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What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

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Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#401

Post by autoexec »

pocksuppet wrote: post #314
dh2022 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a drive on an interstate highways. Whenever I take an Uber/Lyft to the airport I ask the usually (more like 100%) foreign born driver to compare the highway (I5) and the airport (SeaTac) with the same from his country. The comparison is bad for the US. US is a third world country, but Americans do no want to admit that.

The first world is defined as the countries that are affiliated with the USA, so that's not strictly accurate. However, we can say it's a developing country - a first-world developing country.

We can't be a developing country when we're doing the opposite of developing.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#402

Post by mlrtime »

squibonpig wrote: post #394
mlrtime wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you like Trump and why?

Do you think someone's political belief system can be summed up with a 'Do you like '?

Do I like him? I don't know him at all. Maybe if I had a chance to sit down for a dinner and ask him questions I could give you that answer.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#403

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

echelon wrote: post #331
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open models are, at worst, a few months behind SOTA closed models. This has been the case since 2024, and there's no indication that it's going to change. You don't need anybody to permit you access. You can, in all seriousness, thank Meta and the Chinese for this.

> Open models are, at worst, a few months behind SOTA closed models. What open models are "a few months behind" Claude Code Opus, Google Nano Banana Pro, or ByteDance Seedance 2.0? Another big problem with the open models is that the ecosystem targets consumer GPUs rather than running in the cloud. The future is a thin client world with stuff at the edge being generations behind in performance.

> Claude Code Opus

Kimi K2.5 is quite literally just a few months behind, at worst. In many cases it already outperforms Opus 4.5 (and reliably outperforms Sonnet), and it's not really that far from Opus 4.6.

I'm less familiar with the video/image side of things.

> Another big problem with the open models is that the ecosystem targets consumer GPUs

No, this is something of a misconception. It's quite difficult to run a model like K2.5 truly locally. But any nation-state or sufficiently large corporation can get its hands on HPC clusters and run it freely, without needing permission from anybody.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#404

Post by soco »

actionablefiber wrote: post #170
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a statist, I personally always found it as a fascinating way to look at the future. They are actively preparing for a collapse they themselves are ushering.

It's increasingly a pet theory of mine that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth into the hands of the richest, their subsequent existential ennui, and their disconnect from reality owing to media consolidation and algorithmic content feeds have basically created a world where the superrich are in a "post-game" mentality. There are no further material comforts to obtain. They just want to feel anything at all and…

Which is the very motivation of the villains in the old movie Hudson Hawk (1991 - Bruce Willis, Andie McDowell, Danny Aiello)

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#405

Post by [deleted] »

tomrod wrote: post #166
xanthor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you address any of the points the commenter made instead of retreating into an ideological non sequitur?

My comment was made prior to the parent's edit.Further, familiarity with the subject does not make an informed comment a non-sequitur. Happy reading. [0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha... [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293... [2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2... [3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9..…

[deleted]

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#406

Post by xanthor »

tomrod wrote: post #166
xanthor wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you address any of the points the commenter made instead of retreating into an ideological non sequitur?

My comment was made prior to the parent's edit.Further, familiarity with the subject does not make an informed comment a non-sequitur. Happy reading. [0] https://sites.pitt.edu/~tgrawski/papers/2001%20What%27s%20Ha... [1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29349/w293... [2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/epr/2... [3] https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/245398/1/cesifo1_wp9..…

Nice you can also spam links without making an argument, some of which 404. Can you help me reverse a linked list in Python?

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#407

Post by asdff »

kasey_junk wrote: post #391
asdff wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, so they don't capture that data well as they admit. household survey has a high margin of error. You have to also consider signal to noise ratio of some of these data and whether the survey even has the power to detect the signal. My grad school cohort for example was 15 people for the entire department. That is about as large as they get for PhD in most STEM fields. What are the odds this sort of employment s…

This is perhaps the most well studied and validated data set that any government has ever produced. Their methodology and techniques are documented to the nth degree. "they" will admit whatever you want them to admit because they are stone cold professionals that are scrutinized by every political hack in the country and their datasets are poured over by teams of financial analysts across the globe every time they ar…

So you are appealing to precedence and authority and not really addressing the underlying point being made.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#408

Post by throwawaypath »

text0404 wrote: post #134
kittikitti wrote: post #77

People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests. I think the reliability problem is very bad…

Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders? I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.

>Can you tell us a bit more about the gag orders?

They're LARPing. There are no gag orders.

>I find it fascinating that all the discussion about climate change has largely disappeared after LLMs became mainstream, and the idea that state actors may be suppressing data is equally fascinating/terrifying.

It's just not as popular to virtue signal over. Everyone is discussing the wars.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#409

Post by salawat »

jeffbee wrote: post #209
salawat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Not once. If their methodology is built on that + unemployment data from State Unemployment agencies + data from payroll processors, anyone not collecting state unemployment benefits is invisible to the system, and half of the payroll is actually not even consituted of U.S. Citizens. Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone…

> I've never met a single person willing to attest to filling out a BLS survey. Unless you have introduced yourself with this question to thousands of people, this is a totally meaningless statement. It says more about your social circle, your grasp of descriptive statistics, and the weird online stew you are soaking your brain in than it says about the CPS.

I never complained about the Current Population Survey. Census Bureau does a great job. I complain about BLS. And yes, I'm the odd fellow who does, in fact, talk about weird niche 'work' minutiae with people because I'm actually curious how the world works, and whether our "authoritative metrics" are actually worth a damn. My grasp of descriptive statistics is just fine, thank you very much, but I also happen to know it doesn't work if you're not actually collecting data, and if the data you're collecting is incomplete, you're doing what is essentially inferential statistics (assuming your whole is entirely represented by what you have collected. If you don't check, you don't bloody know. If you actually are checking, it's not normally that hard to find the population you're checking with.

Re: What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

#410

Post by b112 »

suzzer99 wrote: post #264
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smart play is goats (for meat and milk), ammo, and maybe some silver if you want some ready "cash". You can barter the meat/milk, and even the ammo (but it has other uses).

I would bury a bunch of gold coins and act like it's my last one from the family heirlooms anytime I spent one. Shaving off chunks of a gold bar makes it pretty obvious there's more at the source. But yeah, ammo will be the new currency.

Definitely, "usable thing" such as ammo will be the currency.

After all, if it is societal collapse, that means no society, hence no bartering for shiny bits of metal. Why would anyone care about gold, or silver? There's no merchants. No social cohesion. What will you do with the gold? Look at it? Hope someone will trade stored food for it?

Why would anyone?

The unfortunate part is that it is far harder to move or carry or hide your wealth. It's quite tangible. Where do you store a million rounds of ammo, or maybe water filters, or even MREs or canned food? It all takes space, and in the end?

No person will horde such wealth if anyone knows they have it. It will be taken.

That's why prepping really only makes sense for temporary disasters in your region.

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