So ... the story goes that one day a Mexican magician informed his audience that he was about to disappear, right in front of their eyes, on the count of three. He began counting, "Uno ... "Dos ..." Then POOF! He vanished. Everybody was surprised. Not so much that it was a good magic trick but because [scroll down] [a little more] He disappeared without a Tres.
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Somebody very clever fed 1,000 hours of Trump rallies into a computer and had it algorithmically generate an artificial Trump rally. This is part of the result. PRESIDENT: Foreign powers cheat us! Canada steals our milk! China steals our milk! We only had one glass of milk left: Obama drank it. Not fair. Crowd boos. They wanted that milk. PRESIDENT: But like President Ronald Rogaine: I will bring back the milk! Crowd roars. They still want that milk. PRESIDENT: A wall of milk. No criminals get through. Democrats want criminals to have the milk. No way. Milk comes from coal. We'll dig it up.
By way of concluding this round-up, I'll address two decisions that themselves addressed the relationship between the United States and its territory, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. I'll also finish my discussion (begun earlier this year, well before this 'round-up series) of a controversy over US policy on the Mexican border and on the deportation of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S. Further, I'll say something about the ability of Indian tribes to maintain their own reservation-based courts, which courts can hear at least some controversies involving persons who are not residents thereof. All these controversies speak in their various ways to the idea of sovereignty, which underlies not only the US constitution, but any nation state's constitution, written or implicit. Tribes and Reservations Reservations are the sovereign territory of the recognized tribe. Obviously the Choctaws are not sovereign in quite the full-throated sense in which the United...
To resume discussion of the question I raised yesterday: is any living thinker with academic cred a cognitivist and intuitionist in meta-ethics, as well as a teleologist and pluralist in substantive ethics. I did receive one answer from my various postings of this question that deserves further inquiry: Amartya Sen (1933-). I looked into it a bit further. Sen is the author of COMMODITIES AND CAPABILITIES (1985); ETHICS AND ECONOMICS (1987); DEVELOPMENT AS FREEDOM (1999). In the first of these books, Sen looked at empirical evidence on gross national product per capita in various countries, and asked whether it correlates with other sensible-seeming measures of the well being of a country: life expectancy and infant mortality. Brazil and Mexico, he found, had more than SEVEN TIMES the per capita production of Sri Lanka, India, or China. But does that extra money buy them happiness? Sri Lanka does better than any of the other countries just listed by longevity and child mort...
I begin this year, as I seem to begin each year, with three calendars. I have a new desktop/appointment calendar from American Express; a month-by-month wall calendar advertising the Boston Red Sox baseball team, and a day-to-day calendar atop my dresser filled with trivia regarding a television program, The Big Bang Theory. The AMEX calendar, as is its year-by-year custom, tells me to travel to various exotic places where I can use my blue card to go into debt. Among the locales highlighted this year: Cancun, Mexico; Oslo, Norway; Cusco, Peru. In connection with the latter, we're told amidst space for mid-September 2015 appointments that visitors to high-altitude Cuzco should keep well hydrated and avoid heavy meals and alcohol. Got it. The Red Sox calendar gives the stats for different players each month, starting in January with Jon Lester, Pitcher, #31. Lester also gets a very dramatic photo portraying him in full stretch, mid-pitch. If you're curious, he was born...
We have travelled a long way. A look back is a good way to end a journey. We began with a discussion of some of the concepts essential to any discussion of contemporary finance. Why do stock prices move? Do they move randomly? We discussed the fact that modern finance theory has long used the bell curve as a randomness base line. Related to this, we said that the efficiency of markets, built as it is upon their liquidity and transparency, as well as the fact that a lot of very smart people are looking for an edge in competition with one another, is an adequate explanation for random movements, but that inefficiencies of inefficiencies of markets, which show up as skewed or otherwise non-normal curves, require other explanations. From there we moved to the questions: how stock options derive their value? And, what are the defining facts about bonds, either corporate or sovereign? We also discussed accounting, and so the balance-sheet difference between stock...