Sunday, January 22, 2023

Unveiling the Price of Obscenity

One tires of combat, although I can still throw a punch, you know.

Paul Keating


Isabel Maxwell At 50 in 2000


Humans Still Have The Genes For a Full Coat of Fur, Scientists Discover ScienceAlert 


Fort Bragg strip club owners donate $1B in weapons to Ukraine DuffelBlog 


The new way to find the next book to read

Let AI to help you discover the best books for you…: “Readow was created as an R&D project at MORAI. At MORAI, we are a team of mathematicians, programmers, and big data developers passionate about artificial intelligence and machine learning research. We do end-to-end projects in every area of AI: from research on the latest developments in AI to final product implementation.

 If you are interested in our activities – visit our website Readow is an example of our achievements in the area of advanced AI-based recommendation systems. It provides personalized recommendations for a user on interesting books to read. The recommendations are generated by our AI system by analyzing huge amounts of data ( such as reviews from readers and ratings of specific books) concerning the reading preferences of other book lovers. 

Readow gives unbiased suggestions based on opinions of fellow readers in contrast to recommendations given by online stores that usually use commercial data which is also skewed by promotion deals with publishers. We work for book lovers and our goal is to help you find an interesting book for you, not to sell it to you.”




UK weighs supplying Ukraine with Challenger tanks Financial Times. 64-66 ton tanks. Even heavier than Abrams (55 tons), deemed to be so heavy as to damage Ukraine roads. And as Alexander Mercouris has pointed out several times, maintenance needs increase geometrically with weight.

Meritocracy is make-believe. It’s all about who you know.


Orthodox Jews 18 percent of U.S. kidney donors


So much Adderall!  Has to be screwy.  And presumably many people get it without prescriptions


Redux: My 2021 talk at OpenAI — recommended.  And Arnold Kling on ChatGPT


The Economist on whether economics has run out of big new ideas.  And should MIT be abolishing first-year macro in the graduate sequence?


Contactless Real-Time Heart Rate Predicts the Performance of Elite Athletes.


 “Norway is a wealthy and egalitarian country with a homogeneous educational system, yet achievement gaps between students at the 90th and 10th percentiles of parental income and between students whose parents have at least a master and at most a high school degree are found to be large (0.55–0.93 and 0.70–0.99 SD), equivalent to about 2 to 2.5 years of schooling, and increasing by grade level. ”  Link here.  vtekl.


 “A pair of Indian men broke a Guinness World Record by visiting all seven continents in 3 days, 1 hour, 5 minutes and 4 seconds.”  Like wise men, they started in Antarctica


 Paul Johnson, RIP (NYT).



 Unveiling the Price of Obscenity”

Does legitimating sinful activities have a cost? This paper examines the relationship between housing demand and overt prostitution in Amsterdam. In our empirical design, we exploit the spatial discontinuity in the location of brothel windows created by canals, combined with a policy that forcibly closed some of the windows near these canals. To pin down their effect on housing prices, we apply a difference-in-discontinuity (DiD) estimator, which controls for the precise location of brothel windows and the effect of other policies and local developments. Our results show that the housing prices are discontinuous at the bordering canals, and this discontinuity nearly disappears after closures. The discontinuity is also found to decrease with the distance to brothels, disappearing after 300 yards. Our estimates indicate that homes right next to sex workers were 30 percent cheaper before the closures. This result seems unrelated to the presence of other businesses, such as bars and cannabis shops. Instead, the price discount is partly explained by petty crimes. However, 73 percent of the effect remains unexplained after controlling for many forms of crime and risk perception. Our findings suggest that households tend to be against the visible presence of sex workers and related nuisances, reaffirming their marginalization.

That is from a new paper by Erasmo Giambona and Rafael P. Ribas, via a highly reputable man.