Long Straight Highway - Latest Comments

Re: Life in a nutshell

Shane Hoversten — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 00:08:48 -0000

And a one-armed dude?

Re: Life in a nutshell

Kira — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 23:25:32 -0000

My night: Same general story, but with coffee and a piece of gingerbread cake. And less swearing.

Re: I guess body issues are over

Kira — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 11:57:26 -0000

They are comfortable, damn it. I don't wear highly sexualized leggings. Mine are totally non-sexual. Chaste leggings, even.

Re: Feeling good part 1

Eden Robins — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 04:23:24 -0000

"They Live" is pretty much the best WWF/SF hybrid movie ever made.

Re: Anti-life equation

B"BH"H — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 08:51:12 -0000

x=42

Re: Anti-life equation

DDB — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:42:39 -0000

I'm not sure that's the right equation.

"Virtually? Almost?"

Re: TV

DDB — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 00:34:46 -0000

Is not Tang! Is robot!

Re: A potential roadblock on the way to transcendence

DDB — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:42:21 -0000

I'm working on my second draft of that book right now. You'll get a signed first edition.

Re: Coming for you

Eden Robins — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 06:11:05 -0000

What a delight to find I had FIVE blogs to read this morning. Keep it up, tiger.

Re: Conducting your business redux

Pamela — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 23:11:44 -0000

Huh. So he loses his accent when he writes?

Re: Conducting your business redux

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 10:51:18 -0000

If you'd like to create your own fictional universe using my characters, you can have them say whatever you like.

(Plus, I'm pretty sure that _is_ what he was writing.)

Re: Conducting your business redux

DDB — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:28:56 -0000

I'm pretty sure that wasn't what he was writing.

Re: Conducting your business redux

Shane Hoversten — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:39:35 -0000

"While conducting my stupid affairs today I encountered a salt-of-the-earth Midwestern type. As he was working quietly and politely next to me the only reason I noticed him was his profound handsomeness and a dazzling intellect that shone through even in the absence of speech."

Re: Conducting your business redux

Pamela — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:30:16 -0000

What do you think the french guy wrote about you in his fictional universe?

Re: Several reasons for cautious optimism

Shane Hoversten — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:07:43 -0000

Also, I suspect that the bookstore is just a honey trap. If you walk in there you get stuck to the floor and die. This way the city eliminates undesirables. Going into the cafe probably just puts you on some kind of watch list.

Re: Several reasons for cautious optimism

Shane Hoversten — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 22:55:06 -0000

I get up that way alot, I'll text you next time. It will be nice to have an Elk River friend again.

Re: Several reasons for cautious optimism

DDB — Mon, 03 Sep 2012 20:53:02 -0000

You forgot to mention that the Dunn Bros. is tied into an independent book store. People in Zimmerman read?

They were most likely part of the longbow competition this weekend. Loads of poachers, erm, bowhunters up that way. I wish I knew you were up there since I've been there everyday this weekend.

Re: On conducting your business in a cafe

DDB — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 10:35:41 -0000

He was most certainly Parisian. Douche. Nice to see you blogging again.

Re: Write what you know

Ryan Houle — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:59:39 -0000

My opinion on this is to take what you aspire to first and foremost, and secondly, weave in what you know to give it a foundation for real people to latch on to and empathize with. And, obviously, my success speaks for itself...

Re: The tragedy of macroeconomics

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:15:12 -0000

One more thing on the health metaphor:

It may or may not be tough to say what caused your grandfather's heart attack. But what we can certainly say is that, for instance, it probably wasn't eating cholesterol and saturated fat, despite what 90% of doctors would have you believe. How do we know this? Because other populations, who eat absurd quantities of those things, have great heart health. It's not possible to make causal attributions with correlational data, but even this (relatively) weak evidence is enough to definitively refute the "saturated fat = universally bad" people, who somehow continue to dominate the mainstream cardiological universe. If you can blankly refute a claim, and yet the claim persists, that is a special kind of systemic dementia.

Anyway, I didn't mean to imply that complex systems that are amenable to scientific investigation are magically rendered simple; just that you can at least move definitively forward via the scientific method. The further you are from being able to a) measure accurately and b) perturb a system in the form of experimentation, the further you are from actually knowing anything substantial about it.

Re: The tragedy of macroeconomics

Nagasaki — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:32:29 -0000

Most of the disagreements with questions like, "What caused the Great Depression?" aren't as black and white as you infer. Similarly, what caused the finanical panacea of 2008? The disagreement among real economists, seperated as much as possible from political motives, would be more a function of what percentage each cause had contributed. I do understand that the existance of debate means the facts cannot be concrete as some scientific measures offer.

The math behind govt stimulus spending is fairly clear in macro-econ. I'm not convinced that the politics and subterfuge around butter in your diet are any different really than the politics behind trying to convince the world that austerity is stimulatory. What caused my grandfather's heart attack? Was it stress induced, diet, genetics? What causes Percy Harvin's migraines? These seem like complicated health questions not because we lack rigorous scientific methodology, but rather the sheer number of potential factors at work.

I'm not sure how to answer your challenge. "Non-trivial" seems subjective but if you dig into macro-econ textbooks there are plenty of mathmatical equations that are acceptable among the field. How to calculate measurements such as GDP, inflation, etc come to mind as non-trivial mathmaticially driven contributions. The calculations behind govt or central bank responses are also pretty clear, but I think often the problem is given the scope of economic challenges it's hard to administer the right dosage of response if you don't have perfect data in real-time. So then how useful is the math? I don't know. To me it would be like a Dr. trying to prescribe antiobotics without ever being able to know the patient's weight within 20 lbs.

I don't even really intend to correct you. I agree that economics seem to be more useful in explaining what has happened than predicting the future, and it really is "history with equations." Well, unless you're attempting to explain Austrian economics which uses no mathmatics. Really. So in that case it seems "history with theories" would be more suitable.

Re: The tragedy of macroeconomics

Shane Hoversten — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:33:44 -0000

It seems to me that it's difficult to know cause-effect in _any_ circumstance. IE: what caused the great depression? Or: is it better for the economy to save all your money, or to spend all of it? The answers to big questions tend to be superficial or just kick the can down the road. And even when they posit something particular, you can't actually test it. That standard of evidence and proof would be laughable in any other field besides English or History. In fact, macro econ would seem to be more aptly named "history, with equations."

Although I'm willing to be corrected. What, in your mind, is a non-trivial 'scientific' finding of macro econ? I don't think the austerity stuff qualifies, based on what I've seen.I also don't think the metaphor with health holds. There is certainly a lot of contention in the field (for instance, is butter good or bad?) But that's mostly political. There is, at base, a body of empirical research that tests the appropriate questions in a rigorous scientific manner, which has produced concrete and repeatable findings. It so happens that the health/nutrition field is terminally polluted by both lobbying groups and years of conventional wisdom, so findings that counter the orthodoxy take a long time to get any traction. But at least there are findings, and they are repeatable, and they're pretty straightforward for those with ears to hear.

Re: The tragedy of macroeconomics

Nagasaki — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:14:57 -0000

I don't think macroecon is as obscure as Shane implies. It's true that an economy has so many moving parts it's difficult to know the cause-effect relationship in every circumstance, at least when compared to scientific case studies with controlled environments. What I think obscures macroecon is political motivation to disprove or prove ideology. Austerity is a perfect example because the majority of real-world economists agree it will slow growth. The Austrian flavor is a far less tested, textbook theory that can only enter the discussion because economies are complicated enough it's possible to find situations where austerity didn't slow economic growth. Then with a little handwaving it isn't hard to appeal to the crowds, who have zero understanding but simply like the message. But as the author notes, when you did into the details of situations where austerity seemed to work, you find a different set of circumstances so in reality I don't believe it's that unclear. I agree that the armies of economists constantly making predictions is mostly worthless.

If you think about other fields, I'm not even so sure that macroeconomists argue any more than other experts. Just get into a discussion on butter with your heart doctor. The only difference is politicians are constantly distorting economics to fit into an ideology, so I think the disagreements are more noticeable than disagreements in cholesterol theories or brain science.

Re: The tragedy of macroeconomics

Ryan Houle — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:12:01 -0000

It would be nice if the austerity proponents could at least point to some stronger historical evidence of it working in a first world nation before taking everyone off of what could be a very large cliff. It seems to me, layman that I am, that the austerity proponents are also big time believers in the confidence fairy, in fact, austerity seems 100% reliant on the existence of the confidence fairy. And that's not the most convincing foundation for an argument, at least to me.

Re: Some thoughts on inequality

Ryan Houle — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:48:55 -0000

I agree with you that in the race between education and technology their might not be any other way but crazy gaps if we let it runs its course naturally, but, why must we let it run its course naturally? Is there a good argument as to why we shouldn't try to level off the peaks and valleys - at least temporarily?

Even in cases where business chasing low tax rates isn't bullshit [in states like VA and NC], what happens is businesses move to red states for lower taxes->skilled workers move there->skilled workers don't want to live in a trailer park hell hole->they start voting for more government services and all of sudden, like magic, you've got a purple or blue state. You can run but you can't hide from civilization.