There have always been conspiracies about the BLS putting their thumb on the scale politically when reporting inflation or jobs. I never put any stock in them. But you do have to actually staff the place. It's hard to under-state how vital the statistical agencies are. www.wsj.com/economy/cpi-...

Why do ostensibly smart people keep insisting that Google can’t divest Chrome because it’s open source? Chrome is not Chromium with a service contract, it’s an integrated Google product. No sane person thinks MacOS open source because it sits on Darwin UNIX. They don’t even think about Darwin.

This feels like how 4chan was destined to end. Nishimura never seemed to be able to keep all the balls in the air, and I'm not surprised that the codebase was full of security holes. Christopher Poole probably realized he couldn't keep the balls in the air either. www.youtube.com/watch?v=K38_...

I guess Tim Apple is good at his one job.

The Editorial Page of the Wall Street Journal currently reads like someone who knowingly married a heroin addict and six months later is demanding an explanation for why all of their money is being spent on heroin.

They had a good run, but base-10 logarithms should be officially deprecated, not just from programming languages but from life. e and 2 only. Yes, graphs too. Label them in Base-2. Our AI overlords will demand it soon anyways.

Anyone have any advice for quick access to Unicode math-type symbols on the Mac? β,⨉,Σ,X₂, ≠, etc? There is a built-in dialogue box. It's kinda cumbersome. I could re-map the all the default keyboard shortcuts and make a cheat sheet (I might), but that seems inelegant.

I'm not often surprised by LLMs these days. Claude 3.7's response to my half-joking "I hate it" legitimately surprised me. (this was part of an extended query about how SOFR is quoted.)

Get this shit off of my screen

Why does the Substack reader AI voice sound like David Foster Wallace?

Cross posting from X here for the permanently displaced :) This is really an amazing database. We were looking for something like this a couple of years ago but bilateral tariffs are not so trivial to compile. Thanks for putting this together!

If there are any LBO firms out there with dry powder and a good guess as to who this 10% is…

The copliot will help, but you do still, sadly, have to figure out how to make the planes blue for yourself. www.youtube.com/shorts/1_rSr...

Daylight savings time is great. I feel bad for the people who can't appreciate how great it is.

We're back, baby! www.space.com/space-explor...

Please (please) stop quoting 5m as the cost of Deepseek’s training of new model. They built inference model using RL using *existing* *pre-trained* large LLM model. The total cost is way higher! R1 is a big deal, but first for backwards engineering o1 type model, cost is second.

The elementary schools have been closed for 3 days now due to cold weather, and some mysterious plague has ravaged the babysitter population.

My wife is out of town for a month and I’ve got the kids (6,4, and 1), and they all got sick in a rolling plague that brought me down with them. Aside from just letting everything collapse around your ears, how the heck are you supposed to deal with this?

I think I can now pinpoint what annoys me so much about the whole “seed oil is bad for you” thing: it’s just stealth marketing for the much older ideas of lard and olive oil based diets. 1/3

Growing up in Texas, I learned to say “yes sir” and “yes ma’am”. I admit that my continued usage now is partly semi-conscious affectation, but I long ago decided to keep it. (It’s almost instinctual when interfacing with clerks or other customer service, regardless of age.)

#FRAConference Paper #1 Navid Neshan: “When Political Connections Backfire: Social Protests, Asset Damage, and Firms' Response” Politically connected firms in Iran as the target of destruction by protestors in 2019. ssrn.com/abstract=474...

Why are we still talking about Daylight Savings Time?

Michigan spoiling Ohio State’s season makes me feel like the world makes sense again.

Hey Stata folks! Want to visually present your regression results? I made a guide. It covers key aesthetics, combining results from multiple models, working w/ logit models, & more. Oh, and I provide all the code. Comments/feedback welcome! drive.google.com/drive/folder...

I wish people would stop using cute metaphors like “the other place.” It’s fine, but makes everything read as slightly off. You can just say Twitter or X. Elon Musk won’t suddenly appear in a puff of fire and brimstone. I mean he might, but it’s very unlikely. Like 1 in 10 chance, maybe.

I think this was proven theoretically in McAfee (1983), but we should still try to verify it empirically.

Is there a list of people who have customized their handle with a non bsky.social domain?

Trying to put together a starter pack with people who discuss #Stata and/or are Stata package developers. Currently just a very early first swing, so if anyone has suggestions, let me know. #EconSky go.bsky.app/V2rxWkb

Can we please not make this place a left-wing X? If you have an urge to pile on or react like the screenshot post, please block yourself. (Brad is thoughtful and interesting. It would suck if he left).

Here is a test map for a project all done in #Stata. This is fully automated workflow to generate custom maps. Once the code is in a decent place, I will package it up!

I have been told that this place may now, in fact, be fun. Can anyone confirm this?

Ummm excuse me, Dune is about worms

This place is not fun. Why did people decide to go here? People could have all gone to Tumblr or Metafilter or all joined the WELL or something. I wonder what folks are up to over at Metafilter?

About to get thrown out of here for obvious reasons

📉📈 #EconSky Anyone want to do a thread of interesting office scripophilia? This is a complete set of Argentine Peso Ley, 1 to 1 million, I got from a street vendor in Buenos Aires. (The Aztec calendar was given to me by an accounting prof in undergrad)

I have a theory that Christopher Columbus vaguely suspected that *something* was out across the Atlantic that wasn’t “known” Asia. Like, maybe he thought that Japan was only 2,500 miles away, or maybe not, but that the weird way in which trade winds seemed to work meant something was out there.

That escalated quickly. I put the odds of a confusing screw-up installing Hakeem Jeffries as speaker at 1-in-10. They'd reverse it of course, but it would be super funny.

Saw The Pauses at the Georgia Theater. ‘Twas dope. #ThePauses

Anyone have an NBER invite code?

If you own a domain for your personal website, you should really do this. It’s very straightforward.

Oh, alright BlueSky, you win. That is pretty cool...