Ramblin’

@PatMcAfeeShow Whoever made this sign and went behind enemy lines is my hero

@TKratman @ChangYeeFong77 @LeonardBriscoe3 It’s totally a satire account

@ChangYeeFong77 @LeonardBriscoe3 I haven't dug, but one of the comments suggests they did dig and, no, it isn't.

There are over 7 billion people in the world, if he gave everyone a billion dollars he would still have 343 billion left and world poverty would end. Let that sink in. x.com/wyomelo/status…

@CraigVanbebber @shulsie x.com/millennialwoes…

@shulsie Shouldn’t we strive for diversity, equity and inclusion? I don’t get why DEI has gotten such a negative reaction to so many people.

Find me a major university president over the past 10 years that didn’t pay lip service or embrace a DEI agenda. I’m not sure they exist. They wouldn’t have gotten their job during that time without embracing DEI. It was part of nearly every interview process.

@postdiscipline Bell curves: how do they work?

I remain mystified by the 20% quota on “A’s” at Harvard. The average SAT score has risen 200 points in 30 years; selectivity is more than 6x greater with the globalization of the applicant pool and massive financial aid (3% of 45k plus accepted). Weighted high school GPAs are higher. Why does the faculty think only 20% of the students are capable of exceptional performance? Do they think the numbers are misleading, and Admissions is giving them mediocre students who bought high SAT scores and GPAs but can’t read a novel and do multivariable calculus? Has evidence of this been cited? I know of some anecdotal evidence. Are they tired of too many admits who are the children of alumni, donors and celebrities? Or is the faculty trying to set off “Hunger Games” academic competition among exceptional students because they are sick and tired of the time students waste on their clubs, politics and ‘occupations’? Or has the faculty sold their own students out? That is, professional school admission committees didn’t know how to differentiate among so many identically strong Harvard transcripts and didn’t want classes of just Harvard admits. So Harvard gave in to pressure to provide fewer top grads even though they all have the same perfect or near perfect MCAT, LSAT, GRE scores.

@SleeperBraves Nope. Impossible to get to, ugly surroundings.

Does anyone else just miss Turner Field?

@WSJ That's some great journalisming

The Tampa Bay Rays, the owners of the best record in the major leagues, have spent nearly two decades trying to build a new stadium. Their latest proposal might be their last shot. on.wsj.com/4v2qbYI

@hakeemjeffries Why is it the republicans' fault when your side keeps nominating antisemites? Look in the mirror dems.

People of goodwill have forcefully rejected the antisemitic and anti-American candidate in the TX-35 run-off. Republicans must immediately stop boosting her candidacy.

@SenAdamSchiff Stay classy, Adam.

My thoughts go out to Tulsi Gabbard and her family, as her husband battles this serious health problem. I hope and pray that he makes a speedy and full recovery. While the circumstances around her departure are deserving of our sympathy, let’s be clear: Tulsi Gabbard’s only positive contribution to our nation's national security is her resignation. She politicized intelligence. She dismantled critical agencies keeping Americans safe. She weaponized the IC to pursue baseless election fraud claims. And more. We must ensure that her tenure — marked by a devotion to the person of the president and not to the security of the country — represents a terrible exception at DNI and not the new normal.

@JoeSixPackShow @amuse The numbers are real, the math is fake, an invention of new calculations that conflate income and wealth. No one pays taxes on unrealized wealth growth, nor should they. It's rhetorical game played to justify your greed and envy. You just want their money.

@FugitiveJacket @amuse The 2014 to 2018 chart below is from ProPublica @Amuse divides Bezos "total income reported" $4.22 billion by "total taxes paid" $973 million & cries that's not 0.98% "true tax" ProPublica is referring to the "wealth growth" of Bezos which was $99 Billion so 0.98% is correct FU

@ptuomov @tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness You have demonstrated zero understanding of business and taxes. Either you're a troll or an idiot.

@tylermacro10 @FugitiveJacket @PhilWMagness Payroll taxes are related to future benefits. The benefit programs are extremely progressive where the people who pay the least get oversized returns and the people who pay the most subsidize that.

Zucman manipulated the stats you show below to make them fit his political story. In 2018 he published a dataset that inadvertently revealed the real tax rate paid by the top 0.001%. It hovered around 40% in recent years - nearly twice what his 2019 chart claims to show.

@tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness @ptuomov Just admit you don’t like that he has money and you want to take it.

@tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness @ptuomov Yes that’s how personal income tax works.

@ptuomov @tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness That’s a terrible lie analogy. The tax bill is yours. You pay the bank ahead of time. It goes into escrow, and then the bank uses the money you already gave them to pay the tax bill for the money you owe.

@FugitiveJacket @tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness That’s the tax incidence question. (I don’t personally pay my tax bill, it’s paid by my bank.)

@tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness @ptuomov His taxes paid are on his personal income and completely independent of Amazon’s tax bill.

@FugitiveJacket @PhilWMagness @ptuomov That’s v important to the argument that his taxes are much higher than they seem But also makes it harder to dispute that the wealthy share has fallen

@tylermacro10 @PhilWMagness @ptuomov Wait, Bezos is personally paying Amazon’s tax bill?

@PhilWMagness @ptuomov I’m claiming to know how much Amazon paid in corporate taxes as a rate & no I am not

@S_Surprenant It wasn’t nuance. She admitted the paper didn’t “contain the result for which it was commonly cited”. In other words, the specific thing she cited it for was absent. This wasn’t some footnote or other inconsequential error. It’s lazy scholarship.

Let me explain this for people who do not do research for a living. Research papers are not written like novels. They are structured from the start with the view that most people will selectively read its content based on their needs. Most will glance at the abstract to find out what are the question, method, main results. Others will go further and read specific sections in details. Almost no one will read the entire paper. There are use cases of citations that involve a low effort in reading. If you want to know if your results align with others, you don't need to understand the nuance of footnote 8 in the online appendix. You just read about the method, the data, and the key results. It's minutes, not hours. Another example is when you use a method that was introduced by a paper or a series of papers. You just need to know if the method is there. That takes seconds. Now, there are other use cases where you have to read all the fine prints. If you extend the analysis of paper, criticize it, or want to contrast your results to theirs, nuances are not optional. That can be measured in hours or even days. Most of the problems with citations that you will find are about the first situation, not the second. So, the situation isn't that people are not engaging deeply with imagined content they did not read. The situation is laziness or, sometimes, limited knowledge spread errors. For instance, a few people misinterpret a result and erroneously cite a paper for it. You then come across 10 people who claim that X found Y. You should spend a few minutes to go check that it is true, but some people do not and repeat the claim. The error can also enter later. A few people might say that X found Y, but a few rounds of telephone game later Y became Z because people loosely interpreted each other instead of going back to the source every time. Again, all of them should check directly, but not everyone does. A more excusable type of error involves the attribution of origin. No one knows the full set of all relevant papers on a topic, so it's possible to misattribute origin in good faith without being lazy. I gave an example of that recently with Jorda and local projections -- they date back to Dufour and Renault (1998), as far as I know. Now that you all the lay of the land, let's go back to what happened here. She lazily repported what others repported without double checking. We're very far from using the hallucinated references made up by a chat bot or from arguing with strawmen instead of other papers. I don't know about her field, but I have never caught anyone getting into a detailed response to papers they did not read in my field -- economics. If you believe otherwise you're a dumbass. Also, that would be amusingly hypocritical if you did not read as many papers as I did before making that bold claim. The errors that do slip through tend to be annoying, but ultimately inconsequential -- i.e., answers to important questions are unaffected.

@internetuserf12 Maybe next time don’t throw away your pandemic playbook in order to institute an oppressive scheme that destroyed public trust

If Ebola becomes a pandemic, it will be in no small part because millions of people now view public health measures as oppression rather than the most basic infrastructure of a functioning and sustainable civilization.

@Martina Why is everyone else so stupid and poor that we have to go into debt to save them from themselves?

Holy shit. And it all can be traced back to canceling USAID

@DanWolken That’s the most SEC thing ever.

Ok this at the end is hilarious. The Georgia president thinks you can just take the SEC championship and call it the national championship and it’s all good. These are the people running college sports. Prepare for the absolute worst.

@verumserum @neoavatara You’re right but that won’t let him vent his TDS

@neoavatara That's different from saying the arch itself is ugly. As for the view, it doesn't actually block the view. The center is 100 feet tall and open. You can still see the Women's memorial. If it were blocking the view, I would agree that would seem out of place.

Ugly as sin.

@zdeborova @eiszett This is the antipathy of science.

@eiszett Have you read all the sources you ever cited? During my PhD we, along with dozens of other papers, cited a paper that I later found did not contain the result for which it was commonly cited. I should be banned I guess.

Occasional errors and oversights are part of science. If we lost our driver’s license for a year every time we exceeded the speed limit by 10 km/h, daily life would become unworkable. Many countries instead use point systems, where trust can be rebuilt through good behavior.