John Voorheis

January 2015

About the only thing that dirtbag 19 year old me and current me agree on is that you shouldn't do wars

Distaste at PE/"corporate greed" is what glues the horseshoe together and provides the plausible deniability of the classics/racism is the thing

My other take that gets me in trouble on this is that private equity making single family homes accessible to renters merely returns us to the status quo before 2008, it's just we've swapped loose mortgage standards for SFH rentals

A lot of the horseshoe discourse around private equity buying single family homes is just a straightforward distaste on the part of homeowners and their children at the thought of sharing a neighborhood with (poorer, less white on average) renters

None of which ever engage with what it is the jobs they're sure are going to be replaced actually consist of, just a total lack of curiosity about the world they imagine being destroyed

Read the paper man

I am currently trying to get travel approved to go to a conference where the organizers are paying for travel expenses. The amount of aggregate hours spent on this process at going salary + overhead rates far exceeds the value of the travel. But good to know I should have just flown on an FBI jet.

It's political when you say something I disagree with. When I say something you disagree with you just can't handle the objective nonpartisan truth

As we get closer, the population forecasted to be exposed to a foot or more of snow has increased a bit:

Around 48 million people are forecasted to get at least a foot with slight probability

Almost 26 million with high probability

"political" in these settings of course just means any viewpoint the speaker disagrees with, whereas the things the speaker agrees with are nonpartisan independent sources of truth

Only issue is that it's low in lysine -- so it is magical that we not only have domesticated a number of split legumes that are high in lysine, but they cool approximately the same time as rice.

About the same number (46 million) are forecasted to experience "Extreme" winter storm impacts ("substantial disruption to daily life") with some probability; about 20 million with 40%+ probability

Rough calcs based on the Gridded EIF and the latest NWS forecasts, over the next 3 days:

-At least 46 million people are predicted to experience 12" or more of snow with at least some probability

-At least 21 million people are predicted to experience 12" or more of snow with *high* probability

DEI Phil

This is very much a widowmaker snow situation I think? Especially if the North American model (which is predicting more like 1-2 feet in NYC vs. the Euro model which is high single digits) turns out to be right.

NWS showing 30-40% chances of "Extreme" winter storm impacts (the highest on the WSSI-P scale) for Philadelphia-Boston on sun-tues

The employment to population ratio is about 60%, which includes everyone in the denominator.

But the SHED is a household survey, so that's not quite the right measure. You want the % of households with at least one person employed, and that's going to be closer to 80%

Maladjusted Beautiful Losses (ok, now we're just making up band names or Emo album titles)

ew gross

If AI can reconstruct cleared output from outside the firewall the statutory protections do not hold -- this is a database reconstruction and reidentification attack

I'm thinking here specifically of confidential data that has strong statutory privacy protections (so admin records or Census/stat agency data) -- these have constraints both on getting access and getting results cleared that serve as a costly signal of human effort/intellectual value

I don't even think AI slop papers are fraud, they just actively degrade the information environment.

I'm obviously not in charge of anything, but if I were and had the ability to set funding levels I would stop publishing all PUMS and expand the size of the RDC network (+associated staffing) by 20x

But Matt, 48% of Americans *don't* have 3 months savings, did you ever think about that?

(Implicitly people are gesturing towards a Rawlsian social evaluation, but this runs headlong into the evidence that poverty, properly measured has declined massively over 4 decades)

There was a case to be made that they were capturing the views of low social trust men that was hard to elicit otherwise; that's still there a bit, and they seem more and more to just be very responsive indicators of conventional wisdom harvested on the backs of crippling gambling addictions

I think it's pretty clear that research using any data an LLM can access on the open internet is going to be a gnarly pooling equilibrium that actively decreases our ability to know things about the world; this likely changes the privacy/utility tradeoff for producing public use microdata

It's the combination of rapid snowmelt + low/stagnant winds that seems to be the issue.

Theres also some evidence that dissolved road salt aerosolizes under these conditions, contributing chloride and sodium species to PM (in addition to the trapped particles in the snow)

I think this is melting snow (which has trapped particulates) + stagnant winds + maybe thermal inversion, similar to what was happening in the Midwest this weekend.

Forever remains baffling that people doing AI related software engineering -- an occupation which did not exist a decade ago that involves any tasks that did not exist five or even one years ago -- cannot possibly imagine new jobs coming into existence, only existing jobs going away.

Yea right, so the week of the week of the 19th