Consulting

 

Fugue for Tinhorns

I got the horse right here,
The name is Paul Revere,
And here's a guy that says if the weather's clear,
Can do,
Can do,
This guy says the horse can do

That guy is me.

The lyrics above are from Guys and Dolls and were sung by the racetrack touts, including Nicely-Nicely. For all of my public and private career, I realize that I am no different than a tout. A tout tries to make a prediction about the outcome of a random event. Ethical touts will use whatever information and methods are available to give their customers an edge in knowing the outcome before the event. Unethical touts will tell their customers what they themselves don’t believe and those touts may tell conflicting stories to different customers of the same event, in hopes of one of them being the winning side.

I have been a traffic modeler for most of my life. Like a racetrack tout, I have been trying to beat the odds and make predictions. But I hope that I never lose sight of the fact that they are only predictions. When I forecast a trip table, forecast mode share, or forecast volumes on a link, I am not guaranteeing an outcome. All of the methods in these predictions are based on identifying the most probable outcome among many, not the only outcome that will happen.

There are contests in which there are only a limited number of outcomes, for example Tic‑Tac‑Toe. By analyzing all these outcomes, it is possible to see what future outcomes can result from each current outcome. If you play first in Tic-Tac-Toe, then you may have a winning strategy on each play.  However, the player playing second can always make a play in response that forces a draw. Thus it is possible to develop a book on each play that will lead to at least a draw. Unless the opposing player makes a mistake and does not make their best move, it is impossible to win at Tic Tac Toe.  It is possible to memorize that “book” of best plays. Because the number of plays is limited, it is even possible to train a chicken to play Tic-Tac-Toe. (If a chicken makes a mistake, then it is eaten and won’t play again. Fortunately for them, politicians don’t taste very good).  The book in Checkers is larger but it does exist. The book in Chess is even larger and is incomplete at present. A Rubik’s Cube has 43,003,274,489,856,000 positions, only one of which is the winning position. And yet there are people who have memorized the best way to get from any position to the winning position, such that there are contests of how fast you can ‘solve” a Rubik’s Cube (the current record is 3.47 seconds).

The challenge of traffic modeling is that there is not yet a complete book on how to get to a winning solution. Until then, like Nicely-Nicely, I will keep touting customers on ways to beat the odds.

Spacetime

 

It’s About Time

It's about time,
It's about space,
About strange people in the strangest place.
It's about time,
It's about flight,
Travelin' faster than the speed of light.

It's about Minkowski spacetime!

Minkowski space combines inertial space and time manifolds (x,y) with a non-inertial reference frame of space and time (x',t') into a four-dimensional model relating a position (inertial frame of reference) to the field (physics). A four-vector (x,y,z,t) consisting of coordinate axes such as a Euclidean space plus time may be used with the non-inertial frame to illustrate specifics of motion, but should not be confused with the spacetime model generally.          

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski_space

What this says!!!!  I may not understand this, but Einstein apparently did!

If space time is hyperbolic and not Euclidean how does this change things?

Minkowski space is used to describe the light cone , e.g. world lines of light, moving through space.

This cone looks very much like a one-sheet hyperboloid narrowed to a point at the origin, which is identical to a two-sheet hyperboloid where the separation between the two sheets is zero.

I have previously suggested that the shape of the universe is hyperbolic. (IMHO it appears locally Euclidean but is globally hyperbolic, much like geometry on the surface of the earth appears locally Euclidean but, over very large distances comparable to the radius of the Earth, is non-Euclidean and spherical.  I know that am not the originator of that hypothesis.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/07/forever.html

If the shape of the universe is hyperbolic, then mathematics should seek non-Euclidean solutions. This has an implication on the speed-volume curve used in my field of traffic engineering, but also seems to have a bearing on:

·        physics, the Lorentz transform might be γ=1+ln(cosh(v/c)±sinh(v/c)), gravity might be only an apparent force and not one of the three intrinsic forces;

·        statistics, the only valid normal distribution might be the logistics distribution with s=0.5;

·        sociology and political science, tolerance, a SD of 0.6413, may be an intrinsic part of group dynamics, and

·        many other disciplines ( e. g. I suspect that my speed-volume curve findings will have an implication on Fluid Dynamics.)

Right and Wrong

 

You May Be Right

You may be right
I may be crazy
Oh, but it just may be a lunatic you're looking for
Turn out the light
Don't try to save me
You may be wrong for all I know
But you may be right

But what if you are wrong and I am right?

All things being equal, there is, on average, a 50% chance that an individual is right and a 50% chance that an individual is wrong.  In most authoritarian governments, where those can be differentiated as to how the sovereign of the government is chosen, e.g. a dictator, a hereditary monarch, an elected monarch, etc. but the sovereign of the government is an individual.  The are also other authoritarian forms of government where the sovereign is a smaller group within the whole group. That is, not an individual but e.g. a junta, an oligopoly, single party rule, etc. where not all individuals in the larger group are members of that smaller group.  That smaller group still has a 50% chance of being right and a 50% chance of being wrong.

The question about how an individual within a group, or a smaller group within a larger group,  behave is the subject of distributions within statistics.  That is what averages are all about.  An individual is 100% right or 100% wrong but there is a difference between a group and an individual. A fair coin flip is on average 50% heads, but on each individual flip of the coin it will be 100% heads or 100% tails, and not 50% head and 50% tails. 

The government in the US is not an individual or a smaller group, but is all of the People.  A smaller group, or a large group, has not only a mean, its average value, but also a standard deviation from that average value, tolerance.  If a group is normal, then that standard deviation will NOT be zero.

Debt Ceiling

 

Sixteen Tons

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

Debt is bad, but the alternative is worse.

The US is facing a debt crisis of its own making. Its Congress is responsible for all spending and revenue bills. If revenue is insufficient to match spending, then debt is a way of time shifting revenue from the future. So if Congress has authorized spending, and Congress has authorized revenue, then Congress has de facto authorized debt.

If spending increases because of price inflation, and revenue is lowered because of inflation (e.g. the tax brackets are adjusted for inflation) they why isn't the debt ceiling also adjusted for inflation.

You might not be old enough to remember, but there was a time when prices were more stable than today. Then Nixon (er…wasn’t he a Republican) applied his Shock and dollars that were used in international trade could no longer be used to trade for US gold, so they competed with domestic dollars to buy other assets and unsurprisingly inflation was the result.            
https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-happening-riding-high-on-top-of.html

Then Reagan (er... wasn’t he a Republican too?) promoted the first of what became many tax, revenue, cuts. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2020/06/taxman.html So if you cut revenue, and have inflation increasing spending, then don’t you need more debt??

Congress pretends that it also has a debt ceiling. (I guess Congress forgot that it authorized spending and revenue). That debt ceiling was last raised in 2021. At that time, the debt ceiling was set at 31.4 trillion dollars, but isn’t that in 2021 dollars. If that debt ceiling was expressed in 2022 dollars, then it would have been $33.91 trillion. So if revenue is in 2023 dollars and spending is in 2023 dollars, then why isn’t the debt ceiling also in 2023 dollars. If the debt ceiling is $33.91 trillion, or even higher given the fact that we are in 2023 not 2022, before Democrats start talking with the Republican House, if Republicans caused inflation to increase spending, and Republican tax cuts have decreased revenue, then why doesn’t the principle of "you broke it, you own it" apply?

George Santos

 

Liar, Liar

Liar, liar, pants on fire
Your nose is longer than a telephone wire
If you keep on tellin' me those lies
Still goin' out with other guys
There'll come a day I'll be gone
Take my advice, won't be long

Bad news, George Santos!

Wining a primary is not winning the general election, as was demonstrated during the recent mid-terms.  Governing, either by administering the laws, the Executive branch, or making the laws, the Legislative branch, is even more of a difference.  You govern for all for all of the people, so voters want to know a candidate's' policies. Voters probably want  to elect a "Good Shepherd", not a "Boy that Cries Wolf".

The US House of Representatives is currently 435 people.  The population of the United States in 2020 was 331.1 million according to the draft reapportionment figures. Thus each congressperson should represent over 760,000 people.  That they do not is because the Congress has not adopted the Wyoming rule, and instead tries to allocate congressional districts using the Method of Equal Proportions, as provided for in Title 2, United States Code, Sections 2a and 2b. Thus Wyoming's lone congressional seat represents over 577,000 people, while Delaware’s lone seat represents over 990,000 people. But I digress.

I have never met my congressional representative, nor do I expect to.  I also don’t personally know a thousand people, never mind 700 thousand.  Since my intention is to be represented by someone who will look out for the interests of me and my entire district, I look for someone, such as a veteran who has already demonstrated a System Optimal strategy.  If someone does act for themself, a User Optimal strategy, I look for the wealthy because I hope that, even if they can be bought, their price is very, very high.  But barring a veteran or the wealthy, I have to trust the endorsements of the primary political parties, Democrats or Republicans.   

I don’t mean to shock you, but people can lie.  My hope is that those political parties have vetted the person that they are endorsing.  In the case of George Santos, the Republican party clearly did not examine the candidate, or else they would have known he was a pathological liar who lied about almost every aspect of his life.  Is George Santos a representative of me? No, and that also appears to be the opinion of the people of Long Island that he was supposed to represent.  He might have won election in 2022 but….Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.

Tolerance II

 

This Is Me

When the sharpest words wanna cut me down
I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown 'em out
I am brave, I am bruised
I am who I'm meant to be, this is me
Look out 'cause here I come
And I'm marching on to the beat I drum
I'm not scared to be seen
I make no apologies, this is me

Tolerance works both ways.

Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch are doing their best to prove Charles Dickens was right in Oliver Twist. They are casting doubt on the 1977 ruling of the Supreme Court that if an employer makes reasonable accommodations for religion, where reasonable accommodations are those that cause a minor, or "de minimis," cost, there is no religious discrimination. SCOTUS is hearing a case where an evangelical associate rural mail carrier, Gerald Groff, refused to work on Sunday. The employer, in this case the US Postal Service, did not fire the employee or force him to work on Sunday. Postal officials sought to accommodate Groff by attempting to facilitate Sunday shift swaps, but the effort was not always successful. As a result, his absences caused resentment among other carriers who had to cover his shifts and ultimately led one to leave the rural post office and another to quit the Postal Service altogether, according to court papers. Groff received several disciplinary letters for his attendance and resigned in 2019.  Groff seems to be arguing that any disciplinary letters at all were religious discrimination, and the fact that he resigned, and was not fired, was religious discrimination.

The case might be dismissed, by deciding that Groff does not have standing because he resigned. IMHO, that would be a mistake. The case is one of the rights of an individual vs. the rights of the group, which is precisely the kind of cases the Supreme Court should decide. Are the rights to practice religion absolute and the group must accept the decision of the individual, or can the group impose reasonable limits and say that while it tolerates the religious beliefs of an individual that does NOT mean that the religious beliefs of the individual are the beliefs of the group.

IMHO, this is no different than the 303 Creative case. Any beliefs of an individual, or a minority within in a group, should be tolerated, but that does not mean that the group accepts those beliefs. Tolerance, reasonable accommodations, is different from acceptance. The problem seems to be when an individual thinks his rights are correct and absolute and the group does not agree. That individual should also tolerate the group, as much as the group is expected to tolerate the individual. In the words of Eddie Murphy at the Golden Globes, “Pay your taxes. Mind your business…. And keep Will Smith's wife's name out your f---ing mouth!

Inflation VII

 

I Can’t Make You Love Me

'Cause I can't make you love me if you don't
You can't make your heart feel something it won't
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I'll feel the power
But you won't, no you won't
'Cause I can't make you love me, if you don't

Trying to make demand when there is no demand is just as bad.

I have argued in previous blog posts that inflation has two parts, long-term currency inflation. https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-happening-riding-high-on-top-of.html and short-term product inflation  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/02/inflation-predictions.html.

In the most recent episode of the Planet Money podcast they discussed the 2% inflation target. https://www.npr.org/2023/01/13/1149071772/two-percent-target-inflation-expectations. It was argued that an inflation of 2% was tolerable because if someone takes 2% of your beer you won’t notice. But if someone continually takes 2% of your beer, you might not notice on each sip, but eventually you will have no beer. To prevent this a zero percent inflation target sounds like even more of a more reasonable target.

Zero percent was discussed and dismissed because the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, can’t lower its interest rate below zero when inflation goes below zero, i.e. deflation. I would argue that this confuses the role of the Fed. It’s role to serve as the lender of last resort, to provide liquidity to smaller local banks and provide for the nation's currency. It has done this, has prevented runs on banks, and successfully transitioned the US to a fiat currency where the fiat is constrained by the US economy. However since the dollar is also used in international trade, the constraint should arguably be the international economy, not just the US economy. That it is only constrained by the US economy means that  there is more demand than there are US dollars, and currency inflation has been the result.

Product inflation has much more to do with product supply and demand. If the interest rate goes up, then the cost of producing goods goes up. and supply is reduced. If the interest rate goes up, then there is a time shifting of demand from tomorrow to today. Since price is when marginal cost is equal to marginal demand, changing supply and demand can affect prices. However as noted, you can time shift demand, but you can’t create demand.

The goal of currency inflation should be zero. There should be no goal for product inflation and just an acceptance of whatever supply and demand  randomly dictates for product prices. Supply can be contracted by increasing interest rates. Demand can be shifted in time but not created. Maybe setting interest rates below zero to increase supply is impossible ( but isn't that what tax credits and other subsidies do?). The hubris of thinking that we can control short-term product inflation has led the Fed to think that it can control total inflation. As long as long-term currency inflation is zero, even if short-term product inflation is sometimes greater than zero and sometimes less than zero, that should be expected and tolerated.