The current zeitgeist reminds me a little of when Musk acquired twitter and people kept saying he would go bankrupt - he paid way too much for it - $44B. An idiot and also the likely world's first trillionaire.
US cannot default on US debt. It is not possible. World reserve=US does not work the same way. Most politicians know that the debt does not matter, but will use it as a rhetorical device. Does the treasury yield rate matter to the US gov, like the people at the top making the decisions, in any critical sense? I kind of feel like they can control it through policy or the fed, since $USD is literally what the world runs on. So even tho treasury repayments on huge debt amounts now comprise a considerable slice of the budget, and the story is that US cannot afford to support its citizenry, cos they are in debt, I suspect that they could exert far more influence over this if they chose to.
Am also casually looking at FRED. RE 2014 decline - do you know why this was? I speculate something to do with the initial invasion of Ukraine / China cycling out of treasuries possibly to buy Russian war bonds or oil. I am purely speculating.
I think this is well-written and satisfying, I spent many years in postgrad stats departments but never managed to find anything this approachable on category theory.
A professional scientist I know (tenured, professor) recruited me to set up a backtesting framework for a predictive finance model. When the results were not as they expected (this person does not work in finance and never has), they asked to see the code, then told me that claude had found a problem with the way some of the calculations were done (there was actually no problem), supplied the claude comments, and told me to change the code to match what they thought was correct. I did it anyway. Had they had more expertise in the domain (finance), they likely would have been able to leverage claude as a tool rather than inadvertently pursuing a very stupid mistake. Domain experts tend to doubt their ability to excel in other domains which is amplified by LLMs.
The comments section on the author's book 'How to not be wrong' is one of the best things I have read in ages. I am so glad the author left it public. Imagine releasing a book called 'How to not be wrong' and you have like 200 people telling you that you are wrong. Posting in the comments section of your minimal personal blog.
Hi, nice work, its pretty simple and easy to use. I've often found new artists from one-off song collaborations eg Devonte Hynes from Solange's single Losing You. No connection between them is indicated from my minimal use of the site. But that's from the data feed (MusicBrainz) from what I gather, and adding such functionality may increase complexity. Would love to get a quick playlist from all the nodes in a neighbourhood so I could listen quickly. Keen to see where it goes.
I did a job for some neuroscientists years ago and we found a very strong correlation between microplastics exposure and elevated acetylcholine in a very young sample. They all thought there should be no effect or the effect should be inverted because of oxidative stress. We never resolved the phenomenon though. From what I understand, Acetylcholine elevation in the lipidome is either neuroprotective or neutral. Is there any reason why microplastics exposure would tend to increase acetylcholine?