James Surowiecki posts in Some Excellent Debunking:
You know that $700 billion that John McCain and Barack Obama say we’re sending to ‘tyrants and dictators’ because of our dependence on foreign oil? It doesn’t exist. In fact, it appears that Boone Pickens made it up.
This is one of the better pieces of debunking I’ve seen lately. This figure is tossed around everywhere and it’s fictitious.
The chat window is embedded below. Here’s a popup link if you prefer it.
One aspect of jQuery that I’ve really come to appreciate is its ability to apply filters to elements on a Web page. Let’s say, for example, that you want to disable all of the links on a Web page if the user has not yet logged in.
In most server-side frameworks, this requires you to add conditional logic to every link on the page (or just use a different template entirely). In PHP, you’d have to do something like:
<?php if ($login_page) { ?>
My stuff
<?php } else { ?>
<a href="">My stuff</a>
<?php } ?>
You could perhaps shorten that a bit if you were clever, but that’s what you’re up against. And the problem is that you have to repeat it 100 times if you have 100 links on the page. You have to add a lot of code to your page to do something relatively simple.
On the other hand, with a tool like jQuery, you can accomplish something similar with one line of code.
$("a").bind("click", function(e) { return false; });
Needless to say, it’s a much cleaner and simpler approach. This approach won’t work in terms of security since users can just disable JavaScript, but it’s great in terms of clarity and simplicity.
What I’m wondering is why more server-side frameworks don’t have similar selector-based DOM manipulation tools built in. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach such filters to views on the server side and manipulate the output page before it’s presented? Why isn’t this more common?
New York magazine has an interview with Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, this year’s go-to polling analysis site.
I’ve been reading Nate’s baseball analysis for years and was thrilled to see that he was applying his analytic approach to political polling this year. The results have not been disappointing. This paragraph describes my general reaction when I found out who was running fivethirtyeight.com:
Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell. At his day job, Silver works for Baseball Prospectus, a loosely organized think tank that, in the last ten years, has revolutionized the interpretation of baseball stats. Furthermore, Silver himself invented a system called PECOTA, an algorithm for predicting future performance by baseball players and teams. (It stands for “player empirical comparison and optimization test algorithm,” but is named, with a wink, after the mediocre Kansas City Royals infielder Bill Pecota.) Baseball Prospectus has a reputation in sports-media circles for being unfailingly rigorous, occasionally arrogant, and almost always correct.
There are two things that I find interesting about this. The first is that I’ve been reading quantitative analysis of sports for years and wondering how the lessons drawn from that analysis can be applied to other fields. Silver’s work is illustrating just how applicable those lessons are, and I wasn’t surprised to read that he is being invited to speak before business audiences on his work.
The second is that it shows yet again how the secret to being a successful blogger is producing excellent content. Anyone who’s thinking about starting a blog should look at the success Silver has had. He started the year with a diary on the Daily Kos and now he runs a political blog that gets millions of views. Do great things, and the audience will be there.
The lesson for long-time bloggers with small (but wonderful) audiences is self-evident, sadly.
Paul Krugman has argued that bank recapitalization is the most logical response to the financial crisis, and in his column today he credits UK prime minister Gordon Brown for leading the world down that path. The Dow is up almost 600 points right now, so maybe the markets like that move.
Glenn Greenwald documents the cozy relationship between Republican hatchet man Tim Griffin and the Politico’s Jonathan Martin. I post this link not because it’s exceptional but because, I suspect, it is typical.
Nouriel Roubini explains how the provision that enables the federal government to directly buy equity in banks came to be added to the bailout bill. (You have to register to read the full article.)
The short description is that Democrats in Congress added the provision during the negotiations. Liberal economists like Brad DeLong argued in favor, and Tyler Cowen explained why the plan may not work in America.
In general, these are the times when all of the economics bloggers earn their stripes. Apart from software development, I’d say that economics is perhaps the best covered topic in the blog world (celebrity gossip notwithstanding). There are brilliant bloggers representing just about every school of economic thought, and for the most part they engage with one another rationally and without malice.
Over the next few months and years, we’ll learn a lot about which of the schools offer the best insight into what’s happening right now.
Here’s more confirmation that the inability or unwillingness of people to lend money to one another is what’s driving the ongoing bad news in the financial markets. It is essentially twice as expensive for IBM to borrow money this year than it was last year:
IBM raised $4 billion today with the sale of 5 year, 10 year and 30 year bonds. I will relate the story of the bond in the 10 year sector.
I shall begin with the IBM bond which matures in 2017, which is one year shy of the bond that the company offered today. It is not exactly the same but we can compare. That bond traded one month ago at a spread of about 170 basis points to the 10 year Treasury. Yesterday, a salesman with whom I converse, (and friend of the blog) sold some to a customer of his at T+265 basis points.
Today when IBM offers the new 10 year bond the market forced that gilt edged untainted by the credit crisis technology company to pay T+388 basis points. It was over 120 basis points cheaper than a comparable bond traded yesterday. That is a sign to me that the credit markets are in the direst state and that funding is drying up for corporate America.
As the author points out, if it’s this difficult for IBM to sell debt, most other companies are effectively shut out of the credit market entirely.
This is the first installment in a new series, “evidence that we should freak out.” I’ve even created a new “financial collapse” tag for future reference.
Grain is piling up in Canadian ports because the sellers will not accept the lines of credit normally used by buyers to guarantee the purchase. FP Passport has the details.
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Flush Michele Bachmann
Michele Bachmann, a first term Congresswoman from Minnesota, is perhaps the stupidest person in the United States House of Representatives (and that’s saying a lot). I already knew she was an idiot, but the performance she turned in on Hardball today confirms that she really has no business serving in government. (Hilzoy has the details.)
I donated $25 to her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, and I’d recommend others do so as well.