Word of warning on that Trent Telenko guy: he has some interesting but not completely novel observations, but like a lot of One Good Tweet types who get a sudden influx of followers, be careful with any grand pronouncements that go beyond his actual area of expertise.
The reality is that the best-informed military pundits will at this point admit they don’t know how this will go. That’s better than just assuming Ukraine is doomed, but let me just observe that road conditions in Ukraine are not unique to this year (or to Ukraine, given the border with Russia), and Ukrainians manage to move plenty of freight around anyway. So just beware of monocausal declarations.
That being said, the amount of material Russia is losing is extraordinary. The videos this morning (seemingly real, but not authenticated) of Z-marked civilian vehicles - cars, vans, coaches, dump trucks, and fuel trucks - being shipped by train do hint at high losses especially in supply vehicles. The focus on weapons over supply vehicles is common. Not just to angry dictators but the US suffered endless losses of contractor-driven supply trucks in Iraq too, albeit mostly after the invasion phase.
On Python: I have no advice. I think any reasonably intelligent person can learn to program. But learning how to program rarely involves exercises anyone is interested is revisiting, let alone ones that are also instructive in another realm. Unless you want to have two stages for all the material.
I confess as a child of the micro era it is amazing to me that schools (down to elementary) make no real effort to teach programming universally. It isn’t particularly hard. Though Python is almost as nit-picky and obscure in its own way as any other language.
The points on programming and data were on point though one can do a lot of things in Excel (I use Excel for financial analysis and don't need much more). When I was an undergrad many years ago at UC Santa Barbara, we only had Fortran on a mainframe for programming purposes. Over the years I've learned BASIC, C, and most recently Python. I never made the jump to C++ as the use of pointers in C was already a big leap for me. Python is pretty straight forward but the key to any of the languages is "use it or lose it"
Odd that either in the introduction or the body neither Brunnermier nor Gorodnichenko mentioned market transactions indicator of expectations. Likewise the phenomenon f the way the press covers inflation, seldom with any reference to Fed policy. And why not propose more market indicators (e.g. 1 ,2, 3, TIPS)
The difference in the slope of the Philips Curve for households v professional forecasters hardly seems surprising if households seem to believe as if that their incomes are fixed so higher prices mean lower real income. In terms of behavior we should expect to see an income effect and an intertemporal substitution effect with the net ambiguous.
I'm just a retired Eng professor of very little brain, but might it make sense to develop assignments using MS Access and writing the SQL? One reason I ask is because my son recently learned to do this and has found it extremely useful in finance. (The other much less important reason is that I taught myself Access years and years ago in order to pull together disparate date in Excel.)
The demonstrable incompetence of the Russian army should remind us all that Russia is the land of Potemkin villages and mythical Lieutenant Kijé who existed only in the Czar's misreading of a memo.
Word of warning on that Trent Telenko guy: he has some interesting but not completely novel observations, but like a lot of One Good Tweet types who get a sudden influx of followers, be careful with any grand pronouncements that go beyond his actual area of expertise.
The reality is that the best-informed military pundits will at this point admit they don’t know how this will go. That’s better than just assuming Ukraine is doomed, but let me just observe that road conditions in Ukraine are not unique to this year (or to Ukraine, given the border with Russia), and Ukrainians manage to move plenty of freight around anyway. So just beware of monocausal declarations.
That being said, the amount of material Russia is losing is extraordinary. The videos this morning (seemingly real, but not authenticated) of Z-marked civilian vehicles - cars, vans, coaches, dump trucks, and fuel trucks - being shipped by train do hint at high losses especially in supply vehicles. The focus on weapons over supply vehicles is common. Not just to angry dictators but the US suffered endless losses of contractor-driven supply trucks in Iraq too, albeit mostly after the invasion phase.
On Python: I have no advice. I think any reasonably intelligent person can learn to program. But learning how to program rarely involves exercises anyone is interested is revisiting, let alone ones that are also instructive in another realm. Unless you want to have two stages for all the material.
I confess as a child of the micro era it is amazing to me that schools (down to elementary) make no real effort to teach programming universally. It isn’t particularly hard. Though Python is almost as nit-picky and obscure in its own way as any other language.
The points on programming and data were on point though one can do a lot of things in Excel (I use Excel for financial analysis and don't need much more). When I was an undergrad many years ago at UC Santa Barbara, we only had Fortran on a mainframe for programming purposes. Over the years I've learned BASIC, C, and most recently Python. I never made the jump to C++ as the use of pointers in C was already a big leap for me. Python is pretty straight forward but the key to any of the languages is "use it or lose it"
Odd that either in the introduction or the body neither Brunnermier nor Gorodnichenko mentioned market transactions indicator of expectations. Likewise the phenomenon f the way the press covers inflation, seldom with any reference to Fed policy. And why not propose more market indicators (e.g. 1 ,2, 3, TIPS)
The difference in the slope of the Philips Curve for households v professional forecasters hardly seems surprising if households seem to believe as if that their incomes are fixed so higher prices mean lower real income. In terms of behavior we should expect to see an income effect and an intertemporal substitution effect with the net ambiguous.
I'm just a retired Eng professor of very little brain, but might it make sense to develop assignments using MS Access and writing the SQL? One reason I ask is because my son recently learned to do this and has found it extremely useful in finance. (The other much less important reason is that I taught myself Access years and years ago in order to pull together disparate date in Excel.)
The demonstrable incompetence of the Russian army should remind us all that Russia is the land of Potemkin villages and mythical Lieutenant Kijé who existed only in the Czar's misreading of a memo.
Yglesias on COVID? This isn't just background noise?