Gonzo “last mile still to come” inflation-reduction reports & takes demonstrate zero situational awareness; the reason to think that people’s economic situations are good is that they are good; Sam...
BREXIT. Martin Wolf spells it out, correctly. The vitriol to be seen when watching BBC programs like "Question Time" that focussed on this issue was so divisive. Brexiteers would not acknowledge that this would be anything other than an unalloyed benefit. The motive was "keeping those "furrners" out. Screw the risk of any losses - most of which were not believed to affect the older generation. I lost long standing "friends" over the issue.
I will say that Brexit was more a trigger than indicative of of the mood of the ruling party. The UK Home Office became very aggressive towards any perceived foreigner, even UK ex-pats trying to renew passports. Almost every week another story emerges of the Home Office denying residency to EU citizens having lived in Britain for many decades, often for teh most trivial of reasons. This is all of a piece with teh same type of stories over the Windrush scandal, perpetrated entirely by the Home Office and its "hostile policy".
Britain has become stupid. The US seems to be headed in the same stupid direction.
"Enshittification [of Google Search] is creeping in at the edges"
That's a bit of a puzzling comment. Google Search has been on a linear descent toward craterization for the last 5 years, and has been unreliable and essentially unusable for the last 2 years. Even if you know the seldom-used parameters and filters (many of which don't seem to actually work any more) you cannot trust any result you get from Google without checking it against 2-3 other sources. It is a haven of false information, grift, and fraud.
Good to see former Googlers are finally recognizing this, so that's something.
Those "last mile" inflation reports are bonkers! Especially the ones arguing that low unemployment is keeping inflation "sticky" over the last mile. Just think about it: Over the nine miles of this ten-mile journey, inflation has dropped about 5- to 6- percentage points from its peak. During that entire time, unemployment stayed close to where it is now. Why would this low unemployment keep inflation from dipping over the last mile when it didn't keep it from dipping over the prior nine?
Besides, as Paul Krugman correctly points out, recent data are clearly indicating that there might be no more miles left.Today's GDP deflator speaks loudly to that issue. But the usual suspects will not see.
Unless the Fed gets on this case quickly, we may soon have a dis-inflation (below 2%) problem developing. People, aggregate supply is now ahead of aggregate demand, and probably outpacing it. That's a logical conclusion of two facts: aggregate demand has been very strong and inflation has decelerated. The longer aggregate supply exceeds aggregate demand, the greater the dis-inflation pressures (if not a deflation) in future months. The Fed needs to wake up and heavily discount these silly "last-mile" tales, unless they are invoking some big exogenous upward price pressures. Since the Fed can't do much to supply, it needs to boost demand further to forestall dis-inflationary pressures (i.e. below 2%). Demand growth needs to stay well above trend rate to catch up to supply. That can be done by reducing the policy interest rate so that at least some of the prior erosion of demand can be reversed. The sooner the better.
Boeing-Spirit QA. Boeing really hasn't learned the lesson "A reputation is built over a lifetime. It takes just one day to throw it away." [McDonnell-Douglas] Boeing seems to be going the way of Chysler. If it benefits Airbus, then fine. But if the demands of airlines results in buying Chinese airliners,..
Unauthorized immigrants in US. One question is why there are 3x as many today as there were in 1990. Was this due to lax policy that was addressed around teh financial collapse. Was the stable state due to fewer attepting to come after the US economy went into recession. A combination of both. Is there a difference in labeling? Are "Dreamers" authorized or not, and does this depend on which political party is in the White House?
If the number of unauthorized immigrants was reduced to 1990 levels almost instantly, what would be the consequences? [Similar to Florida's post-hurricane repair and construction?]
After border controls were re-tightened under Eisenhower there has been some form of immigration amnesty at 15 year intervals to recognize that the human beings who are here are (1) part of our society and economy (2) aren't going "back". We haven't had one of those since Newt Gingrich & Co weaponized the issue to drive "wedges", so the number of technically undocumented immigrants continues to grow. I'm not sure why the couple who have lived down the street for 20 years, working hard and raising their kids as good citizens, should be viewed as the enemy and driven out (wherever out may be) but apparently it is very important to the Republicans to do so.
So many of these sorts of pieces ignore teh differences in the types of tasks to be done. You want to write an article? There are l;iterally millions of ways to write an article, so if a prompt gives you one of those million that is acceptable, it works. Want to code a task that needs to be accuratel? The prompt will give you potentially a million results, of which only a few come close. In that xcase it doesn't work.
A simple case that most people can understand is using a spreadsheet. What prompts would you need to make to get the spreadsheet doing the exact task you want? Probably a lot more in time and error correcting than doing it yourself.
In my experience, prompts for coding are best used for code snippets or simple methods/functions that can be defined easily and are likely to be commonly made and so can be accessed and modidied in the "stochastic parrot" approach.
When building expert systems was the hot AI, it was noted that experts had hidden knowledge that was rarely exposed in discussions, making these systems brittle and failure prone. I would speculate that if prompts were tested against the types of tasks from writing/art to those with the fewest possible correct soltions, that it would be very clear that "prompt engineering" would start to look like a complex expert system as the tasks got harder to be defined correctly. This may seem obvious, but I just don't see articles written to address this issue.
The other issue is stability.
Suppose you get the perfect prompt to handle some task. If it was deterministic, like code, it could be relied on to automate the task. But do prompts act in teh same way. Anecdotally, the answer seems to be no. They change the output for reasons out of the user's control. This is not helpful unless you are doing one-off unique tasks - like writing an article.
Good to see you have found Juan Browne's Blancoliro YT. He, Scott Perdue and Dan Grader are my go to sites about aircraft. YT came thru with the right story, facts not BS, of the Door incident.
My wife is a pilot and has a plane so I do have a need to stay current. For military aircraft is go to Ward Carroll and Fighterpilotpodcast.
Google: I don't begrudge them several thing that I don't want if they will eventually show me what I DO ask for. It doesn't feel like rocket science to find a mutually profitable midpoing.
Deficit, Debt, and Inflation Hawks are migratory and only appear during Democratic Presidencies. They molt into Tax and Entitlement Cutters during Republican Regimes.
When the consumer is spending 50% of his income on housing, it would seem, depending where the 50% went, that spending other parts of the economy would fall. I assume that the 50% went to the top 10% who have a lower propensity to spend. Where is the balance reached?
Housing Rebound: I'd LIKE to believe that the reason is progress in land use and building gode reform, but I rather that Klein gave me his opinion.
Of course it's good that the economy can function with a 2% real return on the marginal investment project. But not if this means net capital inflow. ST capital is OK (banking is an honorable function) but we need a lot of direct investment outflows to friend-shore supplies away from China-vulnerable sources.
The Border: I get the point; unauthorized entry has become more visible (not more common) as people have shifted to claiming asylum instead of just entering surreptitiously. That would be good if we would just have enough asylum case workers there to hear the claims expeditiously and send people with invalid claims -- the great majority, I suppose -- back to where they came from. There is no reason to provide Abbot and DeSantis with cannon fodder to demagogue with.
We need a better, merit based system for selecting who we DO want to allow to immigrate, bit that implies the ability to say no to some postulants.
The term used to be "political" asylum, just as the term used to be "illegal" immigrant. The adjective in both these terms has fallen into disuse. As I previously mentioned, the grounds for asylum have expanded greatly to now include ordinary crime and even spousal abuse. As such it doesn't really matter whether the government in the country you left is "oppressive" or not. With a good lawyer, you can still get asylum. For example, I know a house painter who, with his lawyer's coaching, was granted asylum when he showed the immigration judge scars on his arms that he testified he got when defending himself from gang members in Honduras 15 years ago!
Yes, we ought to go back to "Political" asylum -- although political should not mean the government came for you by name. Bombing your village could count.
"when there seems to be no way to get to full employment by boosting investment of real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests in order to get it to match desired savings."
But here was: Ben Bernanke announcing that he was going to push inflation up above target for awhile until he works the kinks out of the relative price mess that a bunch of WS "masters of the universe" ("Hey, Tim, why aren't these guys in jail or at least the poor house?") caused. Of course in theory, Congress could also have "invested real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests."
BREXIT. Martin Wolf spells it out, correctly. The vitriol to be seen when watching BBC programs like "Question Time" that focussed on this issue was so divisive. Brexiteers would not acknowledge that this would be anything other than an unalloyed benefit. The motive was "keeping those "furrners" out. Screw the risk of any losses - most of which were not believed to affect the older generation. I lost long standing "friends" over the issue.
I will say that Brexit was more a trigger than indicative of of the mood of the ruling party. The UK Home Office became very aggressive towards any perceived foreigner, even UK ex-pats trying to renew passports. Almost every week another story emerges of the Home Office denying residency to EU citizens having lived in Britain for many decades, often for teh most trivial of reasons. This is all of a piece with teh same type of stories over the Windrush scandal, perpetrated entirely by the Home Office and its "hostile policy".
Britain has become stupid. The US seems to be headed in the same stupid direction.
"Enshittification [of Google Search] is creeping in at the edges"
That's a bit of a puzzling comment. Google Search has been on a linear descent toward craterization for the last 5 years, and has been unreliable and essentially unusable for the last 2 years. Even if you know the seldom-used parameters and filters (many of which don't seem to actually work any more) you cannot trust any result you get from Google without checking it against 2-3 other sources. It is a haven of false information, grift, and fraud.
Good to see former Googlers are finally recognizing this, so that's something.
A little strong, but you are right...
Those "last mile" inflation reports are bonkers! Especially the ones arguing that low unemployment is keeping inflation "sticky" over the last mile. Just think about it: Over the nine miles of this ten-mile journey, inflation has dropped about 5- to 6- percentage points from its peak. During that entire time, unemployment stayed close to where it is now. Why would this low unemployment keep inflation from dipping over the last mile when it didn't keep it from dipping over the prior nine?
Besides, as Paul Krugman correctly points out, recent data are clearly indicating that there might be no more miles left.Today's GDP deflator speaks loudly to that issue. But the usual suspects will not see.
Unless the Fed gets on this case quickly, we may soon have a dis-inflation (below 2%) problem developing. People, aggregate supply is now ahead of aggregate demand, and probably outpacing it. That's a logical conclusion of two facts: aggregate demand has been very strong and inflation has decelerated. The longer aggregate supply exceeds aggregate demand, the greater the dis-inflation pressures (if not a deflation) in future months. The Fed needs to wake up and heavily discount these silly "last-mile" tales, unless they are invoking some big exogenous upward price pressures. Since the Fed can't do much to supply, it needs to boost demand further to forestall dis-inflationary pressures (i.e. below 2%). Demand growth needs to stay well above trend rate to catch up to supply. That can be done by reducing the policy interest rate so that at least some of the prior erosion of demand can be reversed. The sooner the better.
Boeing-Spirit QA. Boeing really hasn't learned the lesson "A reputation is built over a lifetime. It takes just one day to throw it away." [McDonnell-Douglas] Boeing seems to be going the way of Chysler. If it benefits Airbus, then fine. But if the demands of airlines results in buying Chinese airliners,..
Unauthorized immigrants in US. One question is why there are 3x as many today as there were in 1990. Was this due to lax policy that was addressed around teh financial collapse. Was the stable state due to fewer attepting to come after the US economy went into recession. A combination of both. Is there a difference in labeling? Are "Dreamers" authorized or not, and does this depend on which political party is in the White House?
If the number of unauthorized immigrants was reduced to 1990 levels almost instantly, what would be the consequences? [Similar to Florida's post-hurricane repair and construction?]
After border controls were re-tightened under Eisenhower there has been some form of immigration amnesty at 15 year intervals to recognize that the human beings who are here are (1) part of our society and economy (2) aren't going "back". We haven't had one of those since Newt Gingrich & Co weaponized the issue to drive "wedges", so the number of technically undocumented immigrants continues to grow. I'm not sure why the couple who have lived down the street for 20 years, working hard and raising their kids as good citizens, should be viewed as the enemy and driven out (wherever out may be) but apparently it is very important to the Republicans to do so.
re: GPT-LLM-AML and prompt engineering.
So many of these sorts of pieces ignore teh differences in the types of tasks to be done. You want to write an article? There are l;iterally millions of ways to write an article, so if a prompt gives you one of those million that is acceptable, it works. Want to code a task that needs to be accuratel? The prompt will give you potentially a million results, of which only a few come close. In that xcase it doesn't work.
A simple case that most people can understand is using a spreadsheet. What prompts would you need to make to get the spreadsheet doing the exact task you want? Probably a lot more in time and error correcting than doing it yourself.
In my experience, prompts for coding are best used for code snippets or simple methods/functions that can be defined easily and are likely to be commonly made and so can be accessed and modidied in the "stochastic parrot" approach.
When building expert systems was the hot AI, it was noted that experts had hidden knowledge that was rarely exposed in discussions, making these systems brittle and failure prone. I would speculate that if prompts were tested against the types of tasks from writing/art to those with the fewest possible correct soltions, that it would be very clear that "prompt engineering" would start to look like a complex expert system as the tasks got harder to be defined correctly. This may seem obvious, but I just don't see articles written to address this issue.
The other issue is stability.
Suppose you get the perfect prompt to handle some task. If it was deterministic, like code, it could be relied on to automate the task. But do prompts act in teh same way. Anecdotally, the answer seems to be no. They change the output for reasons out of the user's control. This is not helpful unless you are doing one-off unique tasks - like writing an article.
Good to see you have found Juan Browne's Blancoliro YT. He, Scott Perdue and Dan Grader are my go to sites about aircraft. YT came thru with the right story, facts not BS, of the Door incident.
My wife is a pilot and has a plane so I do have a need to stay current. For military aircraft is go to Ward Carroll and Fighterpilotpodcast.
Google: I don't begrudge them several thing that I don't want if they will eventually show me what I DO ask for. It doesn't feel like rocket science to find a mutually profitable midpoing.
Re: Immigration
The Library of Congress has published multiple papers on Mexican immigration. Google library of congress mexican immigration
Deficit, Debt, and Inflation Hawks are migratory and only appear during Democratic Presidencies. They molt into Tax and Entitlement Cutters during Republican Regimes.
Yes. Which means that Democrats when they have the trifecta chance should destroy the deficits these creatures feed on.
We did that under Clinton. Bush then gave it all away.
Indeed...
RE: Inflation
When the consumer is spending 50% of his income on housing, it would seem, depending where the 50% went, that spending other parts of the economy would fall. I assume that the 50% went to the top 10% who have a lower propensity to spend. Where is the balance reached?
Housing Rebound: I'd LIKE to believe that the reason is progress in land use and building gode reform, but I rather that Klein gave me his opinion.
Of course it's good that the economy can function with a 2% real return on the marginal investment project. But not if this means net capital inflow. ST capital is OK (banking is an honorable function) but we need a lot of direct investment outflows to friend-shore supplies away from China-vulnerable sources.
The Border: I get the point; unauthorized entry has become more visible (not more common) as people have shifted to claiming asylum instead of just entering surreptitiously. That would be good if we would just have enough asylum case workers there to hear the claims expeditiously and send people with invalid claims -- the great majority, I suppose -- back to where they came from. There is no reason to provide Abbot and DeSantis with cannon fodder to demagogue with.
We need a better, merit based system for selecting who we DO want to allow to immigrate, bit that implies the ability to say no to some postulants.
The term used to be "political" asylum, just as the term used to be "illegal" immigrant. The adjective in both these terms has fallen into disuse. As I previously mentioned, the grounds for asylum have expanded greatly to now include ordinary crime and even spousal abuse. As such it doesn't really matter whether the government in the country you left is "oppressive" or not. With a good lawyer, you can still get asylum. For example, I know a house painter who, with his lawyer's coaching, was granted asylum when he showed the immigration judge scars on his arms that he testified he got when defending himself from gang members in Honduras 15 years ago!
Yes, we ought to go back to "Political" asylum -- although political should not mean the government came for you by name. Bombing your village could count.
"when there seems to be no way to get to full employment by boosting investment of real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests in order to get it to match desired savings."
But here was: Ben Bernanke announcing that he was going to push inflation up above target for awhile until he works the kinks out of the relative price mess that a bunch of WS "masters of the universe" ("Hey, Tim, why aren't these guys in jail or at least the poor house?") caused. Of course in theory, Congress could also have "invested real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests."