Some Random Nobody

Aspects of MMT

I heard an exchange in a podcast featuring Paul Krugman, about MMTers saying, "You don't understand."  Maybe he really didn't understand.  But we can test this with three fundamental questions:

1. According to MMT, what happens to the taxes that you pay?
2. According to MMT, how does the government pay its bills?
3. According to MMT, what is the real effect (and proper purpose) of taxation?

It helps to understand the parables of coupons that absolutely must be turned in.

My parable of the "kroks" is similar.

Just in case someone wants to comment on anything that I wrote.

Detective Michael Sheehan's death

Detective Michael Sheehan was one of the lead detectives responsible for the wrongful convictions of the Five in the rape and attempted murder of the Central Park jogger.  He was hospitalized for cancer, and finally died about a week after "When They See Us" premiered at the end of May.  This leads to speculation and fantasizing.

Nothing But Speculation but should be further researched.

1.  The enormity of what he'd done to the Five finally got to him, and he gave up fighting to survive.

2.  Doctors or others (need only be one) took revenge on him, and sabotaged his treatment.  (I damn well hope not.)

Was Soleimani on an Iran-Iraq-Saudi tension-defusing mission?

According to the Iraqi prime minister, Soleimani was on a mission delivering a response to Saudi Arabia, about reducing tensions in the area, when he was assassinated by the USA.

How much can we trust this?  The prime minister was US supported.  At the very least, this should be investigated because it changes everything about the assassination.

Face it.  There are Americans who want war, Americans who are potential serial killers.

Punishment for aggressive war: I still think that the appropriate punishment for invading Iraq is to take a few of the head people to decided it, planned it, and ordered the media to push it, and chop them to pieces on national television.  Other modes of death might be the rack -- a very slow stretching, gradually pulling the bones out of their sockets -- and inverting someone and sawing him in half through the crotch.

The LHC and Black Holes: Let's Get Real.

Suppose the LHC managed to create a microscopic black hole.  The black hole would fly out of the earth within a second, and also out of our solar system -- if it didn't annihilate in a burst of Hawking radiation.

Why?

As a collider, the LHC would ideally collide equal-energy protons flying in the opposite direction.  The center of mass would be stationary, so that the full energy would be available for interactions.  How close does it realize that ideal in a particular collision?  If the two energies differ by about 1% (and we ignore that the collision won't be fully 100% head-on), about one part in 40,000 of the energy would be unavailable.

Is there any kind of chance that the two energies would be less than 1% apart?  Let's take them that far apart: E₁ = 1.01 E₂.  Then the total energy is E = E₁ + E₂ = 2.01 E₂, and the total momentum (100% head-on) is pc = E₁ - E₂ = 0.01 E₂.

The speed of the object is pc²/E = 0.01 E₂c/2.01 E₂, approximately .005c or over 900 miles/second.  The collision occurs horizontally, not vertically, so it will leave the earth in well under a second.

Who told us there was no danger?  The experts in the field. Who were terrified of the danger, to the point of even calling to take out the LHC with a nuclear weapon?  Ignorant laymen.

Let's further ground ourselves with an estimation based on general relativity, of the event-horizon radius of a Planck-mass black hole.  In Planck units (specifically, hbar=c=G=1), R=2m, and also m=1.  A Planck-mass (or Planck-energy) black hole would have R=2 Planck lengths or about 3x10^-35 meters.  The Planck energy is two billion Joules, or about 10¹⁵ times the LHC interaction energy.

The LHC is 15 orders of magnitude away from producing a black hole, by conventional theory.  Sure, quantum effects, inflation, dark energy, or something might decrease the energy required by several orders of magnitude, but that still leaves us with plenty of orders of magnitude to play with.

No, there never was any danger, as the past decade-plus has shown.

 

How would the NYT cover these issues?

James Fallows tweets:

And, to state the obvious one more time, the NYT would *never* frame a story on *any* other topic that way:

-“Weinstein, accusers, bitterly divided over clashing claims”
-“Uighurs, Beijing, struggle to find common ground”
-“NFL, brain scientists, trade accusations”

Would any news medium cover these issues like that?

This supposed news article prompted this tweet as part of the discussion: The Breach Widens as Congress Nears a Partisan Impeachment

Consequences of "When They See Us"

"When They See Us" exposed the horror of the crime committed against the Central Park Five (also called the Exonerated Five -- they might very well have been called the Central Park Four and One because Korey Wise was only pulled into the horror for accompanying his friend to the police).  What might the consequences of this documentary be?

I'm concerned that the consequences will favor the worst of police lawlessness.  Why?  Consider the consequences of being caught.  The worst probably went to Linda Fairstein: her publisher dropped her, she had to resign several boards, and is publicly shamed.  Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer is also subject to some of that, although not as much.  The police?  Only the NYPD as a whole, not any individual officers.

The company that trains the Reid interrogation technique is suing the producers for a small portrayal near the end.

The police might as well applaud the publicity from the documentary.  The reason?  The message we get?  Public denunciation can be dismissed and ridiculed.  "Nyeah-nyeah, look at what we can do, and you can't do a damn thing about it."

No longer are we as naive as we were when the Rodney King beating video was shown to the world on TV, that a viral video of law-enforcement crime will produce action.  What were the consequences of videos going viral showing war crimes?

I think this is why it's imperative that at least some of the actors be prosecuted -- both publicly known and publicly unknown participants -- and seriously punished, with serious prison time.  While I would like to see the death penalty abolished (except for aggressive war, military takeovers, martial law which effectively takes over the government), if the death penalty is not abolished, a reasonable punishment for long wrongful prison sentences is death.

This is one kind of situation where vigilante action and all-out rebellion may be necessary, when the law is paralyzed by conflict of interest.  If vigilante action is necessary, lynching is the only reasonable punishment.

Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer, Korey Wise, and a Weapon

Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer corrects Korey Wise in the confession video.  Korey confesses, and the interrogator corrects the confession?

On video?

https://youtu.be/d2kYUctawvg?t=378 -- Prosecutor Elizabeth Lederer shows Korey Wise injuries in a picture, and asks about the weapon.  Wise suggests "a knife".  Then the prosecutor objects that a knife doesn't deliver the injuries shown.  Wise then guesses it must be from a rock.  As psychology professor Saul Kassin points out, Wise is "desperate to get it right."

A confession video?  Obviously false.

There is something else incredibly disturbing -- my memory.  I watched this video over six months ago.  I remembered the confession weapon being corrected -- specifically, a knife to a rock.  Unfortunately, I remembered it as a police officer correcting the confession, not the prosecutor.  It's a horrible false memory.

Let's be clear, the video is up in a tab right next to this one.  I made sure to get it right.

Innumeracy and Conceptual Error -- "Two-Cent Message" in New Economic Perspectives

I can't comment at this blog about Elizabeth Warren's proposed 2% tax, probably because it was written over a month ago.  Any merit to this argument is lost in the face of innumeracy and conceptual error. One might think it a misstatement rather than a conceptual error -- but such misstatements reflect such conceptual errors, conflating different concepts.

http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2019/09/two-cent-message.html

Elizabeth Warren's 2% proposal is allegedly summarized, "which she details as `two-cents on every dollar of income over $50 million.'"  No, it wasn't income, it was wealth.  There is a difference, and if one is confused about the terms, one may be confused about the concepts.  Wealth might entail having (say) $50 million.  Income entails receiving (say) $2 million.

"Wealth" is what you already have.  "Income" is what comes in.

The description "over $50 million" is correct.  Therefore, why does he make the following error?

"...one day they have $50 million in their bank account—way more than they need for even the most extravagant life-style—and the next day they have $49 million."

The amount above $50 million in this case is zero, which means that the tax is 2% of zero.  A more accurate statement might be something like this (happening once per year): "One day, they have $60.0 million in their bank account, and the next day they have $59.8 million in their bank account."

 

Which is the Extraordinary Claim?

We have the following facts regarding UA175, that ostensibly hit the South Tower: the plane hitting the South Tower took off at 8:14.  The Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports that UA175 took off at 8:23.  Both specifically refer to the Wheels-Off Time, the time the wheels leave the runway.

via johnm2.typepad.com

I blogged this over six years ago. If the third option -- a hacker broke into United's systems and changed the wheels-off time, it would have been discovered.

Ostensibly, the ACARS message with the correct wheels-off time was given to the 9/11 Commission, or at least cited by one of its witnesses. Hence the correct version still existed, and United could have found out where correct and incorrect versions were stored.

We have no public indication of any such investigation taking place, despite the hundreds or thousands of inquires that were made since 2004 or 2005. Instead, the issue has been publicly blacked out.