Tag Archives: mother

Factoid of the Day: The IMF is 0 for 220 In Predicting Recessions

by DomingoHeidelber Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Larry Summer points us to this remarkable statistic:

Forecasts of all sorts are especially bad at predicting downturns. Over the period 1999-2014, there were 220 instances in which an economy grew in one year before shrinking in the next. In its April forecasts the IMF never once foresaw the contraction looming in the next year. Even in October of the year in question, the IMF predicted that a recession had begun only half the time.

I guess no one likes to be the skunk at the party, even the IMF. But I wonder who did better at predicting recessions? Goldman Sachs? The CIA? A hedge fund rocket scientist in Connecticut? Whoever it is, it sounds like the IMF might want to look them up.

UPDATE: It gets better! Via Twitter, Mark Gimein points me to Prakash Loungani’s article 15 years ago about recession predictions during the 1990s:

How well did private forecasters do in predicting recessions in these cases? Quite simply, the record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished. Only two of the 60 recessions that occurred around the world during the 1990s were predicted a year in advance.

….If private sector growth forecasts are of little use in spotting recessions, why not use the forecasts provided free by the official sector?…There is not much to choose between private sector and official sector forecasts. Statistical “races” between the two tend to end up in a photo-finish in most cases.

Loungani doesn’t provide a precise number for IMF predictions, but he implies it’s roughly the same as private-sector predictions: 2 out of 60. If that’s the case, the IMF has gotten even worse since then. A hit rate of 3.3 percent might be pretty lousy, but at least it’s better than 0 percent.

Link to article: 

Factoid of the Day: The IMF is 0 for 220 In Predicting Recessions

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Factoid of the Day: The IMF is 0 for 220 In Predicting Recessions

Here’s What Ted Cruz Won’t Tell You About His Days as a Corporate Lawyer

by JohnHaddad5 Posted on January 27, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In the pegged-to-the-campaign memoir Ted Cruz released last year, A Time for Truth, the GOP presidential contender chronicles his rise from the son of a Cuban immigrant to a tea-party-beloved, Obama-obstructing senator. But a chapter in his life gets short shrift: Cruz’s years as a highly paid private lawyer who often defended powerful corporations. And there are several significant cases he handled—politically inconvenient cases—that he has photoshopped out of his personal narrative.

After serving five years as the solicitor general of Texas, the state’s top lawyer, Cruz in 2008 joined the Houston office of the high-powered international law firm Morgan Lewis to develop its Supreme Court and national appellate practice. Having previously argued before the US Supreme Court on behalf of Texas in cases that had a conservative bent—defending the Second Amendment, the Pledge of Allegiance, and US sovereignty—Cruz was well regarded for his skills as an appellate attorney. But now, he would apply these talents to advance the interests of the firm’s clients, which tended to be large corporations.

In his book, Cruz notes that he represented Federal Express, Kimberly-Clark, Dentsply, and AstraZeneca. He also cites two pro bono cases he assisted: He helped veterans groups preserve a cross that had been erected as a memorial on federal land, and he aided two Morgan Lewis lawyers in the firm who were representing John Thompson, a Louisiana man falsely convicted of murder. Thompson had served 14 years on death row and was seeking to preserve a $14 million restitution award he had won in a case against the New Orleans district attorney’s office, which had covered up evidence that could have exonerated Thompson. (Despite Cruz’s involvement in that case, he would, as a politician, later say he trusted the criminal justice system to apply the death penalty fairly and appropriately.) Cruz also notes in his memoir that during his 2012 race for the US Senate, while he was still at Morgan Lewis, his opponent in the GOP primary attacked him for having represented a Chinese company that had been found to have stolen trade secrets and designs from a US-based tire manufacturing firm. (Cruz, an attack ad exclaimed, had sided with the “Red Chinese” against American jobs.) And, the book points out, Cruz was assailed during that campaign for having represented a Pennsylvania developer who was a central player in a corruption scandal that exploited juveniles.

Continue Reading »

Continue reading here – 

Here’s What Ted Cruz Won’t Tell You About His Days as a Corporate Lawyer

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What Ted Cruz Won’t Tell You About His Days as a Corporate Lawyer

Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

by WinfredBSB Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Yesterday I wrote a post that listed a bunch of things people have said about Ted Cruz, along with a bunch of things I made up. But which were real and which were invented? Here was the answer:

All statements whose ordinal number takes the integer form 2n+1 or 2n-1 have been invented. The rest are real.

I got some pushback about this, mostly asking what the hell kind of crap was this, anyway? So here goes. Here’s where it came from:

  1. At first I was just going to toss in a few fake statements and put the answer key below the fold. But then I realized that anyone who got here via a direct link would see the answers right away.
  2. So then I figured I’d add eight fakes in all the odd slots. But if your eye drifted down to the answer, you’d see “odd” right away.
  3. So I put it in small type. But even that was readable.
  4. So then I figured that instead of “odd,” I’d say that all the fakes were of the form 2n+1. My geeky readers would appreciate it.
  5. Then I looked for a link that defined “odd,” so that my non-geeky readers had a fighting chance of figuring things out. The only simple one I found defined odd as 2n+1 or 2n-1. So I changed the text to match.

This was pretty obviously a pointless waste of time. Welcome to my world. This is what blogging has done to me.

Anyway, in case you didn’t figure it out, all the odd numbered statement are fakes. The rest are real. The scary thing is that I didn’t have any trouble coming up with eight plausible fakes.

This article:  

Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here Is What Blogging Has Done To Me

Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

by EsmeraldaSalo8 Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

From the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, after attending a Donald Trump rally in Arizona:

I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.

This is the crowd response to Trump’s confirmation that “he meant it when he said that he would ‘take out’ the family members of terrorists.” As usual, it’s pure affect. Trump talks big on national security: he’s the most militaristic guy you’ve ever met, he’ll ban Muslim visitors and crush ISIS, and other world leaders will unanimously back down under his steely gaze. But when you actually look at the policies he supports—giving him the benefit of calling them “policies” in the first place—Trump has made it clear that he’s actually pretty dovish. He doesn’t really want to intervene around the world. He doesn’t especially want to do the hard dealmaking of negotiating treaties. He wouldn’t instantly tear up the Iran deal because, after all, a deal’s a deal. He wants to boost military spending, but only because he thinks a big army will scare other countries away from messing with us to begin with.

But he’ll kill the families of terrorists, and his fans love it. Booyah.

View original post here: 

Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

Posted in FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the Women and Children

Inflation: It’s a Real Thing!

by IsobelSkinner88 Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Petula Dvorak has gotten a lot of, um, pushback for this column about the kids these days—including hers:

The work ethic of our kids: Where is it? Where are the entrepreneurial snow shovelers? For generations of enterprising children, snowflakes may as well have been dollar bills, y’all, falling from the sky. Kids jostled to be the first to ring the doorbells of the snowed-in, the $5 driveways added up, and that new Atari Defender game cartridge, those rainbow Vans — yours and yours.

But in 2016? Not so much.

….Last year, when we had a mere dusting compared with Snowzilla and the boys were 8 and 10 years old, they shoveled our stairs and sidewalk with verve, and then struck out to ring doorbells to make a buck. The novelty of responsibility was fresh and delicious.

They got three customers: a politician’s wife who was encouraging and delightful, giving them a crisp $5 bill and a load of praise; another neighbor who paid $5; and $0 from a bleary-eyed millennial renter who promised to pay them but didn’t have cash. And never paid up long after the snow melted.

As school was closed for the big dig-out, I tried again to inspire some hustle in my little childlumps, whose only hustle was to get a sleepover going. “There are still lots of cars buried out there,” I said. “I bet you can make enough money for that Lego Poe Dameron X-Wing you want.” No spark in their eyes. What’s going on?

Hmmm. Last year the kids shoveled three houses and they each earned $1.66 per house for their efforts. This year the snow is far heavier. They could probably double their earnings! I wonder why they’re not feeling enthusiastic about this? It’s a head scratcher, all right.

As it happens, lots of kid jobs—snow shoveling, burger flipping, lawnmowing, etc.—have been largely taken over by adults these days. But the real issue here is that adults simply have no feel for inflation. Petula’s father probably got paid $5 for shoveling a walk in 1950, so that’s what he paid Petula. Now she wants to pay her kids $5. Ditto for everyone else in their generation. But $5 in 1950 is about $50 today.

Sure enough, a 30-second bit of googling suggests that the going rate for getting a neighborhood kid to shovel your walk is about $40 or so. More if the storm is heavy and you have a big lot. A professional goes for about $70.

Maybe kids these days are lazy. I don’t know—though the most recent kids I met were so smart and well-behaved that Marian and I were in awe. But hey—maybe they’re lazy too! I didn’t invite them to mow my lawn, after all. But this complaint about snow shoveling is just a personal version of that old chestnut, the business owners who complain they can’t find good workers but then admit they aren’t willing to raise their wages to attract them. Bottom line: don’t whine about lazy kids unless you’re willing to pay them enough to make it worth their time to work for you. For five bucks they’ll feed your cats while you’re on vacation. But only newbie suckers would shovel a walk after Snowzilla for that.

Read original article:  

Inflation: It’s a Real Thing!

Posted in ATTRA, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Inflation: It’s a Real Thing!

Why Do So Many People Believe Bernie Sanders?

by WilfredPba Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

OK, now for the Democrats. It’s really hard to get excited about the state of the race, isn’t it?

The Clinton campaign’s focus on gun control is absurd. Hillary has an NRA grade of F and Bernie gets a D-. That’s what we’re arguing about? For chrissake. How dispiriting can you get?

On health care, Bernie wants single-payer. Me too. And I’ll bet Hillary does as well. She’s just decided that it’s not politically useful to say so. And since neither one of them is going to get it anytime soon, does it really matter much?

The same is true on nearly every other domestic issue. Bernie is off to Hillary’s left—either genuinely or rhetorically—but in office they’d both be constrained to the same place. Neither one could accomplish even what Hillary wants, let alone what Bernie wants.

The one place where they have real differences and those differences might matter is national security. But for reasons of their own, neither of them really wants to talk much about that. Hillary doesn’t want to highlight her relative hawkishness in a Democratic primary, and Bernie doesn’t really want to highlight what his dovishness would mean in practice. Besides, it just gets in the way of the only message he really cares about: plutocracy and income inequality.

Bottom line: given the realities of American politics, they’d both be highly constrained in what they can accomplish in the White House. It doesn’t matter what’s in their hearts. What matters is (a) whether they can win in November and (b) what kind of deals they can broker with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

Anybody who’s read my blog for a while can guess where I fall on this. I think Bernie has done a great job of pushing Hillary a bit to the left and demonstrating that she can expect continued pressure on that front. But the truth is that Hillary wins on both points A and B. She’s not the most charismatic politician in the world, but as we all like to say, we’re voting for president, not someone to have a beer with. What’s more, I’ve long admired her tenacity; her ability to withstand decades of crude invective and political destruction derby; and her very obvious, lifelong commitment to using politics as a way of improving people’s lives. There have been a million noxious compromises along the way, but that’s how politics works in the real world. Plus I’d love to see a woman in the White House.

I like Bernie. I like what he says. If I believed he could do all the stuff he talks about, he’d have my vote. But I don’t.

Read article here: 

Why Do So Many People Believe Bernie Sanders?

Posted in alo, FF, GE, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Do So Many People Believe Bernie Sanders?

Why Do So Many People Believe Donald Trump?

by ClaudiaMillican Posted on January 26, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I’m sort of bored with the Republican race (and the Democratic race too—about which more later) but I do wonder if a lot of Republicans are getting things fundamentally wrong. Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don’t seem to matter, only motives do.

Here’s Rush Limbaugh on Friday: “Forget the name is Trump. If a candidate could guarantee to fix everything that’s wrong in this country the way the Republican Party thinks it’s wrong, if it were a slam dunk, if it were guaranteed, that candidate will still be opposed by the Republican Party establishment…. If he’s not part of the clique, they don’t want him in there.”

In other words, the GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life.

This really does get at a key part of Trump’s popularity: a lot of people believe him. Hell, I’d almost vote for him if I believed him. We’re talking about a guy who says he’s going to grow the economy at 6 percent, save Social Security, cut taxes on everyone, get rid of unemployment, crush ISIS, rebuild the military, erase the national debt, and make America great again. And the icing on the cake for conservatives is that he claims to be solidly pro-life, pro-gun, pro-religion, and in favor of nice, right-wing Supreme Court justices like Clarence Thomas. What’s not to like? A few minor deviations from movement conservatism? That’s piffle. Why are all those establishment Republicans opposed to him?

There are reasons, of course. But primary among them is that no one with a 3-digit IQ believes he can do this stuff. Lots of it is flatly impossible, and the rest is politically impossible. And if you don’t believe Trump, then he’s just a charlatan with nothing left except bad qualities: he’s erratic, narcissistic, boorish, racist, thin-skinned, ideologically unreliable, opportunistic, etc. etc. It’s pretty obvious why you’d oppose him.

So, really, it all comes down to whether you believe Donald Trump can do the stuff he says. It’s pretty plain that he can’t. So why do so many people think he can? That’s the $64 trillion question.

More – 

Why Do So Many People Believe Donald Trump?

Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Do So Many People Believe Donald Trump?

Quote of the Day: The Simple, Ever-So-Simple World of Donald Trump

by JerroldEdinburgh Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Behold the business acumen of Donald Trump:

Donald Trump says he’s unfazed by the prospect of running against Michael Bloomberg….At one point, Trump cast doubt on Bloomberg’s business success, suggesting that the head of the Bloomberg media empire wasn’t actually worth the $36.5 billion estimated by Forbes. “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it,” Trump said.

“I mean if somebody came in…and comes up with a better machine than him, people stop using it,” Trump said. “I don’t even know why other companies haven’t come up with a better machine. I mean why? It’s so simple.“

This comes from a man who managed to run into the ground an airline, a hotel, a casino empire, and an endless series of late-night shills. But he apparently has no idea why Bloomberg terminals are popular, nor any idea that Bloomberg has a number of large competitors. Compare to this:

“I mean if somebody came in…and builds a better car than Toyota, people stop buying them. I don’t even know why other companies haven’t come up with a better car. I mean why? It’s so simple.”

This is the same man who says it’s “so simple” to get Mexico to pay for a wall and force China to stop devaluing its currency; that he would “totally succeed” in creating jobs, reducing the budget deficit, stopping nuclear weapons in Iran, and saving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; that it’s “easy” to get OPEC to produce more oil; and that it’s “very simple” to get ISIS to surrender.

Now you understand why Trump thinks everything is easy. It’s because he has no idea what goes into any of this stuff. Every time he tries to do something that’s even slightly out of his wheelhouse (namely property development and bluster) he fails miserably, but he still thinks everything is easy. And his fans believe him.

Read More:  

Quote of the Day: The Simple, Ever-So-Simple World of Donald Trump

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Quote of the Day: The Simple, Ever-So-Simple World of Donald Trump

Raw Data: Lead Poisoning of Kids in Flint

by BiancaBlackwood Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

I wanted to get a read on historical levels of lead poisoning of children in Flint, Michigan, so I put together the chart on the right. There’s no consistent data available for the entire 20-year period, but I think I made fairly reasonable extrapolations from the data available.1 What you see is very steady and impressive progress from 1998 to 2013, with the number of children showing elevated blood lead levels (above 5 micrograms per deciliter) declining from approximately 50 percent to 3.6 percent.

Then Flint stopped using Detroit water and switched to Flint River water, which corroded the scale on their lead pipes and allowed lead to leach into the water. The number of children with elevated lead levels rose to 5.1 percent and then 6.4 percent.

In late 2015, Flint switched back to Detroit water. Preliminary testing suggests that this had a beneficial effect: the number of children with elevated lead levels dropped back to 3.0 percent. However, these numbers are still very tentative, so take them with a grain of salt.

1Here are my data sources and extrapolations. For early years, only data for children above 10 m/d was available, but later years showed both 10 m/d and 5 m/d, which suggests a rough factor of 6x between the two. Also, some years only show data for Genesee County, but other years show both Genesee and Flint, which suggests that Flint levels are about 1.6x higher than Genesee.

1998-2000: From Michigan Department of Health & Human Services chart here, extrapolated from Michigan —> Flint (factor = 0.87) and 10 m/d —> 5 m/d (factor = 6x)
2001-2004: From 2005 MDHHS report here, page 54, extrapolated from 10 m/d —> 5 m/d
2005-13: From MDHHS data here.
2014: From Hurley Medical center data here, adjusted for Genesee —> Flint (factor = 1.6)
2015: From Hurley Medical center data here, slides 10-11, adjusted for Genesee —> Flint.
2016: From preliminary MDHHS data for post-switch levels here.

Full spreadsheet here.

Continue at source – 

Raw Data: Lead Poisoning of Kids in Flint

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Raw Data: Lead Poisoning of Kids in Flint

Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

by Ethan0387xepklg Posted on January 25, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

My hometown of Orange County isn’t in the news much, so it’s a little sad that our latest brush with fame is the escape of three inmates from the central jail in Santa Ana. Here’s the long version of how they did it:

And here’s the short version: They cut out a vent cover and climbed to the roof. Then they rappelled down by tying together a bunch of sheets. This is what passes for brilliant in Orange County. Sigh.

Continue reading here – 

Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County

Posted in FF, GE, LAI, LG, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Here’s What Passes For a Brilliant Jailbreak In Orange County