One of the most applicable use-case I remember being constantly mentioned about category theory was classification of some viruses.
Category theory makes sense when your business is large enough and you are looking to make everything streamlined. You could use some Category theory to rearrange everything from employee, customers and products into better types.
But the idea that you absolutely need to understand this stuff to get going does not make sense to me.
Certainly. Didn't mean it would be easy but that's the trick with all social and cultural change. You just keep at it until everyone thinks you were right all along.
Or, we simply wait out the next few centuries. Reproduction rates in many developed countries have dipped below replacement. Maybe the total world population will decrease in our time.
This is the problem with our current first world financial system, it is predicated on constant growth. Even the slightest hiccup in growth leads to serious consequences for the over leveraged and make no mistake most of our safety nets are over leveraged and dependent upon unrealistic gains when faced with a stagnant to declining population.
The Great Aging is underway, the EU last year had more deaths than births and will for the foreseable future, Japan has been there for a little while and China's working age population is already in decline. Africa, the Middle East/India and parts of South America are the only places experiencing actual population growth, when immigration is not taken into the equation. With Demographics and Automation deflation is the likely outcome. The Central Banks are trying all they can to prevent this from happening in the near term by spending Trillions of dollars to prop up economies and drive interest rates lower to eek out some inflation. They seem not to care whether growth is actual demand growth or simply a mirage in terms of inflation. The central banks are doubling down their efforts and will be even more accomodative in the next few years when the growth they continue to state is right around the corner never materializes.
Unfortunately I do not see a way out of this without the developing nations taking care of themselves.
People seem to have a lot of faith that a drive or urge to reproduce is not something that can be selected for and transmitted through generations, either genetically or culturally, in human beings. If it can be selected for, it will be, and very rapidly, by simple math.
While it is true that the fertility rate goes down with increasing wealth, this may only be true up to some point. With wealth increasing even further the fertility rate seems to start rising again. Whether it crosses the replacement rate again is up for debate. See the chart on the Wikipedia article for income and fertility [1] for an illustration.
As it stands now the EU has more deaths than births every year for the foreseeable future. When birthrates have been below replacement level for over 30 years it would take a massive baby boom to right the pyramid, but what good would that do? We don't need the population we used to and those babies wouldn't be productive for at least 20 years and as it stands now many of them would be as much of a drain on the state as the retired
I am not arguing that population growth would be a good thing, the population growth rate has to become essentially zero at some point. A constant plus or minus one percent per year means extinction within less than 2000 years. Overpopulation will resolve itself by starvation or resource wars, underpopulation seems actually more dangerous in the long run. But I am relatively sure that we will manage to avoid extinction due to a bad fertility rate.
And the population structure will probably become something like a rectangle then, almost everybody becomes 80 or 90 or whatever and dies within a relative narrow window. Setting aside radical changes like getting hit by an asteroid or discovering the key to eternal life.
I really only wanted to point out that it is not absolutely certain that increasing wealth surely leads to a decreasing population. If all work is done by robots and nobody is at risk of a shortage of good and services, what would people compel not to spend some of their years raising three children?
>The proposition decreased property taxes by assessing property values at their 1975 value and restricted annual increases of assessed value of real property to an inflation factor, not to exceed 2% per year.
This is why you don't really want to live under a democracy (always assuming you can find a non-democracy that respects human rights). California's government-by-referendum has made it impossibly dysfunctional, because the populace consistently votes for two types of referendum: "spend money on things I like" and "don't raise my taxes."
The person does not seem to draw to anything actionable, and his conclusion is vague.
I am not sure what he even means by 'optimizing for efficiency'
If your business depends on the happiness of your employees then optimizing for their happiness increases your bottom line.
If your business will be shut down if you commit fraud then optimizing for transparency is in your interest.
Is this person blaming economists for something that they do not have much control over - and that is thinking about individual lives. Its mathematically not possible for economists to worry about each person.
The reason why people are angry is that employment is closely linked to your ability to feed yourself and be a consumer of the global economy.
So when politicians talk about employment - what they mean is a person's ability to survive.
For economists, efficiency is simply that goods should be created where the surroundings are best suited for it - first described by David Ricardo in the 19th century. E.g. Cotton should be planted where there is the most fertile soil etc. This works best in a globalized economy where production can move around freely and where there are no trade restrictions. As a result, productivity is higher, meaning that goods are cheaper (if there is competition), meaning that - provided the result is used for consumption - that everybody is better off.
This doesn't take into account that a) labor doesn't move freely, meaning the change process creates winners and losers, and uncertainty (locals are in constant danger that their job is reallocated to some other place), b) it gives an incentive to move production to places with lowest priced-in externalities (labor market frictions like unions, environmental damage).
Imagine that you're better than me at everything (both programming and needlework). You can program three times as fast, and sew twice as fast as I can. Does that mean you should do all your own programming and sewing? No.
However small my contribution, I can save you some time by doing some sewing for you. In that saved time, you can do more programming than I could have achieved in the time I spent sewing. So in sum we're better off. So, there are potential gains from trade.
Yes, but at a certain threshold that is no longer true due to logistics. For instance, I could try to sell back all the plastic bags I got at the grocery store, and even if I folded them flat, made sure they were clean and ready to reuse, no matter the price, the grocery store owner would with all likelihood refuse to buy them from me.
Because, regardless of how much money would be saved from buying my bags over the ones fresh from the factory, it wouldn't be able to cover the logistical cost to the company's workflow.
My simplified example was designed to demonstrate the difference between absolute advantage and comparative advantage, and show that there are gains from trade, even when one party has absolute advantage for all output goods.
There is no doubt that transactions costs and other friction make some potential exchanges uneconomical. So, what you say is true. But it doesn't help or hinder my explanation, and is irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.
> For economists, efficiency is simply that goods should be created where the surroundings are best suited for it - first described by David Ricardo in the 19th century. E.g. Cotton should be planted where there is the most fertile soil etc.
This seems slightly off to me. Cotton can be grown more efficiently (in the usual sense of less cost per unit return) in some climates than others. But the economy as a whole may be more efficient if cotton is grown exclusively in subpar-for-cotton areas; perhaps the ideal-for-cotton areas are needed for another crop.
As I understand it, "efficiency" in economics will refer to one of two ideas:
1. Small deadweight losses. The smaller they are, the more efficient the economy is.
2. Pareto efficiency. (That is, the economy is efficient, in this sense, if there is no reallocation of resources that makes somebody better off without making anyone worse off.)
You are correct. GP gave an example of absolute advantage. But Ricardo is more famous for demonstrating that comparative advantage can be enough to make trade worthwhile.
Your field may be 1/3 as efficient at making cotton than mine. But perhaps it's 1/5 as efficient as mine in growing olives. So, assuming we both want cotton and olives, it would be worth you growing more cotton, and swapping for some of my olives. I get a little more cotton than I would have alone. And you get a few more olives than you would have.
Snabbdom is a gem of a library, it makes microsoft ( angular) and facebook ( react ) look like idiots.
Whoever came up with dom diffing in Facebook is clever, but facebook took that idea and made it into a weird beast, which doesn't integrate well with the rest of the open web ecosystem ( I guess facebook has way too many downstream engineers )
Snabbdom implements the core dom-diffing algorithm and leave the architecturing to you and that is where its power lies.
Snabbdom is really powerful when you mix it with the rest of the small libraries that are written in the UNIX way.
I, for one, have loved the slow and steady erosion of my civil liberties. Not to mention the endless wars, abysmal GDP growth, and continued centralization and bolstering of federal power. He's the best!
Presidents have about as much influence on the economy as they do the weather. That's especially true in this modern globalized age. Nobody is in control. The global economy is not controllable, even if a concerted will to do so existed.
On issues of civil liberties, national security + surveillance, and a growing police state, Obama has been similar if not worse than the previous regime.
Then the federal government should stop attempting to control it... That is literally my gripe. The Fed and things like QE (ignoring regulation all together) have been extremely harmful. He has done nothing but perpetuate the nonsense.
On your second point; that is extremely subjective. But even still, that should make me feel lucky?!
choose "trend line". You'll see that 2015/2016 GDP growth is precisely on the trend line. The main difference in the last 8 years is more stable GDP growth, rather than the extreme peaks and troughs of the previous 60 years.
I live in Canada and don't have a dog in this race, but I find it interesting that Americans are so obvlivious of the facts and willing to believe at face value all the BS that comes out of the likes of Trump.
"The call of blood, history, faith, culture and memory is winning the struggle against Economism, the Western materialist ideology that holds that the desire for money and things is what ultimately motivates mankind."
Unemployment sharply reduced, iraq and afghanistan wars ended, guantanamo in the process of being closed, torture ended. Some people are just never happy. Americans dont deserve him.
"Unemployment sharply reduced": you and I both know that is nonsense. The way unemployment is measured is completely illogical.
"Iraq and Afghanistan wars ended": He's continued to murder literally hundreds of people with his drone strikes. He is the opposite of a peaceful president.
"In the process of being closed": haha. He signed the NDAA. It is now harder to close than ever.
> "Unemployment sharply reduced": you and I both know that is nonsense. The way unemployment is measured is completely illogical.
I disagree. Both the primary and alternative official measures of labor force underutilization are logical; each of them may sometimes be referenced in situations where the particular measure referenced is not the most appropriate measure, but those are illogical uses of the measures, not signs that the measures themselves are illogical. If you think that there is a more appropriate measure relevant to this context that shows the opposite of what was contended, then you should present it at be prepared to defend your position that it is a more appropriate measure.
the number of Americans who are no longer in the labor force has hit an all time high of 94.7 million. If one were to factor in the low labor force participation rate, the actual unemployment rate would be significantly higher than the headlines.
According to CLSA economists, if the participation rate stayed at the levels before the financial crisis, the unemployment rate would be 9.6%, more than double what it was at the time of their study (fixed) [1].
> the number of Americans who are no longer in the labor force has hit an all time high of 94.7 million.
And the number of American's who are in the labor force also hit an all time high this year, and 158.9 million.
You offer no reason to believe that the absolute size of the population outside of the labor force is a more relevant measure than any of the official labor force underutilization measures for the claim about unemployment.
> According to CLSA economists, if the participation rate stayed at the levels before the financial crisis, the unemployment rate would be 9.6%, more than double what it is today
Well, first, its 4.9% today (well, June 2016, the most recent month for which numbers are available), and 9.6% is not more than double 4.9%.
Second, even if it were more appropriate to compare employment on a constant-participation-rate basis (for which you have presented no argument), 9.6% on 66% labor force participation rate (what is used as the pre-crisis rate in your source) would still be an improvement over Obama's term, since unemployment was at 9.8% the month Obama took office (considerably post-crisis), with a 65.7% LFPP (which would about 10.1% on a 66% participation rate.)
> You offer no reason to believe that the absolute size of the population outside of the labor force is a more relevant measure than any of the official labor force underutilization measures for the claim about unemployment.
If I understand that sentence correctly, you're putting words in my mouth. I never said it was a more relevant by itself, I said it needs to be factored in. It should be factored in because if people give up looking for work, that isn't a sign of a strong economy.
> Well, first, its 4.9% today (well, June 2016, the most recent month for which numbers are available), and 9.6% is not more than double 4.9%.
You are correct, I misspoke. I meant compared to the final unemployment report for which the CLSA studied, not today since today had not happened yet when their study was conducted. Fixed.
> Second, even if it were more appropriate to compare employment on a constant-participation-rate basis (for which you have presented no argument), 9.6% on 66% labor force participation rate (what is used as the pre-crisis rate in your source) would still be an improvement over Obama's term, since unemployment was at 9.8% the month Obama took office (considerably post-crisis), with a 65.7% LFPP (which would about 10.1% on a 66% participation rate.)
One of the most applicable use-case I remember being constantly mentioned about category theory was classification of some viruses.
Category theory makes sense when your business is large enough and you are looking to make everything streamlined. You could use some Category theory to rearrange everything from employee, customers and products into better types.
But the idea that you absolutely need to understand this stuff to get going does not make sense to me.