Thoughts on their unsung success in America.
Category Archives: Economics
The Openers
Why they’re winning. The “elites” (as has been the case for many years now) have not covered themselves with glory here.
Ferguson’s Imperial Model
A code review.
Good lord.
This reminds me an awful lot of the code that was leaked from CRU. S**t climate coding has done a lot of economic damage, but nowhere near as rapidly as this has, with tens of thousands of deaths to boot.
[Update a few minutes later]
A devastating conclusion:
All papers based on this code should be retracted immediately. Imperial’s modelling efforts should be reset with a new team that isn’t under Professor Ferguson, and which has a commitment to replicable results with published code from day one.
On a personal level, I’d go further and suggest that all academic epidemiology be defunded. This sort of work is best done by the insurance sector. Insurers employ modellers and data scientists, but also employ managers whose job is to decide whether a model is accurate enough for real world usage and professional software engineers to ensure model software is properly tested, understandable and so on. Academic efforts don’t have these people, and the results speak for themselves.
Same with climate modeling. Get it out of the universities. Particularly Penn State.
[Update a while later]
What Ferguson’s booty call tells us about our “elites.”
[Friday-afternoon update]
The model that panicked the world was junk.
Biden’s Edge Over Trump
…has evaporated.
Polls this early don’t mean that much, particularly when it’s “registered,” not likely voters. And it doesn’t take into account the enthusiasm factor. I think that there are a lot more people who would crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump than for Biden.
Academia
If it gets a bailout, it should only be under these conditions.
The loan program needs a complete overhaul, beyond these suggestions.
Viral Load
Thoughts on taking it seriously.
This would have a huge impact on policy.
The Artemis Accords
I haven’t talked much about this, but Bob Zimmerman has thoughts.
I’ve been working on this behind the scenes for a couple years, in both DC and London, and some of the ideas in the accords may be based on my IAC paper from last fall, but these are much more limited than my proposals there. They don’t really “supercede” the OST; the administration’s position is that they are not in violation of it, and that it is “permissive” in that regard.
The Social-Distancing Experiment
…has failed.
This reminds me of the old Soviet joke about the kid in a classroom, asking if Marx was the greatest scientist in history. After being assured by the teacher that that was the case, he asked “Well, why didn’t he try this crap on rats first?”
[Update a while later]
Policy and punditry must adapt to new data.
The Lunar Lander Awards
Eric Berger has the story:
NASA is taking a two-pronged approach toward the Artemis program. The agency has a clear mandate from the White House to land humans on the Moon by 2024. This has been criticized by some as a “political” date, but supporters of the fast timeline say it has injected needed urgency into the program. At the same time, NASA also wants to avoid the pitfalls of the Apollo Program—which flew six missions to the Moon and then ended due to high costs—by designing Artemis to be sustainable for the long term.
Unfortunately, as long as NASA is forced to continue to use SLS, that’s an impossible goal. Speaking of which, they just awarded a contract to AJR for $100M/engine.
Plus, Eric has a story on the uncertainty of launch architectures.
[Monday-morning update]
OK, so it’s not a hundred million per engine. It’s $146M.
[Bumped]
Overmothered Men
America is awash in them. Not just “overmothered” but, more importantly, underfathered. This is also a key part of the sociocultural dysfunction in the black community, because welfare policies encouraged so many black women to marry the government instead of the fathers of their children.