The Angry Bear

I met Cathy in Cambridge when she spoke at MIT a few years ago. This is  re-posted from Naked Capitalism.  Cathy’s whole TED Talk can be watched after the fold. Data Scientist Cathy O’Neil: “Algorithms Are Opinions Embedded in Code” Cathy O’Neil has a PhD in mathematics from Harvard and is the author of the best seller Weapons of Math Destruction. She is also involved in Occupy Wall Street. In this TED talk, she describes how algorithms routinely...

Pres. Trump decides on pardoning Sheriff Joe for all of his community service work in Maricopa County Arizona. What an achievement for a man who can be a racist, defy a Federal Court, and gain the support of a US Pres.

An economy on autopilot between Scylla and Charybdis Interest rates are a vital determinant of longer term growth. While the economy has remained on autopilot for the last several years, with almost no political stimulus or disruption — though that may well change next month — the Fed has to steer a course between the Scylla of an interest rate spike and the Charybdis of an inverted yield curve.  The Presidential election spike in long term interest rates...

Reports of Obamacare’s death are greatly exaggerated: All counties to be covered for 2018 Obamacare has now obtained an insurer for every county in the country, defying Republican claims that the program is collapsing. As reported by The Hill, “At one point or another over the past year, more than 80 counties have been at risk of having no ObamaCare insurer on the exchanges in 2018.” On Thursday (Aug. 24), the last “bare” county, in Ohio, was covered by...

I was looking for information on drug related murders and inadvertently stumbled on this old Bureau of Justice of Statistics report. There’s a lot of interesting information in it. One fascinating table is this: For context, here is the population breakdown over a period that includes the timespan in the table. I’m not sure this gives enough information to say what would happen if drugs were legalized, but I am interested in your thoughts....

Commentary 1. I was bouncing around twitter and landed on the following tweet. It may be the best commentary on where we are that I have read. (click to embiggen or to see the whole picture) Obligatory comment: I know nothing about the individual who left the tweet. To the best of my knowledge I have never seen a tweet by that person before. I haven’t checked his (her? zir?) other tweets to know whether I should endorse or denounce him (her? zir?).  But...

by New Deal Democrat Free Trade, the Primrose Path, and the Blinkered Blindness of macroeconomists Here’s what I learned today: the origin of the phrase “being led down the primrose path.” It turns out that in medieval times, one meaning of the word “primrose” was the “prime,” or first or loveliest, rose.  Thus taking the primrose path was a particularly lovely journey. At least by the time of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” where Ophelia speaks of the “primrose...

Lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts Sure Abigail Hauslohner, Paul Duggan, Jack Gillum and Aaron C. Davis Sure I have trusted The Washington Post, since I learned how to read. However, By Abigail Hauslohner, Paul Duggan, Jack Gillum and Aaron C. Davis are testing me. In this article they assert that an American Nazi went over to that very dark side in spite of the well meaning efforts of Weimar. “Fields looked forward to soldiering in democracy’s most...

by Peter Dorman (originally published at Econospeak) Trump and What Army? Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve. Has he crossed some sort of new line? Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days. I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in...