Orton's Arm

Just because you can't estimate interest expense with any precision does not mean the best guess is zero. You make reasonable estimates of the capital expenditures needed, and the likely interest rates. Then you make a best-case scenario (with somewhat lower rates) and a worst-case scenario (with somewhat higher rates, and possibly larger expenditures). The difference between best-case and worst-case scenarios is why they ultimately ended up with a figure of $300 billion - $400 billion shortfall. That $100 billion in uncertainty implies the use of multiple scenarios, and certainly future long-term interest rates are a legitimate area where you could calculate such.

I'll take this as a no.

The first article talked about a researcher's announcement that there are seven types of "intelligence." And while he's certainly got a point about the fact that some people are more socially aware, or more self-aware, than are others. But you seem to hope that his work would undermine the concept of g, or general intelligence. It does not. The research support for g is strong. In addition, every human language in the world has a word that means "smart" or "intelligent" in a generic sense. The second article strongly implied that environmental differences are a strong factor in causing intelligence differences between one child and the next. While that's true, environment's role in creating intellectual differences becomes weaker as people move toward adulthood.

The links which you posted are broken. Despite that, there's absolutely nothing of greater value you've ever contributed since you came here.

Other than the fact you're an inconsiderate moron, what made you decide to try to absorb JSP's perfectly good plug-in car thread into your vendetta against me?

From what I've read, electric cars do produce less emissions, even after taking into account the fact you'd burn coal or something to produce the needed electricity. A thought experiment should confirm this. Suppose everyone took their homes off the grid, and started using gasoline-powered engines/generators to provide electricity for their homes. What do you think this would do to the overall pollution situation? The advantage to power plants over engines is that it's a lot easier to control pollution from a small number of big sources than it is to control pollution from a very large number of small sources. Another advantage to coal over oil is that we don't have to import coal from the volatile Middle East. Besides that, if we managed to make the switch to electric cars, we'd be one step closer to weening ourselves from fossil fuels entirely. Future models could come equipped with solar panels, so that if they're parked in sun-soaked parking lots, or even stuck in traffic, they could be replenishing their batteries. They'd still need plug-in ability--especially in WNY--but the solar panels would make them even more eco-friendly.

As I said, I will not spend the next 50 pages debating the peak level of oil production with you. Do you, or do you not, have something useful to contribute to the discussion of how long global oil reserves are going to last?

Ooooohh. Ramius thinks you're grinding me into dust. The opinion of that pea-brain really matters to me. You know something? Ramius wouldn't know a statistic even if one bit him on his behind. Then again, if he felt something biting him on his behind, he'd probably just assume it was you. The fact that you think I'm changing my "story" only underscores my earlier comments about how very badly you understand my posts.

I suggest you follow your own advice, and stop trying to discuss anything that has to do with statistics, genetics, or other fields you don't understand. As for the principal repayment of bonds, a fiscally responsible community might decide to begin buying back its own bonds early, so there wouldn't be a giant lump sum waiting at the end. As far as the funding shortfall goes, you have your expenses, and your revenues. If you're making interest payments on bonds, and if those bonds are for a brand-spanking-new wastewater infrastructure, then those bond payments contribute to the expense side of the ledger. And that contributes to any given funding shortfall. See? Real simple.

Better to have a line with no RB than a RB with no line. You also have to consider these factors: - Willis didn't seem like he wanted to be here, and would have been gone after next season. All this trade means is that the Bills have to find his replacement a year early. - Willis's replacement doesn't exactly have to be the next Jim Brown to replace what McGahee gave us. - RB is one of the few positions where a rookie player can make an immediate impact.

The fact that you think you're "grinding [me] into dust" is truly pathetic. I have no idea what "polling" you're talking about, unless you're referring to your love letters from Ramius. As for your comments about the word "luck," you should send them to the Stanford professor who wrote that article about regression toward the mean. You know, the article which repeatedly used the word "lucky" and "unlucky." If you got a response at all--which I doubt you would--you'd hear something along the following lines, "The word 'lucky' is shorthand to describe people whose measured scores exceed their true scores; whereas the word 'unlucky' is a useful shorthand description for people whose measured scores are lower than their true scores."

What I had in mind when I wrote my earlier post is that a bond offering could be structured in a number of ways, but typically there'd at least be interest payments over the short term. If every year a community has to write out a check for interest payments, that expense contributes to the total funding shortfall. But you could issue a 40 year bond, with principal repayment to begin after year 20 or 25. So the funding shortfall caused by principal repayment may fall outside the time period covered by the study, unless they made the specific assumption that principal repayment would begin in a timely fashion.

Wrong. It's a 20 year study. So let's say Mainstreetville, USA needs to float a bond in year 5 of the study, in order to pay for a capital project. Typically, Mainstreetville would at least pay interest on those bonds within the first year, even if principal repayment was delayed until later. Whatever interest and principal payments Mainstreetville makes during years 6 - 20 of the study contribute to a potential funding shortfall.

I don't like voting for a punter, but Brian Moorman's our best player. He's earned his place on that banner.

Great. Let's spend the next 50 pages debating how much oil we produced when we were at our peak. Just dandy. But the points I made in my post go far beyond the exact value of the U.S.'s peak oil production. But why would you bother commenting on the minor issue of long-term oil sustainability when you've got more important things to worry about--like calling me stupid? Your vendetta against me has long since passed mere crusade territory, and it's polluting a number of perfectly decent threads.

Are you really this clueless after 60+ pages of discussion? You amaze me. You test all parents. Then you select those parents which got a 140 on the I.Q. test. This subset of the population got disproportionately lucky on the I.Q. test, because they were selected on a score that's (somewhat) based on luck. Hopefully even you can understand this. Then you test their children. This time around, positive errors will cancel out negative errors, giving you an accurate idea as to what the average I.Q. of the children is. This doesn't mean the test is "automatically 100% error free" as you so stupidly assert. It does mean lucky children and unlucky children will be roughly equal in number, thereby giving you an accurate idea of the average I.Q. for the children. The fact I have to keep explaining stuff like this to you is why I don't respect your intelligence.

Yes, because interest obligations on those muni bonds you're talking about don't require any funding at all. Borrowing money is just as good as earning money, right? So there can't be any funding shortfalls associated with any of that.

It's stuff like this that has me worried about Newt Gingrich. On the one hand, there's a leadership void on the right, and has been ever since Newt fell from his leadership role. Bush has affronted the conscience of the real right, which wants nothing to do with a borrow-and-spend, open-border president. Newt, on the other hand, helped institute federal spending discipline. He helped reform the welfare system to eliminate financial incentives for people to have babies they don't want. His conservative credentials are strong. Except for his personal life. Normally you'd say just write this guy off. But he's really smart, and an outside-the-box kind of thinker. He's got a PhD in European history from Tulane. He runs the Center for Health Transformation, a for-profit think tank with clients such as GE Healthcare, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the American Hospital Association, etc. He'd improve healthcare by using technology to allow information flow, and to create competition. He has ideas about the specific tools needed to implement these changes, and to allow consumers to regain the sense of ownership that's been lost in our current insurance system. I really think that if any politician can deal with our healthcare mess, he can. But then there's his lack of maturity. There's the fact he couldn't hold the Republicans together after gaining power. Given the way the Republican Party's betrayed its principles since Gingrich's fall, the fault may not be entirely his. But still. If he can't hold a marriage together, and if he can't retain the leadership position atop his own party, how could he make a good president? And yet, there are his ideas. There's his intellect and his creativity. And you hate to let that sit on the sidelines while some dolt like W or some smirking womanizer like Bill Clinton infests the oval office. My feelings about Gingrich are very mixed. They'd quickly become unmixed if you could show me a clear-cut alternative. Show me someone with Gingrich's intellect and creativity, someone with good character, and someone whose principles are similar to mine. Someone like that would make me forget all about Newt Gingrich.

An equal proportion of people score less than their true score across the entire population. But not within the subset you selected. Inasmuch as the group you selected had high test scores, and inasmuch as high test scores are based on luck, the group you selected got disproportionately lucky. This means their test scores are somewhat higher than their true I.Q.s. If you select a group of parents with measured I.Q.s of 140, you're selecting a group of people with true, underlying I.Q.s that are actually lower--say 135. If you were to retest the parent group, the group's average score would fall to 135. This is because of the test/retest phenomenon. But you're not retesting them, are you? Instead you're testing their children. You're testing the children of parents, when the parents have measured I.Q.s of 140, and true I.Q.s of 135. Hey, maybe the children averaged 135 on the I.Q. test. That doesn't mean they're regressing toward the mean, even though a lot of young punks do that nowadays. It just means that, unlike the parents, the children's I.Q.s are (on average) being measured correctly. So if children score closer to the population mean than their parents, it isn't necessarily because children's true values are closer to the mean. At least some of that movement is due to the test/retest phenomenon. On the other hand, tall parents tend to have children that are somewhat less tall. Given the fact that narrow-sense heritability is less than one even for traits that are easy to measure, it's probable that heritability is also less than one for more difficult to measure characteristics such as intelligence.

I remember that discussion. I ran a regression which showed that for each starting offensive lineman a team obtains in the first round of the draft, it will (on average) win two additional games per year. I found a weaker correlation between 2nd and 3rd round picks and additional wins. Someone--it may have been you--pointed out that this correlation isn't necessarily unique to the offensive line. It could just be a question of your team winning more games because its first round picks (in general) work out. As a control, I should have run the same regression for other positions. But it's time-consuming enough that I haven't yet gotten around to doing so. This regression, BTW, was something I threw together on a spur-of-the-moment impulse. I didn't realize that months later, people would be making assumptions about me based on whatever shortcomings it may have had. I don't remember who came up with that--it may have been Ramius. Whoever it was, I vaguely remember finding his whole personality so intensely annoying that I wasn't going to be overly amused by anything he had to say. Especially when he was using humor as a vehicle to communicate his own misconceptions about evolution. I've tried ignoring the flames. But Bungee Jumper will say something, and Ramius will respond, and Bungee Jumper will respond back. Sooner or later someone else will find some humor in one of their wisecracks. The flames seem to feed themselves, even without my help. That said, I realize there have been times when I've written well thought-out, intelligent responses when the people I was responding to didn't deserve anything better than a one-line put-down. Agreed. I'll go one step further and say that additional money isn't necessarily part of the correct answer at all. No question there. It's a failed system, and adding money to a failed system gives you a failed system plus a huge debt. I don't see the existing institutions as salvageable. Individual teachers? In many cases, yes. But not the institutions. So yes, what's needed is a holistic solution where we start from scratch.

Conduct a study about the children of really smart people. First you have to define really smart people. You give the entire population an I.Q. test, and you choose parents who scored a 140. But as I've spent the last 60+ pages establishing, those who obtain extreme scores on an error-prone test are generally somewhat closer to the population's mean than their test scores indicate. Even if the children have the same underlying I.Q.s as their parents, the children's measured I.Q.s will be closer to the population's mean. The parents, as a group, will have gotten slightly lucky on the I.Q. test, because they were selected on the basis of their test scores, and a small but significant portion of that test score is based on luck. The children, on the other hand, are expected to be luck neutral on the test. So if children score a little less well than their intelligent parents, at least some of this is due to the test/retest phenomenon.

To be honest, I don't know much about the people on here--certainly not enough to make a comprehensive list of the people with hiring authority. And what little I know about Ramius, or Bungee Jumper, or GG, or Coli, is a lot more bad than good. And you're asking me to trust these people with information that could be used to hurt my classmates? - What do you think that Bungee Jumper or Ramius have done to have earned that trust? - What's my incentive for providing these people with additional information? They've consistently abused what I've already given them. Why should I trust them with more? I don't want to make any mystery of things. It's a top 50-school. Just make a list of the 50 best schools in the country, eliminate the MITs and the Harvards from the list, and pick a name at random from what's left. The school you pick probably won't be a whole lot different from my alma mater.

If you'd bothered to read my earlier long post, you could have avoided the above mischaracterizations of my views. Assuming, of course, that being even the slightest bit accurate about my views matters to you. (Does it?) I never attributed the test/retest phenomenon to variance in the population distribution. Where on earth you came up with that idea beats me. I did, however, point out that if you take a collection of people who scored a 140 on an I.Q. test, their scores will, on average, overstate their actual level of intelligence. This is because there are more 130s available for getting lucky, than there are 150s available for getting unlucky. If you were to retest these people, the group's average score on the retest would be, say, 135. So even if I.Q. was 100% narrow-sense heritable, you wouldn't expect these people's children to have average scores of 140 on an I.Q. test. They should expect an average of 135, because that's what their parents would get on the retest. Let's say the children averaged a 130 on the test. Of those ten points of difference, five are due to the parents having gotten lucky on the test, and five are due to children's actual I.Q.s moving toward the population's mean.

Whatever dude. Someone made the mistake of giving GG hiring authority, and he and I aren't exactly on each other's Christmas card lists. I honestly don't believe he'd hire a graduate from my school if other qualified applicants were available.

I don't have to read this post to know what it feels like to try to teach statistics to an unruly group of ten year olds.