Inflated what?

I try to avoid debates about TIPs, inflation adjusted treasuries. TIPs are returns on inflation adjusted government bonds, the government covers inflation for you. Returns for these bonds should closely reflect a conservative estimate of real growth.

What does the chart tell us? That expected real growth in our economy sucks, as low as 1.5%. When we have 1.5% growth, we will have few trading partners because 1.5% real growth is impossible to plan for. Inventory variance in oil supplies are likely to be greater than 1.5%. So, what's an oil trader to do? Readjust oil delivery channels and focus on emerging markets where growth is 3-5%.

What happened to cause this low growth recently? The Keynesian experiment drove up oil imports, and oil prices to nearly $87, and the economy contracted in adjustment. We never suffered a general glut, the whole idea that we undergo a depression because we have too much stuff?

Is this the feared deflation?

Bloomberg reports on real estate researcher Metrostudy:

New home sales in Phoenix and Las Vegas, two U.S. markets hardest hit by foreclosures, are set to plunge as a federal tax credit for homebuying expires, according to data from real estate researcher Metrostudy.

A sample of subdivisions in both cities showed sales contracts for new homes “pulled back sharply in May and contract cancellations spiked,” Houston-based Metrostudy said in an e-mail. Would-be buyers canceled about 40 percent of new home contracts in San Diego in May, up from 10 percent in April, the company said. Data on new signings in that city weren’t immediately available.

A reminder on stimulus theory

The basic assumption on the Keynes thing is that we over corrected, we had jumped down to a deflated state that was not warranted by the real shock. Under that assumption, government, by virtue of being fleet-of-foot, can jump in and push economic activity; gaining a better operating point for the economy.

If the basic assumption is untrue, say that we really do suffer a severe resource constraint, then all bets are out the window. We get immediate crowding out as government spending drives up resource usage.

Randal O'Toole; in the campaign for autobot

For someone writing about the often lamentable state of American transportation, Cato senior fellow Randal O'Toole spends a lot of time on the road. Between January and May, he spoke at more than 30 engagements from Anchorage to Orlando, presenting the case against high speed rail and smart growth policies and promoting the message of greater mobility found in his new book, Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It.

"Congress, the administration, and others are making very important decisions about transportation that will influence how we travel, how we live, and how much we are taxed for many years to come," O'Toole said. "I want people to be aware of what is happening and help members of the public to have an influence on these decisions."

O'Toole spoke at Cato in January and at the National Conference of State Legislatures in April. His audiences ranged from populist to Ivy League. In January, he spoke at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon, the largest independent bookstore in the world. He addressed a crowd of 250 people at the Racine Tea Party in Racine, Wisconsin, in March. A few weeks later, O'Toole took part in a special panel of the Janus Lecture series at Brown University, where he provided the libertarian perspective to counter co-panelist James Howard Kunstler, a leader in the anti-sprawl movement and author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape.

When he wasn't speaking in person to audiences across the country, O'Toole was talking to the media and writing for newspapers. In January and again in March, he was a featured guest on John Stossel's Fox Business program.

Back to the farm

Networked autos and the killer app

When cars talk to each other , what is the big deal?

Straight to the point, I think it is vehicle swarming. The idea that like minded travelers can have their cars coordinate movements with feedback to the drivers. They can manually "convoy" their vehicles on summer vacations. Synchronizing a bit might save them 10% on mileage due to constant speed. The concept will be a must have for truckers.

Cars that talk to each other quickly gain by talking to central traffic control and buying right of way. They get another 10% off the top in the city for that. Networked cars gain from efficiency, a gain returned right back to the buyer of the little dashboard device. Early adapters gaining from pay per mile, driving congestion pricing.

Which company wins the battle of the swarming cars? The company that has the best Navigation Logic. They can show a reliable software path from the Rules of Bot Driving to implementation. Open Software has the edge here due to transparency.

The General Glut Theory

DeLong claims it exists, I claim it does not.

The economy does not have complete solutions to inventory mis-match problems, so inventory cycles remain and must be dealt with. The economy deflates, or contracts, for a period and builds up surpluses, then inflates for a period. over time we get the balance.

We entered the depression because of a severe shortage of oil. We contracted beyond that necessary to correct, because it was the closest solution we had. We will attempt to re-inflate when oil inventories build up.

A Yield Curve Index

A market that places bets on the area integral of the Treasury yield curve. It is a futures market that should satisfy the NGDP, interest rates and shape targets all at once. Each amateur monetarist picking their personal Norm.

Database update

I am releasing the 150 Essential R Lines for SQLite Integration. I swear not to inflate more.
The new release maps R dataframe column names to SQL column names and defaults to .headers on to swap names, and extract R names on table create. Our other default is to map table names to file names of their csv sources.

So, if I remember, this began as an odyssey to digest reams of government data, and it is working better. BLS data is the toughest to swallow, but FRED is a snap.
The new call: qframe(tb,db,x="",mode="w and or or c or r")
allows creation, read, and write of a SQL table to match a dataframe.

Back to the Autobots

Specifically, their license. I left it last time that basically we can write the autobot driving test in plain language, then looked and decided that autobots have to process every object within some minimum time. Spatailly, the main thing is keeping other bots and people out of the exclusion zone for the next move.

So the rule looked more like a procedure, "The robot must process all object trajectories within a meter accuracy every 128 millisecs"; may be an appropriate rule. Rules could be about emergency , safe stops.

My first list of rules:
Manual override required, Pedestrian keep out, emergency safe stop, general collision avoidance, and any other scenario specific requirements.