Donald Rumsfeld Is Old, Thinks Gay Marriage Could Lead To Polygamy

Reblogged from The Cassandra Files:

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Quick! Name a former Bush-era Secretary of Defense from whom you'd take moral advice. Easy, right? Donald Rumsfeld, obvs. While it is beyond this blogger's comprehension why anyone would choose to interview Mr. Rumsfeld in 2013, let alone to ask him about marriage equality, it is nonetheless true that Larry King did just that. (And yes, I too thought Larry King had retired.)

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Donald Rumsfeld knows there are things he doesn't know and that there are things that he doesn't know that he doesn't know. How he could make comments about gay marriage possibly leading to polygamy and gay marriage not fitting as a civil liberty for him is an unknown unknown for me.

An economist's mea culpa: I relied on Reinhart and Rogoff

Reblogged from Quartz:

Ken Rogoff is an economist who has always been kind to me, and for whom I have deep respect. And I have no animus toward Carmen Reinhart. Nevertheless, I hope there has been a nightmarish quality to the last few days of what Quartz writer Matt Phillips called a “bone-crunching social media pile-on that Harvard economists Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart…

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High marks go out to economist Miles Kimball today. In the linked article above he holds himself publicly accountable for using Reinhart and Rogoff's findings, and pledges to try to avoid such missteps going forward. Kimball's humility is a breath of fresh air for a staid field, as Economists tend to stand by disproven theories, as if to do otherwise would remove all credibility. It should be just the opposite. Let's hope that Kimball's admission clears the air for others.

Friday Night Music Blogging – Can’t Hold Us (Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

I don’t know about you, but I’m worn out. The seemingly relentless onslaught of bad news was hard to believe. While I have had a number of strong reactions to the week’s events, I don’t feel it’s time to go into them. Instead, I’ll ask you to keep those who’ve lost loved ones in your thoughts and, that you find ways to spread a little extra good in the coming weeks. We’re gonna need it. With that, let’s enjoy a song that, for me, is a pure expression of joy. It seems we’re due that bit of respite. Tomorrow, I’ll get back to booking my summer in Cambridge. (I can’t wait to get there so I can buy a round for the boys in blue.)

 

The Importance of Excel

Reblogged from The Baseline Scenario:

By James Kwak

I spent the past two days at a financial regulation conference in Washington (where I saw more BlackBerries than I have seen in years—can't lawyers and lobbyists afford decent phones?). In his remarks on the final panel, Frank Partnoy mentioned something I missed when it came out a few weeks ago: the role of Microsoft Excel in the "London Whale" trading debacle.

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Given today's news on Reinhart & Rogoff's potential Excel blunder, this February post from The Baseline Scenario seems prescient.

But while Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.***

The Price of Carbon

Reblogged from Clearing House for Environmental Course Material:

ClimateReality

Published on Mar 13, 2013

http://ClimateRealityProject.org - Narrated by Reggie Watts. We are all paying the price of carbon pollution. It's time to put a price on carbon and make the polluters stop the carbon destruction.

Global Climate Change http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre130
Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
Environment Ethics http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre120

All the more reason to love Reggie Watts.