Friday, April 29, 2016

SAR #16120


Gasp: We knew that the CO2 being taken up by the oceans was driving up the acidity to the point – currently 30% more acidic than before we started killing ourselves with progress - that crustaceans such were having trouble making shells and corals were bleaching. Now we find that the oxygen levels in the seas are falling; warming oceans absorb less oxygen and turn over more slowly, leading to depletion at depths. This deoxygenation poses a major threat to marine life and is one of the most deadly side-effects from a global warming. No oxygen in the water, no life in the seas. No life in the seas, little elsewhere.
Wish Them Luck: Iran is calling for the global destruction of weapons of mass destruction. If they will include religion under that rubric, I'm for it.
Mirrors: The US foreign policy establishment, in and out of government, Republican, Democrat and academic is having kittens over Trump's foreign policy speech. Based on the last thirty years of misadventures and international disasters, quite where the establishment gets a pulpit to preach from is a mystery. Name something they've gotten right. Anything? We'd be a lot better off without their expertise and so would hundreds of thousand dead civilians.
Boom: In March the median annual household income in the US reached $57,263, close to the real level of that existed in January 2000. Yeah, recovery!
Capitalism Clarified: The Taiwanese conglomerate building a state-of-the-art steel mill on the Vietnamese coast explains that the choice is “whether to catch fish and shrimp” or to build the mill. Let them eat ball bearings.
Like A Virgin: Ted Cruz's Super PAC either transferred or donated (there seem to be legal differences) but at any rate gave Carly Fiorina's Super PAC half a million dollars. No, not to get her to help him lose, but back when Trump was accusing Cruz of having extra-marital affairs and one of Carly's campaign workers was rumored to be involved. This is the only known instance of a candidate giving an opponent half a million bucks.
Hide In Plain Sight: The National Security Agency is so busy scooping up every tweet, text, email and phone conversation that is overwhelmed and cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. If there is any wheat, that is.
Job Well Done: Volkswagen's departing CEO will get a $8.2 million goodbye gift in honor of his years and years of deceitful marketing. Cheap compared to the estimated $18 billion the deliberate fraud will end up costing the stockholders.
Quoted: Many Americans have almost no savings, so they have barely any wealth. Two-thirds live paycheck to paycheck.”
Right Hand Washes Left: Germany is going to underwrite the sales of new electric cars to the tune of €1bn. Maybe they could take the money from the profits that VW, Audi and others have made cheating on diesel emissions.
Making Haste Slowly: The Fed now sees real GDP growth in 1Q2016 as 0.6%, maybe even 0.5%, not the puny 0.4% previously reported. Too bad it seems based on Consumer spending, largely on services,
Succinctly: “I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.” John Boehner describing Ted Cruz.
A Parting Shot:
 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

51st floor isn't half-way up the Empire State Building
Use of a median is a favorite tool from How To Lie With Statistics, it is can be used to either expose or to perpetrate a deception. A median is

...a number separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of {3, 3, 5, 9, 11} is 5). ..... median can be used as a measure of location when a distribution is skewed, when end-values are not known, or when one requires reduced importance to be attached to outliers,**

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median

** ie: don't look at those rich bastards just raking it in.

The reported number can't be the real median, therefore it must be drawn from a manufactured distribution, known as a trimmed range. Who trimmed the range has the same import as follow the money.

Bratwurst gives me gas: Germany's carbon emissions have gone up along with it's solar and wind power production, so those cars will still create large amounts of C02, particularly in their production. Seems moving to high density and mass transit doesn't offer the same opportunities for corruption, as San Francisco proves.
http://archpaper.com/2016/04/san-francisco-solar-panels-density/
Apparently Germany is not planning on settling/integrating any of those refuges after all.

Anonymous said...

the previous poster seems to be expressing distrust of the median - in my view, it's a very useful statistic, especially to describe income distribution - it specifically refers to the "person in the middle"

imagine a population of 5 people - their incomes are as follows

1 - 2000
2 - 6000
3 - 7500
4 - 15000
5 - 1,000,000

median income here is 7500

mean - arithmetical average - income is 206,100

Anonymous said...

Use of a median is a favorite tool from How To Lie With Statistics, it is can be used to either expose or to perpetrate a deception...

Of course even the best data isn't useful if the reader doesn't read closely.