Phil

Why would there be a difference in muscle loss between losing weight with semaglutide and losing weight by "regular" dieting?  Both methods involve taking in fewer calories than you burn.  Why would there be a difference?

Also, if income is lowered in Tulsa, housing prices must drop, because you have fewer dollars chasing the same amount of housing.

Perhaps your argument is that, with lots of new housing built in NYC, prices drop in NYC and Tulsa, but consumers of housing are not necessarily better off because (for instance) they might be "forced" to move from Tulsa to NYC, making them less happy than they would have been otherwise, despite the lower housing prices in both cities.

But that's a completely different argument.  

I may have erected a straw man here.  But... (read more)

Why didn't Adam's bosses move him to NYC before the new construction?  Because, I assume, the bosses knew Adam and his colleagues wouldn't move because rent is so expensive.   Or, which amounts to the same thing, they knew they couldn't attract enough talent in NYC because of the high housing prices.

This implies Adam and his colleagues DO have a choice.  It's just that the new, lower housing prices in NYC provide enough incentive to make the move that Adam chooses to make the move, although perhaps reluctantly.

It seems that your argument, therefore, depends on housing prices being lowered in NYC.  Otherwise, why wait for new housing before making the move?

I am confused by your number 3.  Edited for what I think you mean, and using NYC (high cost) and Tulsa (low cost) to make your example more vivid:

"Building more in [NYC] causes people to move [to NYC because now it's cheaper to live there,] which causes jobs to move [to NYC], which causes more housing to be unused in [Tulsa, which causes housing costs to drop in Tulsa]."

If my understanding is correct, then housing prices drop in NYC, and housing prices drop in Tulsa.  Therefore, housing prices drop on a national level.  But you say, 

"..... (read more)

How long did it take to feel the difference?

FWIW, my friend who lives in downtown Ottawa sent me this link, written by a neighbor he knows personally.  (It's an account of him meeting some of the truckers parked on his street, who are nice people and considerate.)  My friend went down to meet them too, and confirms this account.

https://maybury.ca/the-reformed-physicist/2022/02/03/a-night-with-the-untouchables/?fbclid=IwAR0se_AVoi1p4Ae7l3KQSsU3oxoCNNYfNi3SWaaay-2Qvkiqig35oNqElTk

I live a few miles from downtown and so haven't seen what's going on personally.
 

Attackers aren't given infinite attempts, and even if they are, God doesn't give them infinite time.  So what you really want is to minimize the probability that the attacker guesses your password before giving up.

Suppose the attacking bot can make 200,000 attempts.  By the first scheme, the probability the attacker guesses the password is .95 (plus an infinitesimal).  By the first scheme but with a three-character password on a high roll, the probability is 1.00 (with 50 different characters, there are only 125K three-character words, so su... (read more)

Fair enough.  The question is then, does a vaccinated person's immune system take care of the virus so fast that the viral load remains "extremely low" enough to result in a negative test?

That seems counterintuitive given that Elizabeth says vaccinated people are more likely to be symptomatic, but I suppose it's possible that the immune system would trigger covid-19 symptoms even while maintaining a low viral load.

Is the vaccinated person's lower viral load enough to trigger a positive test, especially for those with symptoms?  

If it is, shouldn't we be thinking of "reinfections" as those cases of serious disease, rather than simply positive tests?

One thing I've never found the answer to: is a positive test evidence of disease?  It seems to me that a vaccinated person inhales the virus just as readily as an unvaccinated person, but the vaccinated person's immune system fights it off before symptoms (or before serious symptoms) appear.  

In that case, wouldn't it be normal and expected for vaccinated people to sometimes test positive, in the sense of "there exist copies of the coronavirus in the upper respiratory system"?

 

Why do you say research before 2013 is of lower quality?

With a seven-day incubation period, does that mean it's 0 protection until about day 4, then near-perfect protection after that?  (As per jimrandomh's comment of 4/17.)

Very well stated.  I would be interested in a link to something that describes that principle, the outcome of the prediction process.

Correction to above: the quote from p. 206 refers to high schools, not colleges.  

For colleges, I found a page here that lists 25th and 75th ACT percentiles.  Some pairs of schools have no overlap at all; for instance, Ohio State's middle interval is (27, 31), while Vanderbilt is (32, 35).  The average for college enrolees, per this study, was 20.1, with an SD of 4.33.  So Vanderbilt's 25th percentile is almost +3 SD.

For GPA ... the 25th percentile for Vanderbilt is 3.75.  The mean in this study was 2.72, with an SD of 0.65.  ... (read more)

I realized I forgot to provide evidence from the paper that the range of ACT within colleges is smaller than the range of GDP.

From p.207 of the paper:

"Thus, ACT scores are related to college graduation, in part, because students with higher scores are more likely to attend the kinds of colleges where students are more likely to graduate..."

(I think they obviously have this backwards, for the most part.  Seems to me more likely that the higher graduation rates of those "kinds of colleges" are the ones that choose students with the higher ACT scor... (read more)

Here's an argument for why the study's conclusions are unsupported.

-----

Suppose that there are lots of things that go into predicting what makes a student successful. There's ACT score, and GPA, and leadership, and race, and socioeconomic status, and countless other things.

Now, suppose colleges have tried to figure out the weightings for each of those factors, and shared their results with each other.  They all compute "success scores" for each student.

Harvard takes the top 1000 applicants by score.  MIT takes the next 1000.  Princeton takes... (read more)

Do any of the cited effects of higher air pollution depend on the subject recognizing the higher levels of pollutants, by sight or smell? Or is it invisible except for the effects?

FWIW, I remember reading about the Chevy Orlando, sold in Canada (but not the US) until maybe 2015. I recall it was said to be the cheapest new vehicle that could seat seven.

It seems cruel to me to ask someone to sit middle seat in front! Maybe not a small child, though.

The logic would be correct if, when Yovanni lied, he would always say it was Xavier Williams.  In that case, there would be (roughly) 1/100 "Yovanni lies and says it was Xavier" for every 1/1,000,000 "Yovanni tells the truth and says it was Xavier."

But if Yovanni lies randomly, and you have no prior that he would lie and say Xavier any more than he would lie and say anyone else, you have 1/100 * 1/1,000,000 "Yovanni lies and also Yovanni says it was Xavier" for every 99/100  * 1/1,000,000 "Yovanni tells the truth and says it was Xavier," which is 99% truth.

I'm saying that if previously expensive goods become very cheap due to automation, the total for all goods will be valued higher in "real dollars".  For that one good, the total dollar value could indeed be lower, even after overall inflation (such as, for instance, if the price drops by a factor of 20, but only 10 times as many items are produced).

But for the economy as a whole, the value in "real dollars" will always at least stay the same after productivity improvements that lower some prices relative to the status quo.  That's because even th... (read more)