Memory Matrix

Frank said

The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip tried to make sense of it. Existing inflation “might be part of the explanation” for why capital is not fleeing to the traditional safety of U.S. bonds, but that fails to explain the apparent lack of faith in the Federal Reserve’s ability to come to the rescue. “Technical factors” like hedge funds shedding their bond holdings are similarly unsatisfying. “The more fundamental explanation is that global investors might be changing how they view the U.S,” he wrote. In cruder terms, our allies and partners abroad think we’ve lost our minds, and there are few indications that sanity will be restored anytime soon.

We’re not yet even talking about foreign adversaries like China, supposedly the target audience for our exercise in economic masochism. “There were recent fears that China might try to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs by selling some of its own bond holdings,” Ip noted. “There is no evidence that it has, but the possibility has highlighted the risks to the U.S. of a trade war morphing into financial war.”

You read that right: Not only has China held in reserve its own economic weapons in a global trade war that has so far primarily rattled America’s allies, but our deteriorating position also provides China with even more leverage over the administration than Beijing had just two weeks ago. That might explain why the Trump administration isn’t waiting around for Beijing to make the first overture in trade talks. Trump is asking Xi Jinping to request a phone call from the White House — presumably so the president can save as much face as possible as he engineers a retreat from the conflict on which he embarked wholly unprepared. (1)

For every seller of a treasury security there is a buyer.  If they dump their securities, the buyers get a good deal because fund will obtain the PAR value and an increased yield.  The Chinese dumping treasuries would be beautiful for people who wanted to earn a good interest rate on their capital by investing in American government bonds. The commenters making waves about the Chinese body politic selling their treasuries are selling pablum.

Convincing the American people that neither they nor their children deserve a good return on bonds and savings accounts is the worst thing about the about pablum economics lesson pushers. No American hurt from the tariffs because the money wasn’t even collected for them yet.  The heavily capitalized funds tanked the stock market to terrify people.  The Wall Street Journal is on the side of the outsourcers and always has been. It once was a great information source for those who wanted to be informed.  It has turned into agitprop but still has useful headlines about CEO changes, lawsuits, and the like. It is turning into NPR for the literati.(2)

1. https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/counter-intelligence-friday-april?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=108011028

2. https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/counter-intelligence-friday-april?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=108054614

A ranking of counties is a serious undertaking with many different paths that one might embark upon to complete the work. The output could be considered software. Software design works best when one has a metaphor. The metaphor in this one is that of a parent deciding where to move in one of the following scenarios 1) around their child’s sophomore year in high school, 2) just after the child graduates high school, and 3) later in life when the child wants to attend college or work in their twenties. The reasons to do this vary, but generally can be summed up as ensuring a paid for college option if so desired, ensuring an intelligent pool of potential mates, offering a potential source of fulfillment for the parent as they age. Moving somewhere becomes a strategic matter with regards to wildly different labor markets and costs.

The funding of college should be the prime factor in deciding where to move. Many such programs have funding that might cease to be available in the future. Children might not want to go to college. The reason for this as the factor in determining the states is because it demonstrates a commitment to equal protection under the law. Universal higher education funding demonstrates it by offering the programs to all students and without regard for program preferences. Universal higher education funding demonstrates that the people of the state care about the young. That is not to say the states have everything in order. Tennessee for example is a well known for privation in certain segments of its economy economy, as is North Carolina. Montana has high suicide rates. New Jersey makes people think of Ben Affleck.

These states were selected because they offer universal higher education funding without regarding to the specific program selected. This selection is a subset of states that guarantee higher education funding, however many states require specific programs. These programs often purport to be high demand areas, yet the labor environment disagrees. For Example, Kentucky claims that information technology is a high demand career field, yet there are areas with a quarter of a million people in them, where one would be lucky to find five job postings for a systems job per year. There are more system administrators in one large city in Pennsylvania than the entire state of Kentucky, yet thousands of Kentucky students are told that information technology is a high demand career within the state. This is but one example. The same issue will arise in other states.

New York offers a program, but is not in the list because it incentivizes sociopathy. Wisconsin offers a program, but its continuation is determined on a per year basis and the state seems to be a contributor to the national schizophrenia. Maine and Connecticut have programs that match the criteria but they eliminated religious exemptions to vaccination. No one who loves their children should move to place that will not allow one to opt out of placing the child into a premature death lottery without the possibility of exemption for reasons of morality.

Kentucky is here due to a confluence of factors that make it uniquely interesting. E.g. one of the nation’s lowest Gini Coefficients, poor social indicators of health, labor market issues, long time spans of overwhelmingly one-party rule, with each party having taken decade long turns at the wheel, a unique position as the only state where public sector employees outnumber private sector employees, etc. In a way it is the most communistic if one considers communistic to mean that the government controls the means of production – as in the government furnishing the voter with a paycheck. That was as of my last research on the subject, but more detail will appear on the subject later.

North Dakota is here because it is apropos of the maxim “If a man wants a job, he can have one”. I lived there. My favorite economics professor is there. It’s a good place if you will risk frostbite in less 5 minutes at 50 degrees below Fahrenheit in order to live somewhere apropos of the mentioned maxim. They also have good fields and excellent bird watching opportunities.

This project will take a long time. It is a labor of love largely for myself, and one which others may take pleasure from. It may also provide useful intelligence for political activism and policy debate. Massachusetts is very costly. One of the interesting things to ascertain is whether people from less affluent places could even manage to move there in the first place. Michigan has a large Islamic contingent growing and that may prove to be a confounding variable when analyzing historical data. New Jersey is a land of high wages and UFOs, North Carolina is a red state with opposition to unemployment insurance. Over the first few counties, I will find some good information that transfers easily between analysis. Good data sources may vary between states. For example, many states suddenly hid all their vital records data such as births and deaths after 2021. The analysis will vary. My ultimate goals include formulas for the cost of housing, the probability of find a job in particular fields, and even an estimate of the probabilities that given job would have rest periods like 10 or 15 minute breaks in addition to a lunch break.

States very greatly. My non-maxed unemployment insurance in North Dakota 10 years ago was more than the 150% of the maximum unemployment insurance available in North Carolina or Kentucky a decade later. Kentucky mandates lunch and rest periods because of some hard work by the originators of the name redneck almost 70 years earlier. A similar situation exists with Massachusetts social benefits like unemployment insurance relative to those in some of the other states. The term liberal relates to the posture toward the education benefit. Some of the states in the list are profoundly illiberal in other areas. Merely offering an education program in no way assures the state’s counties’ greatness relative to another state’s.

The final states for the ranking of counties are Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, Vermont, Georgia, Montana, North Carolina, and New Jersey, plus North Dakota and Kentucky. These are the Liberal 8 plus North Dakota and Kentucky.

The Edison method serves me well in life. It worked to stop smoking. It worked for other commitments. The Edison method is to simply announce what you will do let your integrity and shame avoidance drive you to accomplish the goal. Thomas Edison used the process when he announced what he was to invent in the future. With that in my mind, the name of this collection will change to “A Ranking of Counties”. This will become an aggregate of data and analysis regarding numerous counties in the United States.

One may recognize an allusion to “A Ranking of States” by H. L. Mencken. Mencken’s ranking of states was a legendary work which still remains readable and informative in the present day. The ranking of counties will have a similar aim albeit with a slightly different focus. The mission is this case is to function as a resource for trans-generational migration. Trans-generational migration means relocation for the betterment of one’s children and to help ensure future generations survivability through geographic location selection which best supports the continuance of the family line.

The analysis on where to place one’s future descendants will lead to some uncomfortable realities. Economics is called the dismal science after all. For example, the early death rates in almost every Kentucky county skyrocketed at the same time. What relationship might explain things like that? Those kinds of questions will be answered with data, hypothesis tests, probabilities, charts, and historical context.

A name will be introduced for the set of states containing the counties which will be analyzed. The name is the Liberal n where n is the number of states selected. In similar fashion to the G7 or G8 in the global environment, the Liberal 7 or Liberal 8 will refer to the states in this environment. The final number may not be 7 or 8, that is for example. There will also be a plus two, which consists of North Dakota and Kentucky. The analysis by county will consist of everything from employment and housing features to suicide probabilities and local colleges. The ranking is not the same as those rankings one sees about the best colleges or best town, but about the best place to plant descendants. Some of the data types that will likely be included will include sample data related to work and life conditions as reported by people in those counties. Readers may suggest counties of interest and I may review those counties at some point. Countering confirmation bias is an important task in any endeavor, so counties outside of the Liberal n may be studied for comparison.

Economics is the study of how humans allocate resources. In olden times the field was called political economy. The terms were split into politics and economics by university wanting to distinguish classes between trade oriented and government operations. The Bible contains numerous sections related to decision making around resources. Some articles in this collection may relate to prophecy and events because the events affect the economics of individuals. This work is about the making of decisions and not about the idolatry of wealth or politicians. It is impossible to separate morality, amorality, and immortality from decision making about resources. Therefore the work assumes a moral dimension. Some articles may analyze the the views promulgated by others because such views often play a role in individual decision making.

The next step in the ranking of counties will be the official identification of the liberal states for purposes of the project.

The Claude AI terms of service at Anthropic, as of 14 October 2024, say that

you may not use the service to “develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models.”

Claude’s terms further state

“Equitable relief. You agree that (a) no adequate remedy exists at law if you breach Section 3 (Use of Our Services); (b) it would be difficult to determine the damages resulting from such breach, and any such breach would cause irreparable harm; and (c) a grant of injunctive relief provides the best remedy for any such breach. You waive any opposition to such injunctive relief, as well as any demand that we prove actual damage or post a bond or other security in connection with such injunctive relief.”

Machine learning includes linear regression. Other Machine Learning algorithms include Logistic Regression, decision trees, random forests, support vector machines, K-Nearest Neighbors, & Bayes Algorithms. It seems to me, that as of 14 October 2024, no one seeking to handle any data science can legitimately use Claude. They are driving toward Claude working as the replacement of human co-workers according to some of the latest marketing.  If the users are forbidden from using the results of the services to strengthen their own work, it seems like it will produce a walled garden without machine learning expertise within the businesses.

Zero Hedge reported on California launching a hydrogen hub infrastructure for hydrogen refueling infrastructure. https://www.zerohedge.com/political/california-launch-hydrogen-hub-expand-zero-emission-technology.  The California government’s official press release on the Hydrogen Hub was released 17 July 2024 at https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/07/17/california-launches-world-leading-hydrogen-hub/. Clean Technica produced an article about the Hydrogen Hub grant program that covers multiple states.

This blog will follow Nikola and Hyla, which are available online at https://www.nikolamotor.com/ and https://www.hyla.co/. Nikola produces the TRE FCEV.

General Motors has a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and Honda for Hydrogen development. Hyundai has the XCIENT fuel cell truck. Kenworth has the T680. Like the Hyundai the T680 places the fuel tanks behind the driver from floor to ceiling.  The Kenworth is a partnership with Toyota with Toyota producing the fuel cell power plant and Kenworth producing the trucks.  All of these are limited to around 400-450 miles of range, with the exception of one of the XCIENTS which listed 400km, which is 248 miles. Hyundai has a class 8 truck in partnership with a company called Plus, and they claim to be fully autonomous.

Volvo has fuel cell trucks with a range of up to 1000 km.  International Trucks has a hydrogen fuel cell technology designed for routes 300+ miles in testing.  They use the General Motors fuel cell platform, and OneH2 mobile hydrogen production and fueling technology to bring the fuel station to the customer in a manner similar to Hyla.

Mistral Instruct using the above as Local Documents input:

The Hydrogen Hub infrastructure launched by California is an important step towards expanding zero-emission transportation options. With more refueling stations available, it will be easier for consumers to switch to hydrogen-powered vehicles and reduce their carbon footprint. It’s great to see multiple companies working together on developing hydrogen technology, including Nikola, Hyla, General Motors, Honda, Kenworth, Toyota, Volvo, International Trucks, and more. The range of these vehicles varies, but it’s clear that there is a growing interest in producing longer-range hydrogen fuel cell trucks.

Addendum 9/21/24:  Ford has a hydrogen vehicle in the works with an outsourced power train, but it was not included at the time of original writing.

1. R² is the coefficient of determination, which is the square of the Pearson correlation coefficient, r, the formula for which is ρ=β₁(σx/σy), where β₁ is the parameter estimate. ASCI and Unicode text does not have a circumflex, ^, on top of the β. For this documentation the objective is multiplatform long-term readability so an equation editor with specialized support for circumflexes is out of the question.

2. There is also the existence of the rejection region method. We reject the null hypothesis if the test statistic’s absolute value is greater than the critical value, which we can express with the formula Reject if |t| > t_α/2,n-1

The U.S. Department of Labor shows the states with mandatory lunch breaks and the states with mandatory rest periods.  The national Conference of State Legislatures has a list of which states codified religious and personal belief vaccine exceptions.

This article is to narrow down long a long term settlement plan based upon a critical factor, probably the most important factor.  Some might not think this factor is that important, but since it is encountered day in and day out every working day of every year, it is extremely important.  The factor is whether or not a worker gets breaks at work.  Numerous states do not mandate any kind of break.  Others mandate a lunch period, and others mandate lunch and rest periods.  Some mandate lunch periods only for those under 18.  Ostensibly, the day after one’s 18th birthday is the point at which one no longer needs rest during a workday for those states.

I have worked in Kentucky and Tennessee.  Both of these states have different regulations. Tennessee requires a lunch break, but does not specify rest periods.  Kentucky specifies lunch and rest periods.  In the state of Kentucky, every employer I ever worked for except for one complied with all the provisions.  A single employer hated the idea of rest periods, but such behavior was illegal and that gives people the right to argue against them.  In Tennessee, which has a slightly different framework, I have had had 2 employers which had both lunch and rest breaks, 1 employer that had only a 30-minute lunch break in the center of a ten hour shift, and one employer that had none until complained on severely, and then the complainers got the mandatory lunch break while the non-complainers still received no breaks.

New Hampshire was on my short list, but it mandates only lunch breaks like Tennessee.  That means a distribution center with a senior walking 10 miles a day would have no rest periods and that would be legal and they would have no argument against that treatment.

With n=4, lunch and break stands at 50% for a state that regulates only a lunch period, and greater > 95% in a state that regulates both lunch and breaks.  Part of that may not even relate to any kind of enforcement, but the simple cultural difference that workers should be able to rest for a few minutes during the day and the people growing up under such a culture just expect that it will happen for others.

Illinois, Kentucky, Colorado, and Vermont pass the anti-slavish test.  California also regulates lunch and rest periods, but they and New York have chosen the path of gene-therapy anti-humanism and cannot be considered among the moral states that we consider further.

Of those 4 states continuing, Vermont’s regulation about rest periods is a vague standard of reasonable to protect health and hygiene.  The other three specify minimum time amounts.  So any person who will have to work a full time job in their senior years should live in one of those three, possibly four states.  Frankly, anyone who has to work a full time job at all should live in one of those states.  Maybe a further look at the pragmatic realities related to Vermont’s non-specific standard would make it a quartet of states with respect of workers.

A non passive-incomer’s state of choice to settle in would then be either Illinois, Kentucky, or Colorado, so that they may have some rest breaks during the thousands of days they spend working over the course of their lives.  It’s illegal to work animals with no breaks in the same states you can do it to humans if you are a monied interest.

The number of science, technology, engineering, and math, STEM, jobs in the United States, shrank for the past three decades,1982-2012. The draw-down accelerated from 2000-2012.

The highest occupational growth occurred among occupations with soft skills, with K-12 teaching and non-doctor health care support staff, such as nurses, technicians, and therapists. From 2000-2012, those in the physical sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and others, biological scientists, and engineers saw decreases in the availability of work in their field. The percentage of the workforce that fell into the category of “engineer” declined by over 15% (David Deming, 2017). In “The Economics of Noncognitive Skills”, data from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton project shows that the number of service jobs increased the most over the last three decades (Timothy Taylor, 14 October 2016). These are tasks such as customer service.

Very good article on decision theory by James Jones, Professor of Mathematics Richland Community College.  The modes discussed are expect value (realist), also called the Bayesian principle, Maximax (optimist), Maximin (Pessimist), and Minimax (Opportunist).  They use the example of a bicycle shop choosing how many bicycles to purchase and sell.  The example is very good and the explanation is well-constructed.

Forestry Economics: A Managerial Approach by John E. Wagner has a great explanation of the decision modes.  The Wikipedia article on Minimax includes pseudocode for using Minimax in games, such as Chess.  Of particular interest was the mention of this technique’s use by Deep Blue, the computer which beat Gary Kasparov in chess.

Management and the Technology Professional – B302 Risk analysis using maximin criterion, minimax regret criterion, expected value criterion, and decision trees is a good example of decision theory writing as well, and it includes a Dilbert cartoon.  Ultimately the regret table at Wikipedia was one of the most useful.

Real-World Decision Making: An Encyclopedia of Behavioral Economics edited by Morris Altman captured my interest when search related to Laplace decision criteria.  It’s more of an economics book on behavior.  I am mentioning here not because of decision theory content, but because it’s page on Google Books led me to IndieBound.org, which seems to be a federation of independent bookstores.