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Hassle

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2023/01/hassle.html
Created
Mon, 09/01/2023 - 01:30
A friend keeps encouraging me to write this book (a book titled "Hassle"), and if anybody is willing to pay me an absurd advance I will. I have thought about this a lot over the years, and the simple example is that you can't easily get a human on customer service anymore. Anything from the IRS to your cable company. Minor problems which eat up absurd amounts of your time.

But it's so many things. Once upon a time Ward Cleaver pulled out the checkbook once per month and paid the bills, and now it's just endless ongoing... Hassle!

Coming Attractions: A Trump charging decision

https://digbysblog.net/2023/01/08/coming-attractions-a-trump-charging-decision/
Created
Mon, 09/01/2023 - 01:00
News overlooked on Friday This news was largely obscured Friday by the Republicans’ Speaker follies: The special counsel investigating Donald Trump could decide whether to file criminal charges against him in just weeks after amassing a trove of new state documents concerning pressure to overturn the 2020 election, sources have told Bloomberg. Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of Justice Department prosecutors are currently poring over new emails, letters and other records from battleground states. “You can tell that it’s moving quickly,” Brian Kidd, a former federal prosecutor who served under Smith at the Department of Justice, told Bloomberg. Officials in Arizona, Georgia, New Mexico and Nevada confirmed to Bloomberg that they have complied with grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. The material turned over by Nevada and reviewed by Bloomberg reveals that Trump representatives baselessly accused the state’s local officials of allowing election “fraud and abuse” soon after Trump lost the vote to Joe Biden. “Moving quickly” is good.

Econometric testing

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2023/01/08/econometric-testing-2/
Created
Mon, 09/01/2023 - 00:09
Debating econometrics and its shortcomings yours truly often gets the response from econometricians that “ok, maybe econometrics isn’t perfect, but you have to admit that it is a great technique for empirical testing of economic hypotheses.” But is econometrics — really — such a great testing instrument? Econometrics is supposed to be able to test […]

Chaotic speaker vote two years after attempted coup in oil-rich North American country

https://rys.io/en/163.html
Created
Sun, 08/01/2023 - 12:18

This week in the United States of America, a former British colony on the North American continent, long-brewing political and social problems culminated in a messy speaker election in the lower chamber of the bicameral national parliament.

The Republican party, by far the more conservative of the two major parties in what effectively is a two-party political oligopoly, gained narrow majority in the chamber in November elections, but was unable to effectively execute on its new-found power. A small far-right splinter group within the party blocked the election of the speaker — a procedural position that has gradually become heavily politicized — demanding political favors in return for their votes. This resulted in four days of heated and often chaotic proceedings, at one point devolving into a brawl.