The Sotomayor Verdict

Fear of prosecution does not absolve responsibility to Due Process.

And, Yes to Yglesias commenters, even a simple minded engineer saw through the initial Sotomayor decision. It was tough call, I give her that, all along it was split decisions.

Update.

Here is another report, in which the author credits Alioto with: "Thanks to Justice Alito for pulling back the curtain and showing the ugly reality of racial discrimination in America today."

It was an unseemly, ugly mess in which Sotomayor decided to ignore the law and apply local racism. She should not be confirmed.

Transit and the San Jose Airport, update

I have continued to look into the situation. As I left the debate, the issue was: Do we need concrete guide ways to deploy podcars around the airport? I checked into Ultra's general idea and I looked at MapQuest.

That airport controls a lot of asphalt road around its perimeter, including all of the long term parking. The airport should simply Green Lane all through the airport. Green Lanes are lanes Street Bots with a legal driver's license can use. Then work the quarter mile to First Street, using curbing where needed to separate bots from autos. From there the city might build concrete to get over the freeway.

But, the best of this idea is that the Green Bot Lanes are open to both people and freight. So we stimulate UPS and FedEx to join the Bot parade. Such a green strategy would yield high energy efficiency within the few square miles centered on the airport, including the rail hubs. We get Cargo Bots, Tram Bots, Taxi Bot. Then the City of San Jose can extend the concept to home Delivery Bots.

Inflation and QM Theory

Inflation is associated with increases in the velocity of money. In QM Theory we use the Transaction Rate, but the result is the same. Transaction rates are not minimized in inflationary periods, hence measurement uncertainty.

In line with my thinking, finance closely follows the bulge in transaction rates, and is not the cause of inflation. QM Theory does not believe the Money Illusion, rather events in society ramp up transaction rates first, inflationary money follow imperceptibly behind.

In terms of equilibrium points on the yield curve, there are too many terms during inflationary times, and too few in deflationary times. When there are too many equilibrium points, the uncertainty band about each term will overlap, and during deflationary times there will be gaps of measurement where the yield curve is not adequately measured.

Right now, in deflation, we notice the consolidation of finance firms, and the close correlation between finance, the Fed, and Treasury. They have formed a conglomeration because there is not enough measurement space for them to fit individually.

More on this later....

Street Bots should pass their Driving Test

Sure, a Bot can pass the driving test and be licensed it for Green Lane mobility. Any Bot worth its technology should be able to read an eye chart, speak fair English (or Spanish), know the driving rules, and pass the street test. I think the DARPA Urban challenge finishers are up to passing a driving license test. We can give the written test electronically.

Then we have a fair playing field, Bot manufacturers can build the variety of vehicles to meet diverse needs, from TramBots to TaxiBots to CargoBots; each gaining rights to the Green Lane. Such a fair and transparent licensing scheme pushes the industry into high gear, almost right away.

Start with California, because California is so broke anyway, they will try it. The Gubinator is open for business. We can apply a very hefty Bot tax, say $5,000/vehicle, plus mileage. By charging Bot a high entry fee, we get the enthusiasm of cities, like my home town, Fresno,CA. The industry essentially buys off the City Council here, each meter of Green Paint represents new taxes, better jobs, more efficiency, and a more complacent population.

The City Council here reads my blog, well, one or two assistants. We could probably push through a trial here, if we could get high per mile fees to the city. Another thing that politically helps the Bots would be delivering food to the homeless.

Helping Krugman with the Hangover Theory

He summarizes his objections:

"The hangover theory, then, turns out to be intellectually incoherent; nobody has managed to explain why bad investments in the past require the unemployment of good workers in the present"

First, we do hire good workers to handle bad investments; we hire bankruptcy experts, bailout experts, lobbyists, and economists. We do not hire good workers to continue working consumer production with obsolete capital goods, because of old technology being phased out, by definition.

Second, we want to hire good workers to work on, ex-post, good investments. We are delayed in achieving economies of scale, something slows us from seeking efficiency with the new means of production.

Why not, he implies, continue running the old investments at low efficiency while building up economies of scale in the new? The answer, according to QM theory, is the inability to run more equilibrium points than the economy can support without measurement interference. We have a hard time measuring demand when both a low and a high efficiency production system operate simultaneously, producing the same good. You end up with convexity in the supply/demand curves. The old means of production, competing against the new, becomes increasingly viewed as bankrupt in comparison. Generally, we enter a depression because the old system has already been abandoned.

Summary:

We choose to delay consumption today in expectation of higher economies of scale tomorrow. This is speculation on efficient machinery, not speculation on money.

Solving the San Jose, CA transit connection.

The problem is moving people from the airport terminal across Skyport Dr. to First St.

The BotTram solves the problem. They can run driverless along a Green Lane from the terminal through the airport parking lot. These auto trams can operate only in Green Lane paths but human drivers can share space with them.

This solution gets San Jose what they need, the infrastructure cost is Green Paint. San Jose Airport Authority should be able to buy TramBots for 250 grand. Buy 10.

Anatomy of Bubble and Bust in QM

Consider the housing market. In QM housing distribution is finite stage queue. The long period queue is the land acquisition and permit process. The medium is building the tract, the short are retail sales. When some change happens at the short end to stall demand, what happens.

In infinite dimensional space, we don't care. Each 'out of phase' process in the queue can smoothly adapt without over shoot after a shock.

QM is finite dimensional and twin constraints must be met.

When things are going smooth, inventory and inventory demand increasing; economies of scale are deepening. The market tends to reduce queue length, but it can only do this by dropping a term, deleting a queue in the finite set of terms.

At the market turn, the switch back to the deleted queue is painful bankruptcy across the network as supply movement stops. Inventory is zero bound.

In QM, the economy specifically drops terms whenever it feels safe, the economy always has a bias toward economies of scale. It is like an adaptive linear filter that successively reduces system variables as time goes on. Twin constraints, maximize measurement accuracy and minimize transactions.

Update:

This Scientiic American article of the same topic, I am reading now. But, the question is, how does a preference for economies of scale reflect neurology. It has been many years. My take right now is that this bias toward synchronous action is very old biologically. I have it back to the olfactory brain and primitive limbic system. The urge to action comes from the primitive olfactory. Evolution modified it with delay, and feedback from its neighbor. The feedback is that bias toward a certainty that others will make the same movement. From that we get flocking, herding, swarming. It is a necessary solution for evolution to move out of the pond.

Automated pizza delivery

A Discovery Channel project. I would do it a little differently.

Rather than a small two wheel robot, send out the automated cargo van which drops off 15 to 20 shopping boxes per trip. Homeowners who sign up have a green box on which the cargo van uses a its arm to drop of the package. UPS without the driver.

While we are at it, has anyone figured out how to tether a couple of electric hybrids?

Wait, Reflexx Robotics has a prototype that is beginning to look right. And don't forget the Robot Mowers.

And the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium was held in China. A survey of the research reports covers the necessary technology.

A multi-stage queue of pending transactions

I think, choosing transaction as the fundamental to be minimized in the economy. Inventory becomes transactions. Inventory storage is assumed much a much lesser problem than inventory transport.

So, integrating bottom to top, all transactions across all periods results in a definite shape, as a distribution of transaction rates, which the real economy minimizes. The distribution which minimizes variation minimizes the transaction rate distribution.

Measurement error, is co-minimized. o we get the concept of the middle man who positions himself as a valuable inventory queue in some multi-stage distribution. But we measure imperfectly, and we measure imperfectly by common custom. So we manage the periods of the queues, picking an inventory spot that minimizes transaction variance.

We agents are coherent, we operate in the frequency domain. We are biologically biased toward group action, a higher than linear beta on gains from economies of scale. We tend to stick to the regime longer than we should, and are too hasty in reforming the regime "collectives" after Reorg.

Coherence aligns our expected errors, hence the periods are as finite set of knowns. We are deliberate in our effort to get collective action, because we have a bias toward economies of scale.

The yield curve is banded, for that reason. We operate our lives synchronously to five terms on the standard bankers chart.

So, we know why the ten year yield is high, it is high because we buy less of those goods that have ten year depreciation, like cars. If our refusal to buy more cars appears to be a collective rebellion, it is.

California's overdue budget cuts

Finally coming. I notice the fiscal stimulus as it arrived in California managed to delay the cuts for a few months, so mark that multiplier as less than one.

California was due for cutting back five years ago when government jobs held the second fastest growth in my community, just behind house construction. Three of four of my neighbors relied on government salary. The house I rent out in the city had four students, whose parents were 75% employed in government jobs. California teachers always talked about classrooms; yet the smart high school kids were off on personal study aided by technology, a system run out of a converted strip mall. In central California the real shadow government are the government service unions. When one of the student renters voted in support of the Bullet Train bond, I asked him who was paying taxes. Looking around, he discovers the only tax to pay for the Bullet was my property taxes, of which he paid a substantial share while living in student poverty.

The government reform in California is long overdue, and California growth will be better for it. We could have been at this a year ago, one year ahead of the game except for Keynes and his twisted logic.

Velocity of Money or Transaction Rate

In the priceless model, it is Transaction Rate, and price is derived from inventory ratios across goods across periods. It is the premise, the closest unit of Hamiltonian measurement, so to speak. Its self measurement is reasonably uncertain, within a band.

A good premise? Generally when the movement of goods requires expensive energy, at least. A finite dimensional distribution of Transaction Rates will follow a transaction rate minimizing kernel, or shape in some orthogonal measurement.

It is coherent with the agent, mostly. Probably not far off the market and it leads to a sort of spectral accounting system. That is the trader looks for pricing bands, then break outs. The trader assumes break outs are periods when the economies of scale are favoring a certain set of firms. This behavior is common across all transactions and as a biological root.

So, in minimizing transactions of a finite length queues of multiple supply chains is what we are left with. The queues contain pending transactions. The transaction rates between queues ae a finite set located across the yield curve, spaced to minimize measurement interference. Thus, what can change to increase efficiency of scale is the lot size per transactions.

High interest rates implies larger queue growth. When rates are high then certain yield points, the economy will dis-equilibriate and try to double up the equilibrium points to get more uncertainty distributed. This is inflation at that region of the curve, over determinism at the inventory level, too many middle men. The fear is that some inventory in the mid-chain will go negative, disrupting the whole supply chain.

The tendency in the bond market is to force the natural shape in the yield curve. When the curve is steep, as we are now, then bond traders tend to be short in the ten year bond and long in the two year. Zero Hedge has some pointers on this. Since the Fed is holding Zero bound, the entire yield curve must eventually flatten, yield curve trades force the proper shape. That kid of yield forcing is the devaluation of long term real assets that cannot meet economies of scale. However, most of the long term trades are government debt or government backed agencies, and that (ot the taxpayer) is being forced into bankruptcy.

Global Trade, Rohmer, Recession of 1937

I was interested in the cause of the 1937 recession, and began to focus on world trade coming across this paper. The authors place more emphasis on monetary and exchange rate stability than they do on protectionism. This is the reverse of what I though going onto the search.

Back to the main problem of the 1937 recession. The problem solved in that recession was a shift from domestic production to war production. The 1937 Federal Reserve changes, which Rohmer call inadvertent, were more likely the result the prelude to war. The re-alliance of American, Britain and France started with the Tripartite monetary agreement, an effort to allign monetary systems as part of the anti-German efforts.

It is less important what the Fed does, but more important what the regime change was. Regardless of who was on the gold standard, who balanced budgets, the dominant theme is 1937 was a demand in French Europe to invest in the American war machine. Money would have found a path to that investment regardless of initial conditions. The 1935 terms of trade was Domestic Production, in 1937 it became Big Fascist uprising. Yes, monetary stimulus helped, getting France off gold. The deficit, or something like it, was a necessary "zero crossing" in Congress to switch production regimes from domestic to foreign war material.

I have a buncha charts.

Another Transportation Contract

From the government (yech!). The contract is for study only and seeks to find the proper planning for venture capital in transportation innovation. Dated May, 2009; it must be part of the stimulus package.

Also I learned about HOT lanes:

"HOT lanes are tolled lanes that operate alongside existing highway lanes to provide users with a faster and more reliable travel option. Buses, carpools (HOV-3), motorcycles and emergency vehicles will have free access to HOT lanes. Drivers with fewer than three occupants can choose to pay to access the lanes.Tolls for the HOT lanes will change according to traffic conditions to regulate demand for the lanes and keep them congestion free - even during peak hours."

They are really car pool lanes that single drivers can still use with a toll. HOT lanes can be used easily by driverless PodVehicles.

HOT lanes are coming to California.
"Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico’s bill to create a Bay Area express lane network that would give solo drivers the option of paying a toll to use lanes in which carpools and buses travel for free passed the state Assembly today 58 to 18 with bipartisan support."

What was lil Bush thinking?

"Government does not create wealth. The major role for the government is to create an environment where people take risks to expand the job rate in the United States, he said to huge cheers."

According to Hauser's Law, government creates 19.5% of the wealth over its cycle. Bush may be confused since had had government consuming 23% of the economy at his peak ruling years. Yes, Bush is correct about his own administration. When he had government so far off equilibrium, government was actually destroying wealth with volatility.

A Krugman Agglomeration in the Capital

The good new for Californians is an agglomeration going on in Washington DC with tons of jobs. Unemployment for government workers in and around Virginia and Maryland is still low. So, pack those bags and Move East young man, Move East.

"Washington is Awash with Money" says a WJS opinion article. Key quote:

"According to new data, the area's unemployment rate dropped to 5.6% in April from 5.9% in March. This is the second consecutive month of improvement for Washingtonians, and it's leagues from the national unemployment rate, which hit 9.4% in May."

Even Drudge is reporting that ABC New will move into the White House.

This is the lesson Krugman Trade theory mixed with Keynesianisms wants us to remember. Government is the effective producer of goods, and so agglomeration about Washington DC is good.

Why would Delong advocate a bailout for California and ruin all this good production? Dunno.

Back to Minsky again with asymmetry

Says Krugman who wants to prove the financial system failed us. The Minsly moment is the moment when an investor suddenly realizes his long term investments are worth shit. The Minsky models involved differing groups of agents with some speculations about the future . Somehow these moments can occur due to something like incomplete markets and massive build up of speculative animal spirits.

The problem they are trying to understand is framed as this: The sane traders make a sound prediction of the future of some asset(s) based on their knowledge of the past absent any sudden appearance of noise traders. Then the noise traders appear with enough wealth to force the stock down when it should be rising predictably. So the sane traders have to meet higher margin calls, agreeing to their contract to buy the stock at higher prices.

Right away, I ask, if the sane traders had secret, but correct knowledge, then they would only speculate on that knowledge if it was not revealed. If it was revealed knowledge, then speculation does them no good. Absent a speculative position they should be buying the stock, or selling it based on public information and current prices relative to their portfolio.

If they are speculating based on unrevealed knowledge, then they are introducing noise and should expect to see noise traders appear. Their unrevealed knowledge is not complete if it does not take into account their own off-equilibrium trades which result from secret knowledge.

Now lets change the topic and talk about asymmetry and coherence. If I build cars, I have a specific queuing model, mainly: I buy one factory every thirty years, then buy a few dealships every ten years, and the consumer buys one care every five years. Those sample periods are fixed by the technology and the requirement of efficiency of scale. The net result, at equilibrium, is that the inventory of factories, dealerships, and household cars will fluctuate minimally.

The problem is reversibility, how do I unbuy one car factory every thirty years? It can become a factory for another car company, but it cannot become a shopping center easily. The economies of scale is zero bound, I cannot run a car company and temporarily have a negative inventory of car factories. This is a result of coherent animal spirits, and finance must be positive definite to support coherent animal spirits. That is the car dealerships are coherent with the inventory of car factories. To reverse ground and have negative inventory we have to use pre-monetary practices, like inefficient bankruptcy.

The car company might figure out they can have a smooth transition of many stages between the factory and the consumer, essentially have an infinite dimensional production line. In that case, marginal reversibility is possible. But the Animal Spirits are constant uncertainty things, they have to separate queues with finite, non zero distance between them to minimizes measurement interference.

We are a Coherent Quantum Mechanical, Finite Dimensional economy, the Animal Spirits tell me that.

Update:

This paper: The Market: Catalyst for Rationality and Filter of Irrationality by John A. List and Daniel L. Millimet (HT Division of Labor)

Answering the PodCar critics

PodCars are electric.
PodCars now are electric for marketing reasons, but the PodBuses use internal combustion and PodTaxis of PodDeliverBots can use hybrid. The current weak design is a cost saving method to get the things in the door.

PodCar system require expensive guideways.
They do not. I have covered this in many postings.

PodCars have high infrastructure costs.
No, skyways systms have high infrastructure costs, so do highways and freeways. There is nothing inherent in the PodCar that raises infrastructure costs. Electric vehicle require charging mechanisms. Right, but that does not especially apply to the PodCar. PodCars do not need special electronic guidance in the road. Covered that, PodCars need a green line to follow and PodCars should be aware of people and careful with people. These technologies are everyday practice in the digital realm.

PodCars are too innovative for government. Fine, I can believe that, but all we ask is for government to allow Green Lane markings in certain areas where PodTaxis can be used effectively. PodCars and other automated vehicles work just fine in settings where government is out of the picture. The system cost seems more related to government mismanagement than anyting else.

PodCars encourage crime!
This is unbelievable. Podcars watch with vision and can actally record any criminal act as well as immediately inform the authorities. If anything, the surveillance capability of PodCars would be of more concern. It is likely that PodCars will reduce crime as they watch our neighborhoods without the high cost of police officer wages.

Liability concerns.
Sue the PodCar manufacturer if they cause crashes.

The Rotterdam bus line.
Yes, two of these buses crashed. So, shit happens. These buses are the most primitive of the RoboCars. The system is now up and running.

In short, the complaints are not about PodCars, but about the contradictory demands of public transit. PodCars can be deployed on units of one or two, easily set up and allowed to run their routes with little fanfare, and little input from government, except Green Paint. We need to quit treating them as Green Mass Transit. They are robotic cars and have no reason to be more Green or more Mass than any other car on the road.

Venture Capital Strategies and RoboCars

Invest in the industry, not the technology, says this report.. A gated report, US Venture in Robotics. In particular, Venture Capital needs to go to transportation automation architecture.; the architecture of robotic vehicles on American aspalt roads.

Venture should be looking for a market dominating company that can manage friendly relations between the pedestrian and the RoboCar. Pushing the industy toward modular sensors for people recognition. Include industry leaders in standard video architectures to get economies of scale for PodCar vision. Ad to that, vendors who can perfect drop off and pick up to small efficient box sizes. Systems control vendors that can put the human transportation manager in indirect control.

The Venture Community needs to push politicians ahead on Green Lanes for Robots.

Here are 1/10 scale RoboCars for sale.

The Yield thing again

Don't need no dialogues.

If the economy is stochastically stable then there must exist an orthogonal decomposition of the economy. That orthogonalization is measured by the financial system, whose system function, the yield curve, is visible.

Hence, the set of functions that make up the yield curve must be maximally uncorrelated, to withing measurement error.

Then apply a queuing model. At stochastical stability, the various yields along the yield curve will vary independent of each other, and dependent upon the economies of scale for inventories with the equivalent term sales cycle.

With constant uncertainty, there is a finite number of bins across the yield curve, equivalent to a multi stage queue. Each queue is drained with a constant stransaction rate, the lot size determining the efficiency of scale. The relative queue sizes, in unit of transaction, generate, by ratio, the price structure. There will be actual production systems tending to allign with the term functions.

Up and down the multi-stage queue, the money good accumulates coherently with goods accumulation, the transmission process between stages is via profit accumulation. The yield curve will have a standard shape at maximum economies of scale for any given technology.

New Business for RoboTrams.

Some new business, from Congress. Open air tram movers for national parks. OK, just skip the driver part.

I introduce the Green Line movement. Vendors of robotic vehicles should push the Green Line traffic rule. People friendly robots can travel on public streets in green lanes. This rule allows Pod vendors to sell them one or two at a time to municipalities for experimentation, but provides a uniform distribution method for economies of scale.

We need vendors specializing safety "people" sensors. Meanwhile the public gets use to the PodCar.

Try it out as people movers in restricted environments, like stadiums. Move the Green Line to short haul public streets to connect the community and strip mall. Sell then one or two at a time, under fairly simple and effective safety rules. The business will be highly successful.

Start with the Gubinator in California. He is desperate, and we can give him a nearly zero initial infrastructure cost, and payback in six months. We can drop transportation energy usage in California bone third. Then we can spark Silicon Valley with a partially deregulated transportation network.

An Ali Khamenei coup (or not?)

Look like asimple one man coup with support from elements of the Revolutionary Guard. It could be turned back as police become increasingly aware they get no benefit from a coup.

Yglesias is following this and cites sources that make this a Revolutionary Guard coup of some sort.

Schumpeter, Keynes and Fischer

A lot of confusion. My short hand take:

Keynes wanted to slow down the rate of change to technology, using the government Luddite process. Fischer wanted it to speed up using the Mellon liquidation process. Schumpeter wanted change to happen naturally.

They were probably all correct, but they differed in estimating the force of the technology shock.

Automated Tractor at work

U Tube video which I do not know how to embed.

Automated tractors are being deployed today, inhibited only by government regulations. Notice that there re no steel tracks, no embedded magnetics; just a smart vehicle able to till the land.

And this link has a video of the Volcano park automated bus tour.
A start up producing automated control for driverless vehicles, and another vendor of automated guidance.

University of Illinois has these RoboTractors operating for two years:

"One test tractor has operated without a human driver for two planting seasons, driving itself from garage to field, planting several acres of crops, and returning to the garage. The self-guidance system uses a gyroscope, Global Positioning System, video camera and computer. Tractors using the technology can go faster, operate at night and in fog and, because they are accurate within inches, increase yields by planting more rows."

Fixing Government Motors

My suggestion is to convert GM from a vehicle manufacturer to a transportation company. The shift is similar to IBM when IBM went from mainframes to computer systems.

My stimulus for GM is green paint. The government shall deploy tens of people to California and other large states with a push to deregulate road use, allowing machines to drive on our roads. Doing so, allows GM to focus on the end to end transportation system, how to get a box of stuff from one place to the next using all available automation techniques at its disposal.

Instapundit remain idiotic

Glenn quotes Lee E. Ohanian who claims the $737 billion stimulus was a mistake. Glenn is either the stupidest or most dishonest of the "center right" because knows damn well that the total stimulus was $1500, the first part was done under Paulson and lil Bush, and the first installment necessarily required a pay off of the second installment.

When I read Glenn on these issues, I keep thinking I am really reading Yglesias, they both use dishonesty.

The Krugman Fergusan debate

The basic outcomes from the monetary and fiscal policy are easily determined.

On the one hand we have a zero bound being held by the Fed. On the other we have increasing amounts of long term debt being placed in the market. The result currently is a steep yield curve which will not hold.

How does the yield cure correct? Long term rates must go down as we hold zero bound or short term rates have to rise. The former solution implies a long term reduction in GDP. The later has to possible mechanisms. One, the Fed cannot hold zero until a dollar crash, so it raises rates suddenly and kicks in the double dip. Or two, Congress greatly reduces the deficit. Congress can reduce the deficit if onnovation solves the economic constraints, or Congress can reduce the deficit by reducing government services to coincide with a reduced output trend.

Where has Sarah Palin been for thirty years?

She tells us:

"Well, when you consider that the federal government is about eleven trillion dollars in debt"

She and her friends Reagan, Cheney, McCain, and lil Bush have been digging about 90% of that hole during their reign.

Notes on inflation

When economic yield is well balanced we would see the yield curve shped for maximum economies of scale. As longas the shape is maintained, prices must be in equilibrium, whether we are i a finite or infinite set of equilibrium points.

So, to look for inflation, we look for distortions in the yield curve, and we are generally stuck with relative inflation between goods, including money. Here is a reference on relative inflation. Hence we can only measure inventory shortages along the chain of production represented by distortions i the yield curve. What we call CPI inflation would have to be higher short term interest rates than a properly adjusted yield curve should have.

Rotterdam Robo Bus

The park shuttle in Rotterdam, moving passengers about the business park. Read about it here.

Toyota's Robo Bus

Details on the Toyota RoboBus here.

The system operated during an expo on Awaji Island for six months. Notice these buses use simple curbs rather than large skyways.

Lawrance G. Lux

Before I talk about bubble theories I will first read all of his sensible comments on the subject. But bubble theory from the QM framework is coming soon. nd the Justin Fox theory of asset bubble. And the related theory of asset shortages by Caballero,Farhi and Gourinchas.

More RoboTaxi

[Top pic] A French company prototype.
[Bottom pic] The little taxi picks up its electric power from metal stripes in the road. Hence, the battery is 1/5 the size we normally need for electrics.

So, what is the driver for? Nothing, the little car can just follow the stripe and watch out for humans.

And I discover another RoboCar had been cruising the streets of San Francisco, top picture.

Cities increasing transportation inefficiency

Municipalities who want to increase transportation efficiency often do the opposite, Reason Online documents the problem.

When a municipal government increase transportation inefficiency then they hurt retailers the most and cause greater downturns then necessary during an oil crunch. Consumes ae aware of the problem, and respond with a vengeance when oil prices peak. These consumers, rather than embracing the mass transit solutions, simply use technology to get around the cost of reaching local distributors. Suddenly, the cost of the expensive, and often barely used mass transit systems, become apparent as consumers drop tax revenue by with wide and more intelligent shopping habits. Badly designed mass transit causes decay in the heart of a city's economic engine.

Here is another survey from the NY Times. My summary is that Transit has become less efficient in the era of the smart shopper, transit is less helpful in avoiding oil spikes because technology allows the consumer to use the car more judiciously.

Here is a survey of transit systems that work by Imgar Andreasson. His list of solutions that work all involve using digital intelligence to manage the optimum route with an emphasis on personal transport.

Oh that yield curve

A QM Economists sees a fintie dimensional division of the yield curve The yield curve is the queue sizes of a multi-stage, multiple good network. Money is the fastest adapter. Queue sizes of multiple goods about a particular term adjust price as queue size. Shortages cause inversion kinks and the queues adjust to remove spectral anomolies (Milt and his Plucking Theorem).

The money system only works in a minimum phase yield curve, hence coherence. The constant of uncertainty would have to be price*time for any transaction. Transactions are finite time and partial results become observable to the agent. Transactions have finite time, governed to the adaption time of money..

The yield curve is the inventory growth at each node. So, simple enough, a steep curve means inventory build up from long term investments. Inventory shortages at the short end because there is no efficient solution to inventory pricing, given the price of inputs.

Balanced expansion expands queues initially, then visibility increases across the yield, and a more acurrate measurement is possible with an increase in the number of terms.

Brad and his Regulators

Here they come. Read all about it.

My advice? The regulators come into play the next time we have some shock that requires bankruptcy. They do happen, how much insurance? Keep regulation costs small? Good luck?

He has our "expert" team, Barney, Dowd and Schumer.

The deal is that our yield optimization is positive definite, it has no function for less than zero inventory over the near term outlook. So negative inventory growth below zero inventory cause firms to be demonetized, and the bankruptcy and insurance system come into play, the more primitive of financial system.

The total loss due to financial inefficiency is probably small compared to the loss due to required changes in real capital investment. Most government losses incurred by the tax payer are coming from reduce demand via the 38% reduction in federal income resulting in efficiency of scale losses for government.

And government regulators inevitably become biased advocates in the next restructuring.

Incentives work better. Create a financial derivatives market.

Recursive Prefereces

I'm working on it. Reading Brackus, Routledge, and Zin. And Koopmans

The idea is to define the relative substitutability of good over time, a vector of utility functions of the goods, and see how it evolves over time toward an equilibrium value. They construct a Marginal Rate of Substition Matrix [MRS], which is the array of partial elasticities over time. The ask how that array converges after perturbations from a starting point, as each agent incrementally adjusts the relative consumption of goods.

Under what conditions cn the final Utility Function be constructed from a Polynomial of the MRS matrix.

If all goes well, the utility of consuming some good at a point of time in the future will converge, and the path toward convergence can be computed accurately as long as the time step reduces. Generally, one likes to get a set of polynomials int time in which to constructes the final versionj of Ut(c), for some t, and for each c, consumption preference with a discount rate. Whew!

So, the assumption is infinite certaint in the converged position. What happend if the discount rate us uncertain, or beter, if the period t, is unsertain to a constand 15%, NIID uncertainty? Then when construction the motion of Ut out of polynomials, the set of polynomils becomes finite. To see this, imagine an agent buying houses and cars. He buys a house every 10 years, a car every 5. Why ten and five? Because he cannot predict axactly when the next house comes, but it is 7 to 13 years; and he buys a car every 4-6 years. Thus his car buying period and uncertainty does not overlap his house buying process. So, constant uncertainty in time or i measurement results in a finite, restricted set of polynomials to construct Ut.


Any way, HT Arnold Kling

RoboCab Arrives!

Here is the article. (HT EngGadget)

"That seemingly innocuous vehicle pictured above (along with an approximation of a future model) is developed by France's Robosoft, and has apparently proven itself successful in the limited uses it's been put to so far..." A UTube link to Robucab videos, and another.

Robocab utilizes technology from the Stanford Research Institute, which is package in, of all things, box software by Karto Robotics.

Here is another version in design.

I am still holding to my claim, Ultra's Podcars will soon leave the concrete track and join us on the road.

We suffer a paradox in America. Home foreclosures continue unabated. The consumer is beng forced back into urban settings, abandoning suburbia, leaving the streets empty, taxes down, states and municipals bankrupt. But states and municipalities tell us that we cannot obtain efficiencies in the "last mile" because robotics interfere with personal driving. But what personal driving if suburbia is vacant!

Rather then waste the vacant suburban tracts, lets convert them into test environments. Design the automated home delivery vehicle, add the robocaps, put sensors in the streets and let the robots take over. Once the consumer observes that his personal freight and person commute can be handled by the robovehicle, he will safely move back to suburbia, and we will no longer be "Stranded in Suburbia"