Random Thread

[Vijay]

It's been a few months since I've been here. What's new? I am not reading all 50+ notifications.

Not really new, but we're still waiting around in the Language Telephone game.

Pretty much brand-new now: Moose-Tache has apparently been asking other folks to take up the slack so we can finally wrap up the game.

[mèþru]

This may affect those of you who live in the US and rely on assistance for housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is accepting public comments on its proposal to change a rule related to fair housing. https://pnsne.ws/30keYFK

Comments go here: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=HUD-2020-0011

[mèþru]

Christopher Tolkien died today

[mèþru]

What happened with Salmoneus? I've seen several references to him having left.

[Vijay]

Start here, skim (EDIT: or read if you wish ) through the next few posts, and you'll find your answer.

[Pabappa]

Trump is definitely a good leader but if we want to ensure a good future for America we need to make sure he concentrates his efforts where it matters most. So we have decided that Trump will only be on the ballot in seven states, and we're changing the electoral map just a little bit to ensure this effort is well rewarded. Gerrymandering is legal now and there is no law that says voting districts have to match state boundaries or have any people in them in order to qualify for electoral votes. The updated map that we will be using for the 2020 election is here, courtesy of http://yaPMS.com :

http://pabappa.com/voter.png

[Kuchigakatai]

Tolkien Jr. dead.

[Pabappa]

getting a haircut really cut down on my ability to retain heat .... i was wearing four layers today, top and bottom, and its not even below freezing. i felt bad when i went to the corner grocery store and i took up an entire aisle and people couldnt even get around me. my avatar is appropriate in this case.

[Linguoboy]

Even by the standards of Google Translate, their Hawai'ian version is garbage. I tested it by typing in "The fog is heavy today" and got "Kaumaha ka lā ka lā lā" which literally means "Heavy the day the day day".

[Vijay]

The less data they have for a language, the more likely the output is to be total garbage.

[Pabappa]

https://www.instagram.com/ronnaldong/ does the kind of "transition" art where 2 images share one part in common, e.g. a girl holding a balloon in a cloud where that balloon is also the yolk of an egg. I found someone else whose name I dont remember who did much the same thing but all his paintings are paywalled (understandably, becaus etheyre really good) and therefore i only ever had ~600px versions of them . searching for flying whales turned up thousands of hits ... guess its more popular than i thought.

ah i found him: Rob Gonsalves . e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/ea/58 ... b525a0.jpg , https://marcusashley.com/artwork/the-un ... ea-and-sky
in fact i think i ve posted his art here before too

https://lrdpdwhome.files.wordpress.com/ ... re_out.jpg <--- someone figured out how to extract a full size image for this one, but for most of the others the full size image isnt even available

[cedh]

https://www.instagram.com/ronnaldong/ does the kind of "transition" art where 2 images share one part in common, e.g. a girl holding a balloon in a cloud where that balloon is also the yolk of an egg. I found someone else whose name I dont remember who did much the same thing but all his paintings are paywalled (understandably, becaus etheyre really good) and therefore i only ever had ~600px versions of them . searching for flying whales turned up thousands of hits ... guess its more popular than i thought.

ah i found him: Rob Gonsalves . e.g. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/69/ea/58 ... b525a0.jpg , https://marcusashley.com/artwork/the-un ... ea-and-sky
in fact i think i ve posted his art here before too

https://lrdpdwhome.files.wordpress.com/ ... re_out.jpg <--- someone figured out how to extract a full size image for this one, but for most of the others the full size image isnt even available

Erik Johansson does something quite similar. (I've been using this picture as my desktop background for quite some time.)

[Raphael]

I'll return to something I posted here months ago on the grounds of something I just read - apologies in advance for bringing it up again:

My nightmare scenarios, to the extent to which I have them, tend to be different depending on the topic, but on the specific topic of economic policy, one of my worst nightmares is basically that the Keynesians and the austerians might both be right about why the other side's approach won't work. I mean, both sides seem to be much better at criticizing the other side's approach than at refuting the other side's criticisms of their own approach.

The statements "If everyone keeps cutting expenses, everyone ends up with less income, forcing everyone to cut expenses even more, leading to everyone having even less income, etc." and "If you keep going deeper and deeper into debt, eventually you'll run out of people willing to lend you anything" can well be both true at the same time.

Well, I've now read Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics (the updated edition), and it turns out that, while he is, of course, a strong Keynesian himself, in Chapter 5 he gets quite close to making a somewhat similar point:

Imagine an economy that isn’t perfect. (What economy is?) Maybe the government is running a budget deficit that, while not really threatening its solvency, is coming down more slowly than it should, or maybe banks with political connections have made too many loans to questionable borrowers. But, as far as anyone can tell from the numbers, there are no problems that cannot be dealt with given goodwill and a few years of stability.

Then, for some reason—perhaps an economic crisis on the other side of the world—investors become jittery and start pulling their money out en masse. Suddenly the country is in trouble— its stock market is plunging, its interest rates are soaring. You might think that savvy investors would see this as an opportunity to buy. After all, if the fundamentals haven’t changed, doesn’t this mean that assets are now undervalued? But, as we saw in Chapter 4, the answer is “not necessarily.” The crash in asset values may cause previously sound banks to collapse. Economic slump, high interest rates, and a devalued exchange rate may cause sound companies to go bankrupt. At worst, economic distress may cause political instability. Maybe buying when everyone else is rushing for the exits isn’t such a good idea after all; maybe it’s better to run for the exit yourself.

Thus it is possible in principle that a loss of confidence in a country can produce an economic crisis that justifies that loss of confidence— that countries may be vulnerable to what economists call “self-fulfilling speculative attacks.” And while many economists used to be skeptical about the importance of such self-fulfilling crises, the experience of the 1990s in Latin America and Asia settled those doubts, at least as a practical matter.

The funny thing is that once you take the possibility of self-fulfilling crises seriously, market psychology becomes crucial— so crucial that within limits, the expectations, even the prejudices of investors, become economic fundamentals— because believing makes it so.

Suppose, for example, that everyone is convinced that despite its remarkably high dependence on foreign capital (it has run large current account deficits of more than 4 percent of GDP for decades), Australia is basically a sound country— it can be counted on to be politically and economically stable. Then the market response to a decline in the Australian dollar is in effect to say, “Good, that’s over, let’s buy Australian,” and the economy actually benefits. The market’s good opinion is therefore confirmed.

On the other hand, suppose that despite twenty years of remarkable progress people are not quite convinced that Indonesia is no longer the country of The Year of Living Dangerously. Then when the rupiah falls they may say, “Oh, my God, they’re reverting to the bad old days”; the resulting capital flight leads to financial, economic, and political crisis, and the market’s bad opinion is similarly confirmed.

It seems, in other words, that the Keynesian compact is a sometime thing. The common view among economists that floating rates are the best, if imperfect, solution to the international monetary trilemma was based on the experience of countries like Canada, Britain, and the United States. But during the 1990s a series of countries— Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, Korea— discovered that they were subject to different rules. Again and again, attempts to engage in moderate devaluations led to a drastic collapse in confidence. It is this problem of confidence that ultimately explains why the Keynesian compact has been broken.

In other words, Keynesianism can work for countries that don't have to face serious prejudices among the people who work on "the markets", but countries that do have to deal with such prejudices will pretty quickly run out of people willing to lend them money. (I find it interesting how he comes pretty close to saying that countries perceived as "white" usually get petter treatment from "the markets" than countries perceived as darker-skinned, but never quite gets there.)

[Moose-tache]

In other words, Keynesianism can work for countries that don't have to face serious prejudices among the people who work on "the markets", but countries that do have to deal with such prejudices will pretty quickly run out of people willing to lend them money. (I find it interesting how he comes pretty close to saying that countries perceived as "white" usually get petter treatment from "the markets" than countries perceived as darker-skinned, but never quite gets there.)

Very true. Keynesians have always been aware of this, or at least have been since the 90s. There are two main solutions presented so far. The first is to tut-tut over how incorrect everyone is to be prejudiced against developing economies (or even racist against non-whites), and assume that eventually they will double check their decision spreadsheet that everyone has of course, and alter their behavior. The second solution is to promote education among policy makers about why some economies aren't as toxic as they might look at first glance, because of course they wouldn't be so prejudiced if only they knew better. In other words, the classic Keynesian fallacy that everyone else in the world also thinks like they do, i.e. the world is populated by cartoon versions of Sheldon Cooper. Keynesian economics has always rested on the premise of everything always working exactly right forever, operated by infinitely rational actors with perfect information. Why don't the plebs just get it?

[Raphael]

Keynesian economics has always rested on the premise of everything always working exactly right forever, operated by infinitely rational actors with perfect information.

Then again, that's true of the economic theories peddled by their right-wing opponents, too.

[Pabappa]

given how bloated modern web design is, I've been increasingly switching to taking screenshots and saving them as PNG or GIF when I want to save a webpage that has graphics or tables that cant be easily copy/pasted as plain text. e.g. it was 300K just for the raw HTML of a page that had just a single chart on it, of about 10 rows, while the other 99% of the page was Javascript, ads, etc. ... and thats just the raw HTML. the files that came along with it added another 12 MB. The chart was only content on the page. it turned out to be just 38K saving it as PNG, and that could have been even lower, maybe 10K, if i had saved it as 8bit PNG instead of 24. the only downside is that i cant search the text, but in this case a text search wouldnt havbe been any good anyway since it was just a chart of numbers and names.


unrelated ... apparently my favorite font family is called Play. Funny to me because that's been my nickname on IRC for several years and I've come to identify with it even more than I've identified with previous nicks.

I saw a font like this a few years ago and fell in love with it. I tracked it down using a font identifier website to a font called GameStation Storm, which looks essentially identical to the one in the link I posted. But I had not realized that it was a derivative of a font with a much simpler name until now when I stumbled across a website that used just "Play" in the CSS. It would seem that GameStation is just "sharpened" Play, with tiny projecting corners on the serifs. Apparently the browser knows that GameStation Storm is similar to Play and will substitute that whenever the original Play font is not available. I think there exists a "font family" called Play which consists of Play and similar fonts like GameStation.

[quinterbeck]

Found on Twitter:

[Raphael]

I just got a new external hard drive - a WD Elements 4 TB. I'm generally happy with it, but I have a question, and I wonder if some of the tech-savvier people among you might be able to answer it. You see, in addition to the sockets for the USB plug and the power plug, it has a mysterious third opening. You can see it here between the number "10" and the symbol that looks a bit like a padlock:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bN80Qi ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IgtqPH ... sp=sharing

Any ideas what this opening might be for? The manual wasn't any help.

[Nortaneous]

I just got a new external hard drive - a WD Elements 4 TB. I'm generally happy with it, but I have a question, and I wonder if some of the tech-savvier people among you might be able to answer it. You see, in addition to the sockets for the USB plug and the power plug, it has a mysterious third opening. You can see it here between the number "10" and the symbol that looks a bit like a padlock:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bN80Qi ... sp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IgtqPH ... sp=sharing

Any ideas what this opening might be for? The manual wasn't any help.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_Security_Slot

[Raphael]

Thank you!