Notices by Nathaniel Swigger (nswigger@mstdn.party)

“Abolishment is too extreme. Let’s focus on necessary reforms. The SS just needs better leadership, better training and rigorous standards so its dedicated officers can serve the public.”

Sometimes it helps to write things down so you can see how stupid they are.

@failedLyndonLaRouchite There are two plausible pathways to that projection coming true:

1) Elmo invents magic, conquers time and space, and personally leads/profits from humanity’s colonization of space.

2) The Us govt gives SpaceX that much money every year in exchange for a rocket that is totally going to work and definitely deliver human colonization within the next ten years and this time boy oh boy we are serious.

Student: “So Elon Musk is a trillionaire?”
Me: “Yup.”
Student: “How did he get that much money?”
Me: “Well, he doesn’t really have a trillion dollars cash. He just owns a lot of stock in companies that are valued at a trillion dollars.”
Student: “So those companies make huge profits?”
Me: “Oh gosh no. They all lose billions of dollars a year. All of them. Huge losses.”

The Economist headline: “Gen Z Mysteriously Hates Capitalism and No One Can Figure Out Why.”

I don’t think there’s any meaningful strategic interaction on electoral politics. It’s never “if he does X, you should do Y.”

Just do Y. If Y helps you it helps you. Do stuff that helps you. You can’t “defend” against anything or prevent your opponent from doing anything. There’s no inoculating yourself against an issue (like, say, by voting for a draconian immigration bill). All of that West Wing-style drama stuff is a bunch of crap.

I played with it for months (sigh) and kept coming to the conclusion that one player’s actions just didn’t affect the other’s. Every model just came to the conclusion that you should do the same thing no matter what the other candidate did.

My dissertation was about campaign tactics. One of my advisors got the bright idea that I should do a game theory chapter so I spent an entire summer trying to work up a formal model with an interesting strategic interaction.

Except there wasn’t one…

At the time I assumed I just didn’t have the formal modeling chops (still don’t!) to create something interesting. But I don’t think that’s it at all.

Sometimes you learn something as a grad student and don’t really appreciate its significance until later.

Story time…