Monday: I saw a cat after work today.

It ran away too quickly, so here's a tablet sketch instead.

• I thought this was a good comic.
• I've posted something like this before.  Maybe exactly this.  Whatever.
• Mulan.
• I really want Qdoba now.
• "The basic Curve itself is a mathematical certainty. At 0% and 100% tax rates no revenue is raised. At some point inbetween those two numbers revenue is raised. Thus there’s a curve and there will be some point on that curve (perhaps many, that curve could have almost any shape) a tax rate that maximises revenue collection. [...] It’s the process of looking at a particular tax change and asking what the Laffer effects of that tax change are. This is entirely normal by the way, at least it’s entirely normal in a mature political environment."  Got that?  There's a function that is presumed continuous between two end points, but the exact form is unknown.  Then, "mature political environments" can use that unknown function to score policy.  Do you know what the derivative of an unknown function is (since you need a differentiable function to find a maxima)?  Here's a hint: it's whatever you want it to be because you stopped doing math two steps ago.  I was going to call you a fucking moron, Tim Worstall, but instead I'm just going to assume that you get mocked for your inexplicably accurate last name.

Sunday: I ended up being lazy. Then I mocked someone semi-famous. Finally, I did unnecessary math.

I had intended to make spaghetti for dinner, but discovered last night that my butter had gone bad.  "I have never had butter go bad," you say?  You apparently don't buy butter and then leave for a month allowing it to go bad.  So congratulations for eating your butter faster than I do.

Since the butter was no good, I had to go out today anyway to get more butter, but then I became lazy and waited around until I had become too hungry to wait to get groceries and then make dinner and then eat. So, burger time.

• I think going to Lotteria is on my list of things to do while in Japan, but I don't think I'll be getting this.
• This was the spaghetti sauce I was going to make for dinner.  I was going to add some extra spices, and use italian sausage instead of the meatballs, but largely the same recipe.
• Bears.
• Niall Ferguson is a lying shitbag.  I know he doesn't care what I think, because he invented a rating scale that means he gets 435.8 points, and I only have 0.017 points, so clearly he's smart and I'm dumb because popularity.  So, I will instead illustrate Niall Ferguson being a lying shitbag by recruiting someone who has at least 435 points on the scale: Niall Ferguson.
• NF: "I’ve been accused (wrongly) of stoking inflation fears"
• Counter-NF: "Yes, folks, double-digit inflation is back. Pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out the real inflation rate just by moving the decimal point in the core CPI one place to the right."
• NF: "not a single reference to anything I myself have published." in reference to "repeatedly raised absurd fears about the U.S. and other countries hitting debt limits and risking soaring interest rates and hyper-inflation"
• CNF: "“The risk is that at some point your fiscal policy loses credibility in the eyes of investors,” Ferguson said at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. “Then, very quickly, you will find yourself in a debt spiral of rising rates, widening deficits, crumbling credibility and yet more rising rates.”"
• NF: "There seemed to be much more regulation in the U.S., not least the headache of sorting out health insurance for my few employees"
• CNF: "You don't have to be opposed to tighter financial regulation or universal health care to recognize that something is wrong with laws so elaborate that almost no one affected has the time or the will to read them."

You may have noted that that last one isn't really fair, because I've kind of expected NF and CNF not to be writing in the exact same article.  Therefore, I don't see any other option than to conclude that Niall Ferguson is kind of a shitbag.  Maybe he's an incompetent shitbag, and me calling him a liar isn't fair either.  

And now, after sorting out links for that mess, something else has struck me.  That rating system isn't just arbitrary and stupid, it's mathematically arbitrary and stupid.  If you wanted to rate the quality of twitter feeds, how would you do that?  First thing that would be nice would be if we have an accuracy value.  Like, the fraction of tweets that were true or helpful or something.  Next thing that you need to include is something to account for how much they tweet.  If you tweet zero, you spread zero information no matter how correct you are, so more tweets that are true is better than fewer tweets that are true.  Next, you need some sort of network effect.  If you tweet, but no one listens, you're only marginally above not tweeting at all when it comes to spreading information.  So, you get the product of these three things, or something like:

U = (a + k) N F

where U is the utility of the feed, a is the accuracy, N is the number of tweets, F is the number of followers, and k is the fraction of tweets containing "cats," in a very general sense (basically, any tweet pointing out something cute to look at.  Puppies would work too, but because internet).

You probably also need to fold in a time decay term, something of the form N = \int \rho(t) dt; U(t) = (a + k) F * \rho(\tau) exp(-(t - \tau) / \kappa).  The idea here being that something wise you said three years ago is probably less important right now than something wise you said seconds ago.  Then again, this invites switching to a(t) as well.  I may be right in what I say today, but two years from now added information may change this fact.  This means that the present utility rating is like

U(t) = \int (a(\tau)|_t + k) \rho(\tau) exp(-(t - \tau)/\kappa) d\tau F

Shit.  F.  That's not constant either, is it?  I'm going to stop here because I'm be lazy today and assume all followers do the responsible thing and scan the entire tweet archive to become as up-to-date as all previous followers.  Therefore, we don't need to bother with anything else and F is simply F(t).  This now tells us the utility at time t, based on a distribution of past tweets at times \tau < t.

I need to meta a post: Debt Ceiling Analogies

Don't read this unless you're linking from the other article posted today. Sssh. Secret stuff inside.

Cynical political theory

While waiting for some test code to run today, I ran across this editorial about the right-ward shift in the Republican party.  The bit that struck me was the note at the end about a paper (which I wasn't able to actually read since it looks to be stuck behind a paywall that I don't seem to have access to) that notes that economic recessions tend to lead to an increased vote for right-wing political parties.

This would be easy to ignore, if it weren't for the fact that conservative economic policy is widely considered by most sane and honest economists as a ploy to divert wealth to the already-wealthy benefactors of the conservative movement.  The past decade has largely shown that these policies do not work to the benefit of regular people, create "jobless recoveries," and basically fuck over the fiscal well-being of the country.

Now, given these two points, it would be possible to create a very cynical reason why these discredited economic policies have stuck around: not only do you enrich your cronies, but you trash the economy enough to prompt the rightward shift in the political climate.  This is certainly a short- to moderate- term solution, as in the long run, you loot too much out of the working class to favor a wealthy elite, which could cause economic collapse.  One would expect this to be a deterrant, but I would offer the recent Goldman-Sachs/Wall Street debacle as an example of people completely ignoring a catastrophic long-term effect for short-term gain.

In any case, it struck me as an interesting point to consider.