J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 132

Geoffrey Skelley: Why So Many House Republicans Are Retir...

Geoffrey Skelley: Why So Many House Republicans Are Retiring, And Why More Could Be On The Way: "Four Republicans who have criticized Trump or... opposed him.... Texas Rep. Will Hurd.... Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks.... Michigan Rep. Paul Mitchell didn't vote to condemn the president over his tweets, [but] he was openly critical of them.... Alabama Rep. Martha Roby hasn't been critical of Trump recently, and has a very pro-Trump voting record overall, she did say she wouldn't vote for him in 2016 after the release of an Access Hollywood video.... She faced [opposition from a write-in candidate][30] in 2016 and had to survive a primary runoff in 2018.... Tough reelection bids... Hurd.... Georgia Rep. Rob Woodall... only held onto his seat after a recount.... Reps. Kenny Marchant and Pete Olson... won reelection in 2018 by fewer than 5 points.... Republican conference rules... do not allow members to lead committees for more than three consecutive terms, unless they get a special waiver (which is rare).... Texas Rep. Mike Conaway and Utah Rep. Rob Bishop, as each was in his third term.... These early retirements don't necessarily signal a wave of future exits. But... don't be shocked if more Republicans decide to exit stage right...

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One very peculiar thing about America is majorities that ...

One very peculiar thing about America is majorities that believe that government doesn't have our back and indeed, shouldn't have our back. This is a very puzzling attitude to see in a democracy: Gillian Tett: Why Japan Isn���t Afraid of Robots: "The social safety net.... 63 per cent of people in Japan think that it is up to the government... to help the population adapt to automation.... In the US, however, only about 30 per cent of the public expect the government to help.... A recipe for anxiety: some of America���s current problems can be traced to the sense of abandonment felt by many workers in deindustrialised regions...

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Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, a...

Arthur Eckstein: Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome: "Tarentine ambitions and strategies... were unrealistic: their resources, large though they were for a city-state, were inadequate for dominion over southern Italy... failure to create a stable hegemonic structure. Tarentum was not powerful enough to impose a hierarchical alliance system upon the Italiotes in the manner of Athens in fifth-century Greece, yet it also failed to create a cooperative and integrative league, such as the Achaeans and Aetolians did in Hellenistic Greece. Nothing in that direction was really attempted.... Thus Tarentum differed from Rome in organizational vision and ability���but it was as militaristic and diplomatically aggressive as Rome.... The citizen army remained strong; the government adapted to the increasing pressure from the Italic highlanders with a reasonable policy of hiring mercenaries... and bringing in famous generals... [and] the last half of the fourth century witnessed the erection of the great statues of Nike and Zeus the Thunderer in the city center. The wide claims of Tarentum show that Rome was not alone in Italy in making such claims���just alone in the capacity to enforce them...

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I am not sure whether what is needed is for economics to ...

I am not sure whether what is needed is for economics to "go digital" as for economics to finally recognize what John Maynard Keynes called "the end of laissez-faire". But since he wrote about the end of laissez-faire 94 years ago, I am not holding my breath for a better economics:

Diane Coyle: Why Economics Must Go Digital: "Drug discovery is an information industry, and information is a non-rival public good which the private sector, not surprisingly, is under-supplying.... Yet the idea of nationalizing part of the pharmaceutical industry is outlandish from the perspective of the prevailing economic-policy paradigm.... Should data collection by digital firms be further regulated?.... The standard economic framework of individual choices made independently of one another, with no externalities, and monetary exchange for the transfer of private property, offers no help...

...Economic researchers are not blameless when it comes to inadequate policy decisions. We teach economics to people who go out into the world of policy and business, and our research shapes the broader intellectual climate. The onus now is on academics to establish a benchmark approach to the digital economy, and to create a set of applied methods and tools that legislators, competition authorities, and other regulators can use. Mainstream economics has largely failed to keep up with the rapid pace of digital transformation, and it is struggling to find practical ways to address the growing power of dominant tech companies. If the discipline wants to remain relevant, then it must rethink some of its basic assumptions....

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Uber becomes modern art | FT Alphaville

Izabella Kaminska: Uber Becomes Modern Art: "Back in September 2016, we cited a BCA report which questioned Uber���s 62.5bn valuation, arguing its model was neither innovative or viable. Unfortunately, the report didn���t really register with the great and the good who have money to burn. Ahead of Uber���s IPO... as much as 120bn was being thrown about by some enthusiastic bankers. Fast forward to August 8, and Uber has truly beaten even the most extravagant of money-burning expectations. Here���s the Q2 results table, possibly in need of framing.... The thing that really hit market sentiment was the slowdown in revenue growth at 14 per cent to $3.2bn. Analysts had been expecting a 20 per cent rate which would have taken the top line to $3.4bn. This is important because Uber���s investment case is based on the thesis that the continuous net losses don���t matter because it���s still a growth company, and its pathway to profitability is through market domination and, of course, revenue growth...

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Jean-Claude Juncker: ���If it comes to a hard Brexit, tha...

Jean-Claude Juncker: ���If it comes to a hard Brexit, that is in no one���s interest, but the British would be the big losers. They are acting as though that were not the case but it is. We are fully prepared even though some in Britain say we are not well set up for a ���no deal���. But I am not taking part in these little summer games.... We have made clear that we are not prepared to hold new negotiations on the withdrawal agreement but only to make certain clarifications in the framework of the political declarations that regulate future relations between the United Kingdom and European Union. We are well prepared (for no deal) and I hope the British are too...

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This was what Conor Friedersdorf back in 2012 was endorsi...

This was what Conor Friedersdorf back in 2012 was endorsing as part of an attractive package deal: Ron Paul (1992): Fundraising Letter: "I have unmasked the plot for world government, world money, and world central banking... high officials who are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.... I���ve been told not to talk, but these stooges don���t scare me. Threats or no threats, I���ve laid bare the coming race war in big cities. The federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS.... The Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica.... The Soviet-style 'smartcard' the Justice Department has in mind for you.... Welfare riots in the big cities. Massive unemployment. The destruction of wealth. The erosion of personal liberties. Vicious economic controls. The exaltation of envy. The suppression of privacy. Authoritarian clamp-downs. Bank and S&L closings on a massive scale. A world dollar crisis as the greenback (or 'pinkback') is rejected for almost any non-paper alternative...

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Note to Self: For programming and Python Jupyter Notebook...

Note to Self: For programming and Python Jupyter Notebook ��Bs, who are wondering what they are getting themselves into:

Programming Dos and Don'ts: A Running List...

Do restart your kernel and run cells up to your current working point every fifteen minutes or so. Yes, it takes a little time. But if you don't, sooner or later the machine's namespace will get confused, and then you will get confused about the state of the machine's namespace, and by assuming things about it that are false you will lose hours and hours...

Do reload the page when restarting the kernel does not seem to do the job...

Do edit code cells by copying them below your current version and then working on the copy: when you break everything in the current cell (as you will), you can then go back to the old cell and start fresh...

Do exercise agile development practices: if there is a line of code that you have not tested, test it. The best way to test is to ask the machine to echo back to you the thing you have just created in its namespace to make sure that it is what you want it to be. Only after you are certain that your namespace contains what you think it does should you write the next line of code. And then you should immediately test it...

Do take screenshots of your error messages...

Do google your error messages: Ms. Google is your best friend here...

Do not confuse assignment ("=") and test for equality ("=="). In general, if there is an "if" anywhere nearby, you should be testing for equality. If there is not, you should be assignment a variable in your namespace to a value. Do curse the mathematicians 500 years ago who did not realize that in the twenty-first century it would be very convenient if we had different and not confusable symbols for equals-as-assignment and equals-as-test...

Do expect things to go wrong: it's not the end of the world, or even a threat to your soul. Back up to a stage where things were working as expected, and then try to figure out why things diverged from your expectations. Here, for example, we have Gandalf the Grey, Python ��B, confronting unexpected behavior from a Python pandas.DataFrame:





Yes, he is going to have to upgrade his entire system and reboot. But in the end he will be fine...

 

#berkeley #datascience #jupytger #notebook #programming #python #teaching

Gary Forsythe: A Critical History of Early Rome: "Histori...

Gary Forsythe: A Critical History of Early Rome: "Historians have traditionally labeled the period c. 1100���800 B.C. the Greek dark age, characterized by village societies headed by local chieftains, from which the city-state eventually arose. The unsettled conditions of the late second millennium B.C. might have extended as far west as eastern Sicily. Coastal sites exposed to sea raids were abandoned, and the inhabitants occupied defensible positions of the interior, such as Pantalica near Syracuse (Holloway 1981, 107���14). It is also noteworthy that at the close of the Bronze Age the major site in the Lipari Islands met with violent destruction and was reoccupied by people from the Apennine Culture of Italy...

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Wikipedia: Talent (Measurement): "The talent as a unit of...

Wikipedia: Talent (Measurement): "The talent as a unit of weight was introduced in Mesopotamia at the end of the 4th millennium BC, and was normalized at the end of the 3rd millennium during the Akkadian-Sumer phase...

...It was divided into 60 minas, each of which was subdivided into 60 shekels. The use of 60 illustrates the attachment of the early Mesopotamians to their useful sexagesimal arithmetic. These weights were used subsequently by the Babylonians, Sumerians, and Phoenicians, and later by the Hebrews. The Babylonian weights are approximately: shekel (8.4 gm), mina (504 gm), and talent (30.2 kg = 66.6 lb). The Phoenicians took their trade to the Greeks with their weight measures during the Archaic period, and the latter adopted these weights and their ratio of 60 minas to one talent; a Greek mina in Euboea around 800 B.C. was hence 504 gm; other minas in the Mediterranean basin, and even Greek minas in other parts of Greece, varied locally in some small measure from the Babylonian values, and from one to another.

The Homeric talent "as money" was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow. Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about 8.4 gm can be established for this money talent. The talent of gold was known to Homer, who described how Achilles gave a half-talent of gold to Antilochus as a prize.

The weight talent (Latin: talentum, from Ancient Greek: ����������������, talanton "scale, balance, sum") was one of several ancient weight units for commercial transactions. An Attic weight talent was approximately 26.0 kg (approximately the mass of water required to fill an average amphora[citation needed]), and a Babylonian talent was 30.2 kg. Ancient Israel adopted the Babylonian weight talent, but later revised it. The heavy common talent, used in New Testament times, was 58.9 kilograms (130��lb). A Roman weight talent in ancient times is equivalent to 100 libra; a libra is exactly three quarters of an Attic weight mina, so a Roman talent is 1.33 Attic talents and hence approximately 32.3 kilograms (71��lb). An Egyptian talent was 80 librae. and hence approximately 27 kilograms (60��lb)...

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