Air dropped a few billions here and there!

"The change, which would allow real estate businesses to take advantage of a new tax break that's planned for partnerships, limited liability companies and other so-called 'pass-through' businesses, combined elements of House and Senate legislation in a new way."

- "Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee ... wrote [yesterday] to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch seeking an explanation for how the provision came to be included in the final bill after being asked about it by a reporter."

- Corker: "The suggestion was that it was airdropped into the conference without prior consideration by either the House or the Senate."

https://www.axios.com/last-minute-tax-break-for-real-estate-investors-air-dropped-on-capitol-hill-2518371645.html

Wikipedia article on Helicopter Money needs to be updated. Basically, top earners, including our so-called president, get a tax cut financed by 5-7% growth in federal debt.

Когда сбываются детские мечты

Давным-давно, еще в позапрошлой жизни, у нас в квартире была радиоточка. Почти все время она передавала партийную пропаганду и новости о рекордных урожаях, которых не было. Но иногда там проскакивала хорошая музыка или фантастические истории. Я был маленьким и мечтал, чтобы у меня была своя собственная радиоточка, и чтобы она играла и рассказывала только то, что мне интересно. Вот кто бы мог подумать, что Амазон изобретет именно такую штуку и именно так ее назовет.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-echo-prices-turn-smart-speaker-market-on-its-ear-1513593000

Fucking Moron (tm)

It's unbelievable how Covfefe nominates ideological judges. For life, Carl! The guy is completely clueless on judicial procedure issues; instead he's well known for his conservative political views.

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Quote of the Day

In 1940, 55 percent of all the residences in the country were heated with coal or coke (77 percent of the central heating systems); by 1950, just five years after the end of hostilities, that figure had dropped to 35 percent, and by 1970 to 2 percent of the total (US Bureau of the Census, 1940, 1950, 1970). If one can rely on the accuracy of the consumer price indexes, the price of coal remained roughly on a par with the price of electricity, gas, and fuel oil during this period. What, then, can explain the flight from coal?



-- Ruth Schwartz Cowan. The Consumption Junction: A Proposal for Research Strategies in the Sociology of Technology. ibid.

(no subject)

But it was the idea of a pattern of differentially attenuated ultrasound that occurred to Karl Theo and Friedrich Dussik, Austrian brothers, one a neurologist and the other a physicist, in the late 1930s. In other words, differences in the amount of energy transmitted through an organ could be used to create a pattern that would represent the form of that organ. This led the Dussiks to make the first claim that ultrasound could be used diagnostically.

In 1937 he [Karl Theo Dussik] obtained the first pictures of the patterned attenuation of an ultrasound beam passing through the skull at a series of positions. The intention was to discover abnormalities in the shape of the ventricles in the brain without using x-rays and dyes. The energy of the transmitted beam could be registered on a photographic plate, so that as the transmitter was moved across the skull a pattern of dark and light patches was built up on the plate.
...

Karl Dussik’s work came to the attention of the American physicist, Richard Bolt, who was director of the Acoustics Laboratory at MIT from 1946 to 1957.

The medical acoustics project was just one of a number of projects, although it is the one with which Bolt was involved. In April 1949 Bolt, his colleague Leo Beranek, and their collaborator at the Massachusetts General Hospital, the brain surgeon H. Thomas Ballantine, wrote to J. R. Killian, the president of MIT, seeking funds for their proposed research.

-- Edward Yoxen. Seeing with Sound: A Study of the Development of Medical Images

The same principle was later used in MRI machines. In general, the idea in combination with calibration seems to be "deeply learnable," although you can completely skip the visualization part. Essentially, we induce and map differences in one domain into a perceivable codomain in order to extract objects/processes and map them further to diagnostics info.

Related: https://a16z.com/2017/12/14/bio-team-bio-fund-ii/

(no subject)

Пожалуй, я был неправ с тоном своего вчерашнего поста об образовании. Как-то по-другому об этом надо говорить.

Dilemma of the day: information vs emotions

But here they encounter the very problems they have enumerated. Providing people with accurate information doesn’t seem to help; they simply discount it. Appealing to their emotions may work better, but doing so is obviously antithetical to the goal of promoting sound science. “The challenge that remains,” they write toward the end of their book, “is to figure out how to address the tendencies that lead to false scientific belief.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds

In my experience, working through difficult issues in a non-threatening environment, rather than talking about them, seems to help. Unfortunately, sometimes it's too late.

(no subject)

I think educating people would be a lot easier if we labeled economics as a technology (or a technoscience) rather than a science. That would shift the focus of study from abstract theoretical notions to practical issues of designing and engineering various economic systems.

Physics -> Science;
Chemistry -> Science;
Geology -> Science;

Economics -> Technology;
Computer Science -> Technology;
Finance -> Technology;

etc.

Nina Simone - Strange Fruit

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