The Angry Bear

In a clinical trial the therapy is decided by a pseudo random number generator. How can this be ethical ? People are treated differently for no reason related to different interests different values and priorities or even different merit (assuming merit can differ). There is a utilitarian rational for clinical trials. Through such trials doctors learn, and that knowledge is useful to future patients. But this rationale is utterly rejected as ethically...

Slavery in the US An issue so far not openly addressed in this “Partial Shutdown” situation is that those who have been deemed to be “essential,” are now working without pay, even though we all believe that they will eventually receive their overdue backpay. I really do not know the law that says that these people must work without being paid within a reasonable time period of their work, but my basic view of this is that people being forced to work...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for January 6 – 10 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. Recent gyrations have changed both the short and long term forecast. Once again, it shows that the biggest problem is that most forecasters simply project existing trends forward. As usual, reading the article should be informative for you, and helps reward me with a little pocket change for my efforts....

Solid social science on the opinion pages (needless to say news reporters consider interest in randomized controlled experiments to be opinion. Christian Caryl explains how it is possible to determine the effect of the Russian influence campaign on the 2016 presidential election. Sinan Aral, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [skip] says he and his colleagues want to study the Russian influence campaign in precisely this...

Kevin Hassett (chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) talking to PBS NewsHour: “Federal workers who are without pay as the government shutdown drags on actually have it pretty good. A huge share of government workers were gonna to take vacation days, say, between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work, and so then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days. And...

I hope and trust that this will be an amusing display of my ignorance. I don’t hope to reach David Graeber’s level David Graeber: Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other’s garages… 1. How did Jeff Bezos get so rich ? His wasn’t a subtle idea. The first...

This is an almost semi serious proposal suggesting payday lenders could get good publicity. There are many entities with plenty of spare cash. The US Treasury isn’t one of them. I think that the good publicity gained by offering zero interest loans to unpaid federal employees is worth the cost. They are good credit risks because they will get paid (without interest) eventually. I’d say some entity with spare liquidity could help the country and win...

How Shocking Was Shock Therapy? In 2007 Naomi Klein got quite a bit of attention and mostly favorable comment for her book, Shock Doctrine. It promulgated that global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly as a result. This was “shock therapy” that was more like destructive electroshock than any sort of...

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) August 31, 2015: As America’s bridges, roads, and other infrastructure dangerously deteriorate from decades of neglect, there is a mounting sense of urgency that it is time to build a giant wall. Across the U.S., whose rail system is a rickety antique plagued by deadly accidents, Americans are increasingly recognizing that building a wall with Mexico, and possibly another one with Canada, should be the country’s top...