Tyler Cowen linked to this NYT reader poll about how to stimulate the economy. I had to stop reading after the first five. Go ahead and try it. In just two minutes you can ruin your whole day.
Invest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
I liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas -- unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
The name is a misnomer. And a harmful one, because it interferes with understanding the process that is really occuring. What is really occurring is a search of a constrained program space. Let's say you want to be able to identify images of hot dogs . You begin with a plausible program for doing so, that is able to also search the space of nearby programs that might get better results on the problem. You then (in "supervised learning") provide scores that indicate how well one of these possible programs has done on solving the problem. After doing this for some time you settle upon a program that solves the problem "well enough." This is a great technique that can produce truly impressive results on a wide class of problems, such as identifying images of hot dogs. But notice that, except for the phrase in scare quotes, there is no "learning" in the description. Calling this "learning" is importing ideological baggage that just obscures what
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ReplyDeleteInvest billions of dollars to develop an interstate passenger rail system similar to the interstate highway system. This would do much to create jobs, stimulate growth in the economy and reduce our dependence on oil.
— D Harwood, Richmond, VA
LOL
Put a hefty $4 additional tax on gasoline. Split the revenues evenly between education (every citizen gets 2 years of college free, and can work off the other 2 years with public service), real investments in solar and wind energy production and light rail. What do you get? Energy conservation, a better workforce, jobs and re-investment in safe, healthy cities. It's what we should have done on 9/12/2001.
— Nick Hayes, Milwaukee, WI
*cringe*
Put a muzzle on Ben Bernanke.
— dave, Tucson
Hey, now that's a good one!
Break windows. As many of them as we can. Breaking windows should be a central feature of any sensible economic plan.
ReplyDeleteI liked this terminology, from comment #5: "assign much more money to community colleges". Assign them more money. That just takes all the coercion and injustice out of it, doesn't it?
I guess no one will read this comment since the post is 4+ days old, but I felt like posting it anyway.