he's not even trying anymore. or maybe he wants to return to his Plan A: lose the office, start a TV network

"Trump suggested Thursday that another foreign country should investigate Biden and his son Hunter, even though House Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry against him over his request that the Ukrainian president do the same."

amazing.

Links to this tweet: https://twitter.com/ALT_uscis/status/1179262379877703687

“Central bank independence increasingly looks like a brief historical episode that peaked around the turn of the century,’’ said Joachim Fels, global economic adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Like it or not, get used to the new normal of dependent central banks.’’

“Central bank independence increasingly looks like a brief historical episode that peaked around the turn of the century,’’ said Joachim Fels, global economic adviser at Pacific Investment Management Co. “Like it or not, get used to the new normal of dependent central banks.’’

so Trump's personal lawyer is a foreign agent but it's okay because he's lobbying foreign governments, not his own, in ways that are interpreted as repressing "foreign partners and foreign investors"

"Giuliani said he was hired to send the letter by a global consulting firm run by former FBI director Louis Freeh. He declined to say on whose behalf Freeh’s firm was working or how much he was paid.

This summer, Giuliani told The Washington Post that he was working with clients in Brazil and Colombia, among other countries, as well as delivering paid speeches for an Iranian dissident group. He has not registered as a foreign agent with the Justice Department on behalf of his overseas clients, saying it is not necessary because he does not directly lobby the U.S. government."

"One of the reasons I think we haven’t seen more strikes already — given that the labour share of the national pie has been declining in most G20 countries since the 1980s — is that asset prices have risen considerably in that time, offsetting stagnant wages for some" (emphasis some)

"An asset price collapse and a lasting period of low returns would bring a looming pensions crisis to the top of the political agenda. That would, in turn, force us finally to reckon with an economic model that has put the interests of capital before workers for far too long.
.. we are due for a swing away from a financially orientated economy to one driven more by income growth."

What Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime; it’s worse. It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit—the kind of gross misconduct that easily clears the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution when impeaching a president. Which means the best way to hold Trump accountable for that misconduct isn’t a criminal trial; it’s for Congress to impeach him.

Pursuing criminal cases that won’t stand legal scrutiny, or arguing that Trump has violated a criminal statute, risks undermining that goal.

Labeling Trump’s alleged conduct as “bribery” or “extortion” cheapens what is alleged to have occurred and does not capture what makes it wrongful. It’s not a crime—it’s a breach of the president’s duty to not use the powers of the presidency to benefit himself. And he invited a foreign nation to influence the 2020 presidential election on the heels of a nearly three-year investigation that proved Russia had tried to influence the 2016 presidential election.

No one should expect law enforcement to act if our elected representatives are unwilling to do so.

No social security net, no family security and a pensions crisis will evolve into a humanitarian catastrophe. In the future, the economic gap between elderly China and middle-aged US will again widen. From this, we can say that the US economy will not be overtaken by China but, rather, by India. China’s economic vitality will continue to decline, which will have a disastrous impact on the global economy.

In our games, when we fight Russia and China,” “blue [the color traditionally representing the US in the games] gets its ass handed to it.” This is because the massive increase in military spending has transformed China’s military. China’s military power in the region is such that within the next 5-10 years Beijing may feel confident it could win in a regional conflict with the US. While its military buildup makes a tactical victory possible, in the larger strategic sense China faces an unprecedented demographic cliff, the country is dependent on trade with the rest of the world, and geography has left the country boxed in.

We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of endless economic growth. How dare you!”

FT announces need for new corporate agenda: "the model has come under strain, particularly the focus on maximising profits and shareholder value... without change, the prescription risks being far more painful"

“Quantum speedup is achievable in a real-world system and is not precluded by any hidden physical laws,”

quantum computing power will “grow at a double exponential rate,” besting even the exponential rate that defined Moore’s Law

Dario Gil, head of IBM Research, described the experiment as a highly special case “laboratory experiment” that has “no practical applications.” He added, “Quantum computers will never reign ‘supreme’ over classical computers, but will rather work in concert with them, since each have their unique strengths.”

Jim Clarke, Intel Labs’ director of quantum hardware, called Google’s update “a notable mile marker.” He said that “a commercially viable quantum computer will require” many R&D advancements before becoming a reality.

"more worried about the serving the master on the stock market and the quarterly earnings report than running a great business"

OOP in DS

Millburn’s new equity fund will use machine learning to decipher signals from exchange-traded funds in order to make long bets on the underlying securities such as members of the S&P 500 and MSCI World.

RL algorithms and illustrate the definitions of the reward function, actions and policy functions in details, as well as introducing algorithms that could be applied to FTFs

“There’s a widely held misunderstanding that genocide is the scale of extermination of human beings,” said the former UN human rights envoy Ben Emmerson QC. “That’s not so. The question is: is there an intention to, if you like, wipe off the face of the Earth a distinct group, a nation, a people?” This, Emmerson and Barack Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta claimed, is what is happening to the Islamic people of Xinjiang. “This is a calculated social policy designed to eliminate the separate cultural, religious and ethnic identity of the Uighurs,” said Emmerson. “That’s a genocidal policy.”

Are we so in thrall to consumerism, to buying cheap goods made by cheap labour in China, so intimidated by Chinese military and economic might, that we connive with what may well amount to a criminal dictatorship? The Chinese refer to the 19th century, during which the British oppressed them with two opium wars, as the Century of Humiliation. Ours is becoming the Century of Moral Feebleness.

take a guided tour through features of OpenAI Gym, from utilizing standard libraries to creating your own environments, then discover how to frame reinforcement learning problems so you can research, develop, and deploy RL-based solutions

In finance, the weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis asserts that historic stock price and volume data cannot inform predictions of future prices. In this paper we show that, to the contrary, future intra-day stock prices could be predicted effectively until 2009. We demonstrate this using two different profitable machine learning-based trading strategies. However, the effectiveness of both approaches diminish over time, and neither of them are profitable after 2009.