far, so it is digestible.

Technorati Tags: favorite,excel,trick,quora,technique

Democrats as 2020’s Never Trumpers

S.E. Cupp hits a home run (watch the video). Her point is that Bernie Sanders is the front-runner, he can win the nomination, and even beat Trump:

To democrats I say learn from us never-Trumpers. We were wrong about the kind of candidate Trump was, but we were right about the kind of president he would become.

The video should be watched. She has archival footage of herself from 2016 arguing that Trump couldn’t win.