Given my departure from MIT, and the inevitable day when birge@mit.edu ceases to be treated with any respect by MIT’s servers, I’ve moved this site to new environs:
Everything on this will be archived there, though links to old posts here should continue to work for a while.
I occasionally like to make predictions about the stock market. I’m hoping that if I’m ever right, I can parlay the retroactive correctness into fame and fortune as a stock market guru. After all, that’s how stopped clock bears like Mish Shedlock, Karl Denninger and the “evil speculator” worked it. Those that were right about the financial crisis become instantly revered because nobody seems to remember that, statistically, anything that can conceivably happen has been conceived by somebody, and they probably have a blog. It’s the anthropic principle writ small.
At any rate, here’s my advice, which I pray you don’t take, since I don’t want to be on the hook for your kids not eating: Now is a terrible time to invest in the stock market. I know I’ve been negative about the market in general for a while, as I think it has become a den of thieves, and that I think we may be in a long-term secular bear market. But what I’m saying here is different, as I’m talking now about relatively short term market timing.
If you were bold enough to get back in the stock market a year or so ago, congratulations. You’re braver than I. But I think there’s now reason to be concerned that we’re near the top of a cyclical bull market. My reason for this is that inflation is starting to become expected, and the economic recovery is actually starting to pick up steam and become real. Now that everybody knows the economy is doing well, the “wall of worry” is no longer there to climb. Once everybody knows of something, it’s hard to find a greater fool to sell to. (At least not without providing shares at a discount.)
Second, once the economy’s footing becomes secure, the Fed will turn to fighting inflation. Given that we’re starting to see the beginnings of inflation in price data, I think this will happen sooner rather than later. Thus, you’re going to have an expensive stock market, a tightening Fed, and–worst of all–an economy that really hasn’t been truly fixed. Much of our recovery has been purchased by debt, the same stuff that got us in trouble to begin with. We’re like the bankrupt family that averted financial disaster not by tightening their belts, but by finding another credit card they forgot about. So, I think it’s likely the recovery will not be particularly strong, involve atypically low job growth, and might even stall entirely once the true austerity we so sorely need is forced upon us and quantitive easing becomes too ludicrous a proposition, even for Bernanke, once the reality of inflation (which is already happening) becomes more well known.
The bottom line, is that I’m not sure I’d want to be in the stock market when the Fed starts increasing interest rates. Given how low they are, it’s quite possible that interest rates on safe investment could increase by more than a factor of two. That would significantly change the fair price of stocks, even absent a slowdown in growth.
But, seriously, don’t listen to me. I’m just writing this to say “I told you so” if it turns out I’m right.
I ran into what is apparently a not uncommon problem with iPhone video: you start to take a video while the camera is in portrait mode (just by accident of how you’re holding it) and then the rest of the video is stuck that way, even if you took 99% of it in landscape mode. If that didn’t make any sense, the bottom line is I had a video I needed to rotate 90 degrees. While there were plenty of solutions available on the PC, tons of Googling turned up virtually nothing for Mac Os X, short of finding an old copy of iMovie from five years ago.
Fortunately, I lucked in to a great solution, which doesn’t even require transcoding (with the attendant loss in quality that would result). This worked for me in getting a video from portrait to landscape, and I suspect it will only work in that situation. (This should be the only situation in which this problem occurs, as nobody in their right mind should ever shoot video in portrait mode on purpose, and if you do, I’m certainly not going to be complicit in aiding and abetting that crime against humanity.)
The solution requires a copy of the very nice all-purpose video player, VLC.
This should be all it takes. The process will be fairly quick, since there’s no transcoding, but its not instantaneous as it does have to move a lot of bits into a new file.
For some reason I decided to take a look at the top 50 most played songs on my iPod. Here they are, listed from 5 to 1.
Rank Title Artist Number of Times Played 5. Many the Miles Sara Bareilles 66 4. Fireflies Owl City 67 3. The Wider Sun Jon Hopkins 81 2. Baby Monkey Parry Gripp 322 1. Oatmeal Parry Gripp 393
One guess as to which two songs are Alex’s favorites?
Ok, I know I promised no more useless political banter, but I think I’ll grandfather in follow-up posts to old articles. A while back I wrote about my “conspiracy” theory that Obama pushed through a health care reform bill that he knew would be struck down as unconstitutional, to set himself up for a rewrite of the reform to be a UK-style single-payer system (which would be constitutional, since there’s nothing wrong with the government forcing you to buy stuff from them).
So far, the first part of my prediction has come true, at least in the sense that the bill was struck down, and struck down pretty hard. Of course, we’ll never know what Obama was really thinking, but I maintain that by far the most likely scenario is that he knew full well it would never pass muster. The man is extremely smart, especially for a politician, and he was a law professor. I’m certain he knows that having the Federal Government mandate that private parties enter into a contract is grossly unconstitutional (not to mention the mother of all slippery slopes). I could buy that Pelosi didn’t see this happening (she looks constantly surprised to be wherever she happens to be) but I can’t believe Obama didn’t.
I think if there is one flaw in their plan, it’s that Obama didn’t see the midterm elections going as badly as they did. That’s too bad. As I argued in my original post, single-payer is really the only way to handle health insurance that makes any sense. Forcing private insurance companies to take people they know are sick is insane. Forcing people to buy something from somebody as a condition of their very existence is patently unconstitutional, and always should be. (To head off the people who point out we are required to buy car insurance, that is a condition of driving on public roads, not being alive and American, and no car insurance company is legally forced to provide insurance to somebody with 27 moving violations and two vehicular manslaughter convictions.)
The idea that people should have a million dollar PET scan machine at their disposal health as a fundamental human right is intellectually bankrupt, but that doesn’t change the fact that it may nonetheless be the Right Thing to do if we can afford it. We can, at least for now, and so unless we’re going to let people go without care needlessly, the only way to get everybody health care that makes any sense is single-payer. I challenge anybody to propose an alternative solution that provides all citizens with quality health care but doesn’t open a pandoras box of legislative legerdemain required to enforce access.
Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that ESP proves frequentist statistics isn’t real. In what has got to be one of the best object lessons in why hypothesis testing (the same statistical method usually used by the medical research industry to produce the Scare of the Week) is prone to generate false results, a well-respected psychology journal is set to publish a paper describing a statistically significant finding that ESP works.
The real news here, of course, is not that ESP has been proven real, but that using statistics to try to understand the world is a breeding ground for junk science. If I had to guess, I’d say the author (who is a well-respected academic who has never published any previous work on ESP) has had a case of late-career integrity and has decided to play a wonderful joke on the all-too-deserving field of psychology by doing a few experiments until obtaining statistically meaningful results that defy everything we know about the universe. As I’ve pointed out before, one of the many problems with hypothesis testing is that you don’t have to try all that hard to prove anything, even when done “correctly,” given that nobody really keeps track of negative results.
If you don’t have a Mac, or don’t know what SVN is, please accept my apologies for this very directed post. To the one guy remaining, rejoice:
For the longest time, there has been no good SVN interface available on the Mac. Windows folks had TortoiseSVN, and Linux folks wouldn’t be caught dead using anything other than command line tools (or, git, for that matter). So, everybody was happy but us Mac folks.
A program called “Versions” has been available for a while, but it, sadly, epitomizes the style over substance sin that is so prevalent on the Mac. It’s got a beautiful interface, but it’s an interface to very little. Namely, it doesn’t support merging or branching, which is pretty much the most important reason for using a versioning system like SVN. If you’re not branching and merging, you might as well just use a good backup system, because that’s pretty much all you’re using SVN for at that point.
So, I was very excited to find “Cornerstone,” which was recently upgraded to support the slickest SVN interface I’ve seen on any platform. It’s as pretty as “Versions” and as powerful (if not moreso) than TortoiseSVN. It’s merge facility is the best approach I’ve seen, for example. It’s intuitive, and as you adjust the settings it automatically performs a trial merge and gives you the results in real time. Awesome.
They have a two-week trial, which is more than enough to get a feel for the product, it’s so simple and well-executed.
(By the way, they aren’t giving me anything for this. I wish they were, but I don’t have that kind of juice.)