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  • Vibes and the economy

    I don’t want to get too political, but it’s an election year (in several countries) and The Discourse is inevitable. But I want to quickly push back on something I’ve seen all too often on social media recently.

    In America, the numbers for the economy look “good.” Unemployment is low, *really* low. Inflation is high, but wage growth is higher. And the stock market is up. So why are Americans’ perceptions of the economy so poor? Why is consumer confidence lower than it *should* be?

    Some partisans and twitterati have decided that Trump Was Right and the problem is fake news. Legacy media and social media are both driving relentlessly negative press and this is brainwashing people into believing that the “good” economy is “bad.”

    But instead I’d like to take take a step back and see if polls are telling us something that “the numbers” just aren’t. And I think I have good evidence that they are.

    First, here’s a graph from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. It shows that housing affordability is lower than at any time since the 80, lower even than during the housing bubble that precipitated the Great Recession. If you’re a millennial or a zoomer, *never in your life has housing been less affordable than it is today*.

    And housing isn’t just a “nice-to-have,” it sits at the bottom of Mazlo’s Hierarchy of Needs for a reason. A stable housing situation is (for most people) a necessary ingredient before they feel confident starting a family, putting down roots, or just feeling like they “belong” to where they live.

    Now, you *can* have a stable housing situation in an apartment, but it’s much harder. Rent increases can drive you out, and rent-controlled apartments are hard to come by. Apartments also aren’t always conducive to the types of living that people want in their life.

    So the price of housing is driving a *real crisis* in millennial and zoomer living, as people with otherwise high earnings are unable to obtain what lower-earnings folks could get in the past, namely a house to live in.

    Then there’s the fact that datapoints about “all” millennials are missing key differences *between* millennials. See the next graph

    The *median* millennial is doing worse than the median boomer was at this point in their life, in terms of net wealth, net assets, and housing. But the top 10% of millennials are doing way better than the boomers ever could, so taken together it seems like millennials are doing well overall. It’s like looking at a city where 1 person is a billionaire and 99 are destitute and saying that overall the city is very wealthy.

    These kinds of mean/median differences are well-known to people in liberal circles, because they signal high inequality. But because a liberal is currently president, these differences are ignored by much of the twitterati.

    I could say more about this topic, and I wish I had the energy to, but I’ve been so tired lately with my new medicine. Nevertheless, next time you see someone like Will Stancil screech that the kids are all morons and that everyone is rich, note that he is a member of that top 10%, not the median.

    When people’s answers in polling are different than what “the fundamentals” suggest, it may be that the people are just stupid. But it’s far more likely that polling is capturing something that your data is ignoring. And right now that’s housing costs and growing inequality.

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  • Sorry for no posts, I was watching the eclipse

    Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, I drove halfway across the continent to see the eclipse. And then after it was finished I immediately drove the other halfway back home. After more than 24 hours of driving, I was beat, and this week was kind of a wash for me after that.

    But the eclipse itself was beautiful and I encourage everyone to look for images of it online. NASA had an entire party for the eclipse, I don’t know if they did that for 2017 but maybe with how popular the 2017 eclipse was, they felt they needed to.

    There was also some real science being done during this eclipse. Telescopes trained on the sun to look at its corona in great detail as the moon passed in front. A longstanding humorous story in the scientific community comes from an eclipse observed not long after Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. The theory predicted that light should bend when passing by massive objects. So scientists used a solar eclipse to visualize stars that were hiding near the sun. As predicted by Einstein, their light appeared to be “bent” because it had passed so close to the sun to get to us.

    The newspapers published this with a somewhat hilarious line:

    Stars not where they seemed or were calculated to be, but nobody need worry.

    New York Times

    The “but nobody need worry” always gets to me.

    Regardless, eclipses are fun both for scientists and non-scientists alike. I hope if you missed this one, you’ll get to see one soon!

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  • The words of Jesus on the Cross

    It’s a little late, but since it’s still Easter season I was thinking about languages and in particular the language of Jesus. The gospels of course record different versions of what exactly Jesus said when he died on the cross. But Matthew and Mark record a version that sounds like it could be historical.

    Matthew and Mark both record Jesus’s final sentence as “Eli, Eli, lema Sabachthani,” which means “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Although they differ slightly in their spelling. Now, Jesus’s native language was Aramaic, but I’ve always been intrigued by how similar this phrase sounds to the Arabic I learned in school.

    To start with “Eli” is almost identical to how you would say “My God” in modern Arabic, El = God and the noun ending -i makes it possessive for “my.” Sabach isn’t a verb I ever learned in Arabic, but if it does mean “to forsake,” then Sabachthani is also very close to how you would conjugate it in Arabic for this sentence.

    But the part I’ve always been most interested in is “lema.” Now the Arabic word for “why” is “lematha,” but it’s made up of two pieces: “le” means “for” and “matha” means “what.” So “lematha” = “for what” = “why.” But there’s another word for “what” in Arabic, you can say “ma” instead of “matha” in many cases. So can you also say “lema” = “for what” = “why” in Arabic as well? I don’t know for sure, but it sounds like a likely etymology for the Aramaic word as well.

    The bible gives us very few direct quotes in Aramaic, the native language of Jesus and many people in his day. It’s good to hear what we can from in their own tongue.

    Happy Easter

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  • Even more Dominions Tactics: Foul Vapors

    I am still enjoying writing about Dominions, especially since the 6th game was just got released. Last time, I talked about overwhelming your enemies in an underwater battlefield, this time I’ll talk about poisoning them in their sleep.

    To recap, Dominions is a game series where gods and their armies fight climactic battles to become the one true Pantokrator, the almighty. In the early game, armies are small and tactics simple, but by the mid to late game, armies can be so ginormous that troops have difficulty even reaching each other through the mass of bodies. In these scenarios, “army wipe” spells, that is spells that do damage to an entire army all at once, are very powerful.

    Let’s back up a second, the normal way magic works is just as it works in any RPG you’ve ever played. The wizard casts fireball, it travels to the enemy, and deals damage. That’s how most spells in the game work. Some spells however, are *battlefield wide* spells. The wizard casts them, and now the entire battlefield is effected.

    Foul Vapors is one such battlefield wide spell. When the wizard casts it, toxic clouds start to cover the battlefield and all soldiers, friend or foe, begin taking poison damage.

    Obviously, killing your own troops isn’t usually a recipe for success. But Foul Vapors can be paired with other nature spells such as “Serpent’s Blessing” which make all your troops resist poison, or can be paired with units who naturally resist poison. That way, even if your own troops die, they die much more slowly than the enemy’s.

    In this way, Foul Vapors can make for an exceptional army killing spell. You don’t need the strongest troops or the most fireballs, you just need 1 mage and enough troops to keep the enemy busy. After a few rounds of Foul Vapors, you’ll have killed an entire army no matter how many of them came to the fight.

    But Foul Vapors isn’t perfect, if the mage who casts it gets killed it turns off, much to the relief of the enemy troops. And it won’t take many rounds for the enemy to reach your mage if you took a truly paltry number of troops. That’s where option 2 comes into play: Rigor Mortis.

    Rigor Mortis is another battlefield spell, but cast by a Death mage this time instead of a Nature/Water mage like Foul Vapors. What it does is deal *fatigue* damage to every living (ie not undead) unit on the battlefield. In Dominions, units die when they reach zero health, but they simply fall asleep when they reach 0 fatigue.

    But Rigor Mortis paired with Foul Vapors is an *incredible* combination. Rigor Mortis puts all units to sleep, which in turn protects the Foul Vapors caster from ever being damaged. Then Foul Vapors works to kill the entire enemy army in their sleep without your own army even needing to work.

    This is extra potent when your own army is made up of the undead. Undead units are immune to Rigor Mortis (they already passed that point), but are *also* highly resistant to poison. Rigor Mortis plus Foul Vapors backed up by an undead army will see the enemy put to sleep, then poisoned, and finally hacked apart by the undead horde.

    Battlefield wide spells are some of the most powerful and fun spells in the game. I love watching a battle where I successfully baited the enemy into a trap and killed them with a few battlefield wide spells. These spells are powerful, expensive, and rare, but if you can pull them off you can win wars against almost infinite enemy forces.

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  • More Dominions Strategies: Underwater overwhelming

    He smells blood, and he's hungry

    I want to write more about Dominions because I’ve been falling behind on writing and it’s a video game near and dear to my heart.

    To recap, Dominions is a video game series whose 6th installment just got released. In it, you play as a god trying to overthrow every other god and become the one true Pantokrator, the almighty. Your battles against the enemy gods can involve summoning hordes of skeletons to overwhelm your enemies. Or you can rain down lightning from the skies. Or you can just make yourself unkillable.

    Today’s tactic is somewhat unique to the underwater nations of the game, and it has to do with summoning so many creatures of the deep that your enemies will start to think Aquaman is OP.

    Dominions has a lot of spells that summon new units, see my post on hordes of skeletons above. But skeletons are undead, and can be banished by a simple priest. The underwater war takes summoning to a whole new level.

    First, there’s “school of sharks,” a simple water 2 spell that summons (what else) a school of 10 sharks to attack your enemies. 10 sharks may not tip the battle on their own, these are large underwater armies clashing together after all. But 10 mages summoning 10 sharks each? You’re going to need a bigger boat.

    Next, there’s “Swarm.” Swarm is a Nature 2 spell that’s more well-known on land. There, it summons small bugs to harass the enemy. Underwater, it summons fish and shrimp.

    Then there’s “Shark Attack.” Shark attack will summon a bloodthirsty shark every time an enemy or ally takes damage. These sharks will then *usually* attack the enemy lines. Sharks still aren’t necessarily as powerful as an armored underwater warrior, but the best part of Shark Attack is that they are *endless*. Sharks will continue to spawn as long as units are taking damage, a constant horde of teeth and jaws to harass and torment your enemies.

    The final cherry on top is Water Elementals. Water elementals are summoned alone, and they cost gems to summon too. But unlike 10 sharks, 20 shrimp, or even infinite sharks, water elementals can regenerate underwater. This is huge in an ocean battle, having a unit that can take endless damage, regenerate it all and still pack a punch is a game changer, and before they nerfed Water Elementals heavily, they were the end-all and be-all of underwater combat. They’re still strong of course, just slightly less so.

    With these 4 conjuration spells, underwater armies can send forth a tidal wave of bodies in ways land nations could only dream of. It gets better because many of these enemies get summoned behind the enemy’s lines, wrecking their weak support units and throwing their battle line into chaos.

    These and other spells let water nations orchestrate a symphony of chaos against anyone they face. Land nations beware, the sea is deadly.

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  • Work hard, even if it doesn’t matter?

    I work somewhere just like this

    I have a project at work that really doesn’t matter. My boss wants me to make a tutorial for a process that no one but me has ever and will ever use. In the abstract it makes sense, we don’t want to lose knowledge if someone leaves. But these sorts of tutorials aren’t really an efficient transfer of knowledge compared to actually *teaching* someone. How easy is it to just learn something from a book vs being taught it in school?

    So I’ll make a tutorial that likely no one will ever see. And even if they do see it, I won’t be there to clear things up for them so who knows if they’ll understand it. And even if they do understand it, I am working on a very esoteric process that I haven’t seen anyone else use, so who knows if they’d even use it.

    Still, I’ve come around to the idea that I should work my hardest on this process, maybe not for others but for myself. Making a tutorial is actually a pretty involved process, there will be sound and video editing, some light script-writing, etc. I think I still want to do my best work possible because it will help me learn to use the tools and give me the experience necessary to do a really good job next time I have to do this *for a better purpose*.

    So is this the most efficient use of my time from my boss’s perspective? I’m going to be paid to do work that likely won’t positively impact our organization, so no. But is it a good use of time from my perspective? I believe yes, and I’ll work hard to prove it so.

  • Social Media is a click-farm, it shows you only what you are most likely to click

    Yet again the topic is raised that social media is harming our youth. Just as Seneca of Rome once complained that reading too many books was corrupting the youth, so too do we moderns complain about our own technology. But now it comes with a twist: social media has been anthropomorphized into a sentient being, force-feeding out children propaganda to turn their brains to mush and their muscles to puddy.

    Let’s get one thing straight: social media gets money through clicks. Without clicks, advertisers won’t advertise, because they know that users aren’t engaged enough to read the ads. And the social media can’t force you to click, the user has to do that themselves.

    So what do users click on? Overwhelmingly it’s exactly what they claim to hate and avoid. This is a classic case of revealed preferences, people like to claim that they are moral and high-minded, that they spend their time on science and philosophy. Overwhelmingly they prefer to spend their time on video games, celebrities, and politics. So if social media is feeding you mindless garbage, it is because you have revealed through your click habits that you prefer to eat trash.

    When you first log in to any social media website, it has no idea what you like. By default, it will start sending you a very random and scattershot selection of everything it has on offer. But very quickly, you will start clicking on the things that interest you, and ignoring the things that don’t. And so social media has learned that the vast majority of us won’t click on a science post if our life depended on it, we’d rather read about Taylor Swift instead.

    Next time a politician complains that their social media feed is nothing but trash, and that they have legislation to regulate social media more, tell them about revealed preferences. That politician is advertising to the world that they themselves are a trash human being.

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  • Surge Pricing and Dirty Deals

    I’m sorry I haven’t been posting weekly like I promised to. February has not been kind to me. But I wanted to quickly fire off a post relating to two topics I’ve recently seen in the news.

    The first has to do with the infamous Wendy’s “surge pricing” announcement which the company has already walked back on. As I know not all my readers are American, I’ll explain both Wendy’s and surge pricing.

    Wendy’s is a fast food burger chain just like any other American chain. Surge pricing meanwhile is what Uber and Lyft do when there is a very high demand all of a sudden, prices shoot up during that time, leaving customers to balk at paying 50$ for a ride home from a baseball game, when getting into downtown may have costed just 30$. Many Wendy’s customers likewise were furious at the price of a burger going up and down during the day, possibly meaning they’d pay for their food than someone who’d walked in just a few minutes earlier.

    The story got so much traction that Senator Elizabeth Warren even tweeted about it, trying to play up her corporate greed narrative. Little does Warren know that we’re now living in the era of Corporate Generosity.

    Nevertheless I’m always surprised that someone with the credentials of Warren is so economically illiterate. Surge pricing has been going on for decades, perhaps centuries even. The earliest examples I can think of are matinees, theatre productions (or movies) that are shown during the daytime for a cheaper cost than the evening. It costs exactly the same to run the shown at either time, so why is the daytime show cheaper? And if you’ve ever seen a bar with a “happy hour” or a restaurant with an “early bird special,” or Halloween candy sold half-off in November, you’ve also seen surge pricing in action.

    What’s going in here is simple supply and demand. The price of a good or service is *not* based on the cost to make it, the price comes from the interplay of supply and demand. The price fluctuates even if the cost does not because sellers are trying to clear the market. Lower demand? Lower price.

    But a restaurant also has service and shifts. Any server serving one customer must necessarily be not serving another. Yet at the same time, servers paid for 8 hour shifts, and few people would work a job where they’re only paid minimum wage for 2 hours. The cost of transport alone would eat into your wage. What this means is that if everyone only comes to eat during dinner (let’s say a 2 hour period from 4-6pm), then the servers are sitting around for 6 hours doing nothing, then madly scrambling for 2 hours. During those 2 hours, many customers might come in only to find the line is too long, or they might be able to eat but find the service poor due to overworked servers.

    Thus, for decades restaurants have lowered prices during the “slow” parts of the day to entice people to eat at those times instead of during the rush. This is exactly the same mechanism as Wendy’s “surge pricing,” only it’s framed differently. But it’s still the case that they’re charging more at dinnertime even though their costs are the same.

    Surge pricing like this is actually a very good thing. It evens out demand in service industries, allowing more people to be served during a day while still letting the wait staff work full 8-hour jobs. And certain customers can take advantage of this, getting a lower price at the cost of not eating during a “normal” time. Warren (and other outraged twitterati) are simply jumping on a poorly framed policy to score very stupid political points. In fact, Burger King decided to dunk on Wendy’s poorly framed surge pricing policy by highlighting their own better-framed surge pricing policy. Every restaurant is like this, and it’s actually A Good Thing.

    Speaking of restaurants but not about Good Things, Gavin Newsom is quite nakedly corrupt. I had only heard mild criticisms of Gavin before, but there were some Democrats I know claiming he was basically the candidate-in-waiting should Biden not run. He is Governor of America’s largest and wealthiest state, and would surely win election because the only thing Republicans could ever say against him were tired tropes about “Commiefornia.” But actually it turns out here’s corrupt.

    I know this because he handed a political kickback to his buddy who owns at least two dozen Panera Bread restaurants. California is set to raise the minimum wage to 20$/hr, except at restaurants that serve freshly bread baked. No, bagels and pastries do not count as “bread.” Panera is one of the very few restaurants that does this, and so they will still be allowed to pay their employees just 16$/hr.

    You might think this would cause many restaurants to start opening up bakeries, but it gets even more corrupt: the restaurant must have been serving freshly baked bread in September 2023 to qualify. So only Panera is grandfathered in. Essentially, Gavin Newsom decided to directly use a government law to enrich his friend and confidant, and no one seems to really care.

    Now of course he wasn’t handing his friend state money. But he was writing legislation that imposes costs on every single one of his friend’s rival businesses, while shielding his friend. That will allow his friend (whose name I just looked up is “Greg Flynn”) to profit much more than anyone else from fast food, since he can keep the same prices while paying his staff 80% less than the competition.

    Some of the twitterati have tried to defend Gavin indirectly, saying that it’s obviously corrupt but that this carve-out won’t actually do anything. They say that since every other restaurant will have to abide by the 20$/hr minimum wage, it means no one will ever work for Panera for less than 20$/hr either. But that ignores that people take jobs based on more than just the wage. Maybe the Panera is closer to you than the Taco Bell, maybe you hate the smell of fried foods and are loathe to work at McDonald’s, maybe you don’t own a car and the Panera is the only restaurant in walking distance. Or maybe you have classes and Panera can offer you hours that better fit your schedule.

    And Greg Flynn knows this. He knows that he will likely be able to find at least some workers willing to work for just 16$/hr, that’s why he asked Gavin to put that in the bill. But corruption and friend-dealing has never been punished too strongly in America, no matter how much partisans rage about how “the other side” is corrupt. Still, the naked corruption on display may have hurt Gavin in a national election, so Democrats are probably happier he didn’t decide to challenge Biden.

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  • Are analysts’ opinions anti-correlated with the market?

    This time 2 years ago, we were still riding high on the post-pandemic surge, and analysts were expecting the S&P could break 5,000. This time last year, we were still in what felt like the 2022 doldrums and analysts were predicting a recession. This time 3 months ago, people were declaring inflation was whipped. And then a few days ago, CPI and PPI came in hot.

    I’ve written before about how the Efficient Market Hypothesis may imply that there is *no* correlation between analyst opinion and the stock market. Analysts are just as likely to be wrong as right, but people only remember the examples which agree with their biases. On the other hand, I read an article recently (I’m sorry I cannot find it to link) arguing that analyst opinion is in fact *anti*-correlated. That is, the Short Cramer ETF is correct, and analysts are so stupid you should do the opposite of what they say.

    Speaking of, the Short Cramer ETF “SJIM” is down about 20% from when it began. But no matter, should you do the opposite of what analysts say or is that as irrational as following their advice?

    One argument is that analysts are inherently *backward-looking*, they generally assume trends will continue forever. Some are perma-bulls or perma-bears, but on average when the market is down analysts predict a down year, and when it’s up they predict an up year. In this case, if the market is a random walk then it’s very unlikely to simply continue it’s current trend, thus an analyst is more likely to be wrong than right.

    On the other hand, shouldn’t wisdom of the crowds have an affect? On the aggregate, many gamblers who bet on real world events (either sports of politics) are betting on what they *want* to happen, and many have no real knowledge whatsoever. Yet Nate Silver and others have argued that betting markets are often more accurate than not, whether it’s politics, sports or what have you. Some how, a million idiots adds up to something better than our smartest mind.

    If that’s the case why don’t all the analysts of the market add up to something smart?

    It just reminds me to be humble, because all too often I’ve seen people caught out badly by a trend. The late 2023 “inflation is beaten, start thanking Joe Biden” narrative won’t seem as smart if inflation stays persistently hot, any more than the “recession around the corner” narrative of 2023. Overconfidence when you really know nothing is the hallmark of an analyst, and maybe that’s why they’re so often wrong.

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  • Avoiding things because I’m avoiding them

    This is going to be a short post. I HOPE to have a better one up this weekend.

    But to cut to the chase, sometimes I avoid things… simply because I started avoiding them previously and now I feel too guilty to just fess up and DO them. 

    I get an email in my inbox that I don’t want to look at, so I ignore it for a day. Then the next day I feel guilty, “what will they think of me, that I was ignoring them for a day,” so I keep ignoring it. Obviously ignoring it for two days makes me feel even more guilty, so this is a problem that quickly spirals into me just ghosting someone for weeks until I finally write a long apology and actually just respond like I should have.

    And it happens with this blog too. My schedule has slipped, I wanted to write a post every weekend, but now that I’ve missed a couple I suddenly feel very guilty, and that just makes me want to avoid doing a post even more.

    I need to overcome these feelings, and I’m sure everyone has them. But to day, I still don’t know how. Having someone else with me when I read emails or write at least puts some of the sting off, it reminds me I’m not alone and gives me someone to bounce ideas off of. But people can’t be with me all the time, this is a skill I need to have for myself.