Looks like the forecast for this afternoon is for wet bulb globe temperatures around 91 degrees F in Ann Arbor; there are not a ton of benefits to working out of an office in a windowless basement in an old concrete building, but avoiding all that is maybe one.

Life in a swing state in a competitive primary year: Jeopardy as breaks entirely composed of Senate/governor attack ads

Since we're discoursing about housing, a semi-provocative take: there is no reason to believe that the well-being of current neighborhood residents should be given any particular weight in the siting and characteristics of new construction.

You've confessed to your last dashboard

One lesson is "you can make publicly acknowledged funding and partnerships nefarious if you pretend it was a secret" but also "don't conduct yourself in such a way that a hatchet job can get written about you two decades later"

My most boomer belief is that essentially all service dogs are fake, and putting them in group 6 with basic economy when boarding planes will accurately identify any residual non-fake cases

EMBRACE WAR

I have become somewhat radicalized on this: if we require realization for capital gains or losses to be considered income, we absolutely need to do the same for depreciation being considered a business expense

Larger US wildfires are reversing a decade of progress on air quality, a new study finds. Smoke-driven ground-level ozone has increased by 4% since 2015, offsetting strict federal regulations on power plants and vehicles. This is also linked to 318 additional deaths annually.

ECWMF's Nino Plumes Viewer now includes (or at least I'm just now noticing it) a dashed line for actual monthly Nino-3.4 anomalies for historical forecasts (charts.ecmwf.int/products/sea...). If you go back to recent forecasts, the actual anomalies were at the upper end of the model forecast spread.

The latest CFSv2 model results for El Nino (ONI) anomalies later this year are kinda nuts, with a peak at nearly 3.9C in November. NOAA needs to once again raise the y-axis range; here is what it should look like without all the runs above 4C cut off:

People like aid to the poor and social security but hate welfare spending

Analyzing intergenerational mobility of wealth and income across US counties, highlighting spatial differences due to factors such as house prices and the Great Recession shock, from Ariel J. Binder, Max Risch, and John L. Voorheis www.nber.org/papers/w35219

They're going to end up reconstructing managers in the aggregate is the thing--the idea is your enterprise tools have all the visibility you used to have via human managers, which requires everyone to diligently label everything so the LLMs can understand it, which is going to require...Management

Probably missed the craft beer elitism discourse this time around, but I'll note that if you consume craft beer in a non-elite context (like the brewery down the street from me in the suburbs of Detroit), you'll mostly find yourself surrounded by like, dads who just want to watch the tigers game.

Somewhat annoyingly, the NBER social media people slightly mis-state our key finding on migration. We find that while migration to Census blocks *near* floodplains has increased, there's been essentially no net migration to *properties inside floodplains*!

We need high quality microdata to be able to do evidence based policy, but this is always going to lag real time. The next best thing is for a robust, well-resourced statistical system to regularly develop and release aggregates which reproduce the insights available in the microdata for public use.

I have two new papers up in this week's NBER working papers (www.nber.org/papers/w35204 and www.nber.org/papers/w35219). Here's a couple of things I learned in pulling these papers together.

These guys could have fully avoided the backlash they face by just writing "if you use our services as a headcount reduction machine you need to pay a higher tier for usage which sets the per token cost such that you won't make any money" and then they could with a straight face say that AI is good.

I guess there's a relitigation of the great Piketty wars of the 2010s, which is fun. I'll add one thing that no one cares about: the entire DINA project was a dead end because we don't actually know how to measure business income, capital income or the stock of wealth that produces these flows.

The last few days have had record high daily average surface temperature anomalies (at least since the 1940s)

The fun thing about this is that since environmental engel curves are concave, if you did this *within country* then environmental damages would increase, not decrease

My longstanding position is that we should stop using Dr. as a title for people who practice medicine (who merely work in a skilled trade) and reserve it for those who truly improve social well being, PhD academics. This is also why I don't get invited to parties

A possible clue to economic discontent, though maybe not: since 2015 or so, the upward trend in inequality within the bottom 90% of the income distribution reversed and has been flat or slightly declining depending on how much you trust trend lines.

ECWMF's el nino forecast now has all of its ensemble members above 2 degrees C anomalies by end of year, which is pretty yikes

Wicked air quality in Bend, OR today (due to prescribed burns I believe)

5 handles all over the place in Michigan FWIW

I know only enough about atmospheric science/weather/climate to be dangerous, but: it does seem notable that the current ECWMF forecast is predicting at least as strong an El Nino as the April 2023 forecast was predicting (if anything with a higher upper bound).

An AI industry that actually cared about avoiding backlash would have license agreements that set prices based on whether the user intends on automating a role, and charging a per token price such that automation costs about the same as average total compensation for the licensee

If you've ever wondered what its like to hear me ramble about using linked administrative records to study the economic impacts of natural disasters, here's your chance: NBER livestreamed today's PE Meeting, which is on YouTube here (my presentation starts at 2:53): www.youtube.com/live/Aad3Y4A...

Got blocked by Michael Mann, which is a fun fact about today

Apparently doomed to repeat this meme every day on a loop

The lead takes have escaped containment and I don't like it

I would even propose we do a survey of American communities with a big enough sample to represent what's going on in individual neighborhoods

Is it good when the other team has double your score at the end of the third quarter?

Guess I'm gonna start using fuckin' in official contexts now. These fuckin' pretends aren't parallel This fuckin' IV doesn't satisfy the exclusion restriction Etc

Global warming is a slowly meandering ghost

Big disconnect between the "everyone admits current AI models are very capable now and will start replacing human labor" discourse and the fact that basically all AI-related subreddits are entirely composed of complaints about how they can't get any work done with Claude because of rate limits

A large part of the "protein maxing by eating a lot of meat" crowd is just picky eaters who figured out a way to be picky eaters without social sanction; the reaction to anyone else not eating meat is a toxic masculinity friendly way to pitch a temper tantrum about said picky eater tendencies

Inequality is worse than it was 40 years ago

Good story about Claudia Goldin and Economics: www.wsj.com/economy/wnba...

US liberalism and neoliberalism only gave us “on paper” legal equality and rights, not material equality? Well now we don’t even have the on paper legal equality and rights

There is a critical difference between holistic, authentic judgment enabled by embodied cognition, and AI's reductive simulation of the language patterns associated with such thought. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

We need to bring back the ideal of masculinity focused on quiet self-sacrifice for the sake of others. Alpha shit is for losers. Be a man and humbly forgo the shit you want for years so you can provide for your family, you indulgent little wuss

Please Share! The Environmental Inequality Lab is hosting it's second undergraduate research training program in environmental and energy economics this summer & it's open to all (with current U.S. work authorization)! Full-time, funded, in-person, 10-weeks. More details here tinyurl.com/EEE-URTP

Corollary: 1) Ban corporate owned single family homes 2) poor people now can't rent in high opportunity neighborhoods and also can't qualify for a conventional mortgage 3) you don't have to deal with poor people around the house you inherit

One interpretation: LLMs have learned that IVs are mostly garbage Another interpretation: a good IV requires out-of-distribution human insight that LLMs are structurally incapable of replicating

The fact that vibecoding the same set of tasks in e.g. R vs. python is substantially harder I think is a useful piece of evidence on likely future paths

The administrative costs of doing research with confidential government data (working in secure enclaves, disclosure avoidance, etc) seem like they're going to be the costly signal to maintain a separating equilibrium (in some fields)