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Dredging up old predictions
I'm looking at Abengoa SA, for example. They got almost $3 billion in guaranteed loans through this program to build infrastructure worth a fraction of that. I don't see that ending pretty, especially with their likely exposure (being the largest Spanish sustainable energy business) to the Spanish solar power industry, which completely lost its government subsidies over the past few years.
While I didn't discuss it at the time, I also was taking into account the company's behavior of what I'll call "chain-smoking loans", borrowing money to buy businesses that became collateral for another loan (for those old enough to remember that behavior burned World.com badly).
Well, turns out their US branch declared bankruptcy (Chapter 15) in January 2016 (though I gather it's now out of bankruptcy - at least for now). The Abengoa projects do appear to have survived with a functional revenue stream, so that implied part of the prediction apparently hasn't yet become a problem.
Nice to see a prediction bear fruit though of course, I probably wouldn't have noticed, if it hadn't. As an aside, neither Standard & Poor or the auditing firm Deloitte noticed anything supposedly until right before the insolvency protection filing (a common prelude to bankruptcy, though apparently Abengoa's main corporation in Spain was able to avoid bankruptcy through a 400 million Euro contribution from the Spanish government). The bank, Citigroup organized a stock sale a few months earlier despite their access to the books too.
A bunch of the usual suspects failing like they've failed before. Good to know that we're patching up all these financial failure modes.
How Now, Brown Cloud?
There's smog and haze up there at cruising altitude, during the entire flight. There's that many damn planes in the air now? Maybe it's all the forest fires...
When is the last time you saw a clean, crisp horizon in your part of the world?
Credible Rumor: Trump Personally Directed Cohen Perjury
President Donald Trump directed his longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, according to two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the matter.
Trump also supported a plan, set up by Cohen, to visit Russia during the presidential campaign, in order to personally meet President Vladimir Putin and jump-start the tower negotiations. “Make it happen,” the sources said Trump told Cohen.
The special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents. Cohen then acknowledged those instructions during his interviews with that office.
If that's all true, then:
Presidential historian Jon Meacham on Friday resurfaced the first article of impeachment brought against former President Nixon in a discussion following a bombshell report that President Trump directed his former longtime lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.
“The first article of impeachment against Nixon was just this: obstruction by directing others to lie,” Meacham tweeted early Friday morning. “This is not hysteria or hyperventilating. It’s history.”
First Time Ever: US Military Service Working Without Pay
As Coast Guard paychecks went undelivered Tuesday as the result of an ongoing partial government shutdown, the service's top officer urged its members to stay the course.
In a public letter published Tuesday afternoon on his social media pages, Adm. Karl Schultz said the day's missed paycheck, to his knowledge, marked the first time in the history of the nation "that service members in a U.S. Armed Force have not been paid during a lapse in government appropriations."
The Coast Guard, the only military service to fall under the Department of Homeland Security, is also the only service with payroll affected by the shutdown, which began Dec. 22. The Coast Guard was able to issue final paychecks for the year, but will be unable to distribute further pay until a budget deal is reached or another appropriation agreement is made.
In all, some 55,000 Coast Guard active-duty, reserve and civilian members are going without pay; the number includes 42,000 active-duty service members.
Coast Guard civilians have been on furlough or working without pay since the shutdown began.
For the First Time in History, a US Military Service Is Working Without Pay
Do patents make sense in 2019?
Do patents make sense in 2019?
Patents deny the right to build an invention to everyone. This made sense with the smaller population in the early 1800s , as the small population meant whatever someone invented probably wouldn't have been invented by someone else in the 20 year period. So the 20 year monopoly encouraged innovation. With today's larger population and greater scientific prevalance, there are an average of 6 duplicates per software patent, and a minimum average of 3 duplicates per patent overall. Are patents really nessecary outside the pharmaceutical industry?
Is Gab shutting down accounts without notice? (edit: no)
Gab, a supposedly pro-free speech website, is shutting down user accounts without providing an explanation. My own account was set to private, I cannot log in, and password reset emails don't arrive.
Is Gab a ruse?
Check comments here:
https://www.contactforsupport.com/social-networking/gab-support-number/
Edit: Seems this is just technical issues. Gab support fixed my account for me. Seems they don't have the least buggy system in the world. If this happens to you email support@gab.com.
Who knew?
At this point, I had this hypothesis that I could find a good answer via looking for minimum entropy (that is, first scale the matrix so that the absolute value of its coefficients add up to one and then calculate a standard entropy measure using the function x*log(x), where x is the absolute value of each coefficient and summed over all coefficients. For most matrices, one can change the coordinates of the matrix by a unitary transform (unitary means the transformation leaves the vector dot product unchanged). The idea is to find a minimal entropy transform of the original matrix and then gawk at it to see what sort of patter n it has. It turns out, through no fault of my own, that the minimum entropy answer is a diagonalization of the matrix with eigenvalues along the diagonal.
As mentioned in the beginning, I wanted to do the same with tensors more elaborate than linear maps, so I thought I'd try some approaches with the linear map case first to see how hard they'd be. My first attempt was to randomly generate a unitary matrix, transform the original matrix, and compute the entropy of the result. If it was lower than my last attempt, I'd keep it. Then go back to step 1 and generate another random one. This is a classic Monte Carlo method (named after the gambling place) where one generates huge numbers of random potential answers and keeps the best.
Alas, when I tried it for 4 by 4 matrices (which incidentally is not a hard problem), I found that even with 100 million Monte Carlo guesses (which on my laptop take an hour to run), I couldn't get within a factor of two of the minimum entropy for a given matrix (again said diagonal form). It turns out that the dimensionality of the problem (4 dimensional unitary matrices have 10 complex dimensions to vary in) and the fact that the x*log(x) function creates a sharp notch around the optimal solution means it is extraordinarily rare to get answers that fall within the notch.
Even when I dropped the dimension to 3 by 3 matrices, I was barely able to get within 50% of the optimal answer (though I could finally see the diagonal structure in the answers). I could also see that increasing the number of iterations by an order of magnitude has modest improvement in the answer. Who knew this wasn't going to work? Guess I'll just have to optimize via the usual tools.
Trump campaign chair accidentally admits collusion
Lawyers for Trump’s disgraced former campaign chairman, who was convicted of tax and bank fraud last year, submitted a filing in Washington, D.C., federal court responding to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s assertion that Manafort had lied to Mueller’s office and so violated his plea agreement. Manafort’s lawyers pushed back on that claim by saying that he had extensively cooperated with Mueller, meeting with the government lawyers and investigators a dozen times and twice testifying before a grand jury.
But Manafort’s team screwed up.
They tried to redact four different passages in their filing, but failed to do so properly, leaving the redacted text in plain sight. For instance, Manafort’s lawyers responded to Mueller’s allegation that Manafort lied to the government about his interactions with a man named Konstantin Kilimnik, who was Manafort’s right-hand man during his time as a powerful political consultant in Ukraine. What’s more noteworthy is that Kilimnik has alleged connections to Russian intelligence.
What the redacted text says is that Manafort allegedly misled Mueller about meeting with Kilimnik during the 2016 presidential campaign and discussing a “Ukraine peace plan” with Kilimnik “on more than one occasion.” Another improperly redacted section revealed that Mueller has alleged that Manafort “lied about sharing polling data with Mr. Kilimnik related to the 2016 presidential campaign.”
Paul Manafort’s Lawyers Appear to Accidentally Blow the Door Open on Collusion
Oops! Not a mistake I would expect out of "the best people!"
"This shows that Bob Mueller can demonstrate to a court, without the testimony of Paul Manafort, that the campaign had a connection to Russian intelligence and the connection involved information going from the campaign to the Russians," Napolitano said. "The question is, was this in return for a promise of something from the Russians, and did the candidate, now the president, know about it?” That would be "a conspiracy," he added, regardless of whether the Trump campaign actually got anything of value from the Russians.
Amendment to Overturn Citizens United Introduced
On Thursday, the first day of the 116th Congress, Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL), Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), and Congressman John Katko (R-NY) introduced a bipartisan constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics and restore democratic power to the American people.
The Democracy for All Amendment affirms the right of states and the federal government to pass laws that regulate spending in elections, reversing the concentration of political influence held by the wealthiest Americans and large corporations capable of spending millions of dollars in our elections. This legislation comes days before the ninth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in the Citizens United case.
For more information on the amendment, click here for a background summary and click here for a section-by-section and answered FAQs.
Is this actually murder? Or was the victim just an idiot?
https://www.businessinsider.com/krystal-whipple-suspected-of-killing-ngoc-nguyen-2019-1/
Police are out looking for a "murderer" who ran over another person in a parking lot. The problem? That victim jumped in front of her car.
I have a hard time being convinced that the alleged murderer here was anything more than a thief. Jumping in front of a moving car to prevent someone from escaping without paying a $35 bill seems a bit... intellectually lacking. Personally, I put the blame for the victim's death on the victim.
Thinking about this rationally for a second, if someone was jumping on or in front of your car to prevent you from driving away, should you have an obligation to prevent them from being harmed if they themselves are actively trying to throw themselves in front of your car and (presumably) use extralegal means to detain you?
Should those rules change if the driver just committed a civil violation of contract like failing to pay for a manicure?
Should comcast agents be able to throw themselves at your car and prevent you from leaving your home until you pay the latest new "service fee" you forgot to account for?
The person in this video might not be an angel, and the fact the car was stolen doesn't help their case, but I have a hard time calling them a murderer.
What are your thoughts? Does the video depict a murderer of just a thief?
