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How would you like the last two grafs of what you post to be cut because someone thinks they are "bullshit?" Auden deserves to be read in full, whether you agree with him or not. You should correct your post and add the last two stanzas. "All I have is a voice/to undo the folded lie" is a pretty good description of what you and I do for a living.

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Touché...

But, this week, I feel that the last two stanzas are bullshit. When I recover I will add them. Whenever that is...

Brad

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Brown Stan Account: It is not illiteracy of one thing or another. Knowing something seems to be a function of how frequently you use it. If students of art and design are not going to calculate percentages often, that skill will likely be lost. No muscle memory there. On unit conversions, try getting people to switch to the metric system (or the reverse in the UK) and watch what happens.

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Noah Smith is on a tear and I don't want him to slow down.

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Daly: But is the Fed possibly working on returning to a 2% PCE trajectory too hard, too fast? So hard in fact that it might overshoot and get both below target inflation and above target unemployment?

I hope that it's just exposition, but I do not like the idea that a) the inflation target is whatever it takes to make it "invisible." Inflation makes relative price changes, changes toward market clearing, income maximization relations possible when some prices cannot adjust downward and b) not excess demand for a unitary blob of GDP that needs to be reduced.

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"No matter what Michael Lewis may say, taking your customer’s money and using it to allow Alameda to make very large bets on crypto is not a “great business”—it is, rather, a business that is derivative of the crypto Ponzi scheme, and “great” only as long as the music continues to play:"

I wonder if the good Professor has read Michael Lewis's book. I don't think he every said what is attributed in the above quote (I'm almost finished with the book and find it a very good explanation of all the characters which is all that it is purported to be and not a dissection of business practices which are alluded to). I think there are a lot of people giving Lewis a bad rap likely out of envy that he had such proximal access to one of the great rise and downfalls of business history.

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The book is somewhat more measured. The book tour is lit, and insane. Watch Lewis oin 60 minutes. And think about Lewis's characterization of the post-bankruptcy receiver.

You might also take a look at Lewis's response to Zeke Faux's disappointment at his puff-interviewing of SBF by accusing Faux of misrepresenting facts in order to sell books.

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I have Zeke Faux's book up next to read. I just heard a couple of radio interviews with Lewis and they were OK. He had a good conversation with Barry Ritholtz on Masters in Business. If you really want to listen to a howler of an interview, Ritholtz had former Trump econ czar, Gary Cohn on and it was ridiculous how Ritholtz was fawning all over him. He never asked the really hard questions about the Trump tax cut and let Cohn get away with a lot of mistruths about the impact of the law.

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Orzel: "I don't think it's good for our educational culture that math is treated as an innate skill rather than a learned skill…" It's not but is THAT the problem? Not that I know what IS!

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Mary Daly: When US diplomats were testifying to Congress during Trump's first impeachment trial related to Ukraine, I recall a comment someone (don't know who) made on TV about how professional the testimonies were and how deftly the diplomats had handled each question, questions that were clearly designed to trip them up. Probably because "government is no good" is repeated so frequently, the person exclaimed as if he couldn't believe the good stuff he was hearing/seeing (paraphrase): Is THIS really what I'm getting for my taxes? That's what comes to my mind whenever I read or listen to Mary Daly.

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I think that one of SBF's great misunderstandings is that the law is deontological, and he is a pure consequentialist, and perhaps a utility monster in the flesh. To the law, embezzlement is embezzlement: full stop. To SBF, embezzlement is fine if he thinks he can replace the bezzle some fine day in the future.

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