experts aren't

I bet you wish you had a girlfriend. Or boyfriend.

The Black Swan guy has mostly contempt for Gaussian distributions, and the quants who rely on same to predict stuff. All the fun, and terrible, things are wild outliers.

I had no idea we'd see the sun this weekend! Gives me another shot at fixing that leak. I just patched a hole in the side of the house with copperclad FR4.

It's not just Murdoch papers that have gone off the journalism rails. The big-city papers, the NY Times and LA Times and Wash Post, are all Trump, all the time, every section, just rants and insults and shrieking. Robert Reich used to be a loony leftist, but now he's a nasty ranter who makes no sense.

Hey, journalism is dead. Lefty colleges and the Internet together killed it.

No, he is too dull to be properly outrageous, and he hasn't done anything new in a decade or so. He just drones on.

From the summary it does seem like the kind of book climate change "skeptics" would glom onto. "It's all too complicated! We just can't predict anything. Stuff just happens. Experts don't know what they're talking about."

Meanwhile the virtues of the Invisible Hand of the Market are treated like some fashion of God-given axiom. I mean, I didn't read it written anywhere. What does Nature care about markets? Did it work in the past? Will it still work in the future? Is past performance indicative of future results?

It's all very complicated. Who can say.

If neoliberal economists could ever present as much evidence that the "invisible hand" operates the way they say it does as there is for the impact of greenhouse gases, the entire world would hire Alan Greenspan as their economic adviser tomorrow.

Some chaotic systems are beyond our influence, so we can just observe them and be surprised by what happens. But economic and social systems are driven by our group expectations, so we *are* the chaos.

That's why we keep having booms and busts and silly dance moves and diets. People might observe gradients, on the theory that nature eventually exploits available energy sources, so some Black Swan events - but not their specific triggers - can be roughly predicted.

That's my idea, not his. But I haven't finished the book.

The invisible hand works in microeconomics, but few economists are interested in microeconomics. The big fame and money are in macro.

I can't say about booms and busts, but when it comes to fad diets and silly dance moves I think part of it is just that people need something to do. Fad diets might give you the feeling that you are doing something to (hopefully) improve your health, when the reality is that so many factors are completely out of your control.

I think humans have a problem with routine and sameness, and that there's a natural tendency to feel when things are just going along, maybe not wonderful, but certainly not bad, that this is an indicator that SOMETHING is wrong or going to be wrong soon, and that something has to change, even trying to effect things that are finally beyond one's control. "We want change! We don't know what we want to change, but we definitely want it!"

The unfortunate irony is that three of the biggest things I consider to be the greatest threats to humanity's long term survival - nuclear proliferation, comets and asteroids, and CO2 emissions, are at this point in our technological evolution 100% under our control.

In the grand scheme of things making ourselves safe from them wouldn't even require that much sacrifice.

One business that Trump has excelled at is the Trump trolling Company. he has millions of customers on the left side of the political spectrum. He gets them hook-line and sinker

We got two principal epicenters of Commie indoctrination here - Berkley in the West and Columbia in the East. Between the pair of them theyve done a lot of damage. Both need nuking.

But he does use rather expensive bait. Getting into bed with Putin isn't a cheap provocation.

If you think they're the only two, your education is sorely lacking. The whole lot needs nuking (a good start would be to eliminate public funding).

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John's attitude to climate change does suggest that he doesn't fight nearly hard or often enough.

Doing the cheap labour doesn't teach anybody anything. Japan and China have both used the extra productivity that western production technique make po ssible to invest a lot in education.

Thatcher in the UK famously pointed to Singapore as getting rich from cheap labour, completely missing the point that Singapore was using the money it made out of selling cheap labour to educated up the work force to do more profitable labour.

She also complained that UK workers were less productive than German worker s, which provoked an economist to rework the productivity statistics to inc lude the capital invested per worker. It turned out that where a UK employe r had invested as much capital as the German counter-part, the UK worker wa s more productive.

This didn't mean all that much - the British only invested heavily in produ ctivity aids when there was a lot of money to be made, so they were cherry- picking - but it did expose the shallowness of Thatcher's thinking.

If you think I wrote above there are only two, *your* education is sorely lacking my friend.

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I don't think that Nassim Nicholas Taleb has any kind of contempt for Gauss ian distributions. He is contemptuous of people who think that only one pro cess is in operation in any one context.

When I had a slipped disk - many years ago - it took six weeks of bed rest to get it right, which was longer than usual, and I said to my doctor "Am I the tail of the Gaussian distribution, or part of some other distribution? ".

The point about Black Swans is that many of them are caused by different ki nds of processes than are visible in day-to-day fluctuations. Unimaginative quants think that what happens every day is the only thing that is happeni ng and get a terrible shock when the GFC hits the fan. People panicking and running around like headless chickens is not business as usual.

Copper sheathing is popular for expensive buildings. A 35 micron layer (one ounce copper) isn't all that thick. Cooper corrodes at the rate of 2 micro n a year in rural atmosphere.

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Not exactly, though there is a lively market for misleading nonsense in bot h fields. The fossil fuel extraction industry can make money out of lying a bout climate science, and cashed up capitalists can make money out of econo mists whose lies bring on depressions.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb doesn't regard Black Swans as completely unpredictabl e, and boasts about making money by getting good odds on events that ended up happening often enough to make him money, even though the quants hadn't expected them.

Adam Smith was less confident about the Invisible Hand of the Market than m ost of his followers. He saw the need for anti-trust legislation quite a bi t earlier than 1895 - he died in 1790.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb says quite a bit more than John Larkin seems able to understand.

Then why did you say there are two?

But he's a billionaire, and you're not.

Oh, leave them alone. It makes it easier for me to sort out intern and engineer applications; I'll get my people from among the College Republicans, the ones that can think.

Ken Rogoff is actually a respectable economist and George Soros is fond of economists who talk sense.

The Mail is less than enthusiastic about anybody who isn't a right wing lun atic, and Cursitor Doom shares their delusions.

They haven't had a chance to. Theresa May has only just got into a position when she can start negotiating the exit, and bring on the dire consequence s.

Trump has already shot himself in the foot with an executive order stopping everybody from seven specific countries from getting into the US even if t hey had been vetted by getting a visa. Obama had already banned visa waiver s for all the countries involved ( and a few more, with which Trump happens to have business dealings). This is such an obvious nonsense that the US c ourts have been willing to block it.

Trump has already demonstrated that he's a half-wit. The risk the he will d o something that is not only spectacularly stupid but also disastrous has n ot gone away.

Cursitor Doom lacks the imagination to conjure up a disaster scenario, whic h is a bit odd, since Trump now controls the US mutually assured destructio n mechanism. A man who can believe that he got a bigger crowd for his inaug uration than Obama did can probably believe that the Russians or the Chine se have launched their missiles, even when none of them are showing up on e arly warning radar.

I'm an optimist, and believe that White House staff has got a team of psych iatrists on tap, so that two area always ready to certify Trump as a lunati c at a moment's notice, as soon as he tries to do anything really silly, bu t that may be over-optimistic.

Only in the Mail. Newspapers that cater to saner readers were more circumsp ect.

Cursitor Doom is the kind if idiot who thinks like that.

Of course you do. If you considered yourself even marginally better informe d you'd have to be persuaded that you weren't Trump, or God or Napoleon, or whoever it is that florid nutters imagine themselves to be these days.

Cursitor Doom won't swallow the corollary, which is that there are economis ts around who know what they are talking about, and are helping politicians steer the economy away from both booms and busts.

Of course not. I don't share you fatuous delusions.