It has started. “I’ll be missing class today. Will you be covering anything important?” No. I never cover anything important in class.
Professor at UBC VSE. Economic History, photography, food.
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It has started. “I’ll be missing class today. Will you be covering anything important?” No. I never cover anything important in class.
Asking ChatGPT to find typos in a document and list them by page number is its kryptonite.
"Pat, why do you carry that ridiculous 600mm lens on long hikes?" Buddy, I can see mountains reflected in the eyes of a trailside pika.
And the production quality is now crap. I just got a review copy for a book that’s priced at over USD 100, and the thing is literally inkjet-printed.
I haven’t had to pull the trigger (which I imagine would take some wrangling). Even though the book is no longe selling a lot, its price has remained reasonable.
The reason I negotiated copyright reversal is that when a book stops selling, presses raise its price to several hundred dollars. They reason that they can keep squeezing out a profit with a single sale. If I can claw the copyright back and put the book in the public domain, it stops that behaviour.
So you don’t know what presses I’ve been publishing with… but YES? 😉 Most academic authors do not have agents. Though I did negotiate with PUP that the copyright will return to me if they fail to sell a certain number of copies per year.
The original thread was how about the large predatory academic publishers would be the ones to make a killing and emerge stronger from this.
The front matter of my book. PUP. Pretty standard.
This is mine, and “generally” is a powerful word.
Maybe reading the original thread would help you avoid gratuitously dunking on somebody you don’t know. Just a thought. (If it helps, it was about how doing this would have the effect of enriching predatory academic publishers like elsevier).
The copyright of academic books and articles generally belongs to the publisher, not to the author. If one of your books or articles is in LibGen, it is the publishing house that will get any damages, not you. You may get additional royalties, but they would be a tiny percentage of the damages.
It is somehow OK to jump onto the tracks from the left side of the platform, but not from the right side?
My research team (w/ @andyferrara.bsky.social, Sam Bazzi, Eric Chyn, Martin Fiszbein, and Thomas Pearson) is hiring a full-time economics postdoc for the 2025-26 academic year! If you know someone who might be interested, see the link below.
Where did you think mozzarella di bufala came from?
You don't need weathermen at all: www.cnn.com/2025/02/27/p...
When MSNBC is the last bastion of free market economics.
Surprising absolutely no one.
It’s quite the feat Bezos has accomplished, making Rupert Murdoch look principled.
Also, printing this on the heels of platforning Kristi Noem’s fatwa against Harvard means that my subscription stays well cancelled.
I did not post about Battacharya’s @washingtonpost’s op ed because I couldn’t find the right words to describe a “scientist” who did his best to undermine trust in vaccines, and now says that vaccines should be abandoned because they haven’t earned the public’s trust. This is the right word.
Argentines cook the beejesus out of their beef, a consequence of historically unsafe food chains. Only in the last couple of decades has medium rare become widespread, and older folks still won’t eat anything that isn’t charred to the bone.
I cancelled my subscription to The Economist when they endorsed the invasion of Irak. 24 years later, they have only gone downhill from there. Who exactly do they hire to write this crap?
The Schrödinger housing market, in which you want buyers to pay low prices for their homes, but developers to get high prices for their builds. www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...
Every article about meeting the AI challenge in college classrooms: "The professor lovingly curated immersive activities that spurred critical thinking in the 16-student audience." Thanks. Where do I sign up to teach these 16-student classes? We need enrolments of 120 just to break even.
Economic history has lost one of its greats.
It’s the theoretical counterpart to the policy term “neoliberal”. In both cases, the accepted definition in any sphere outside economics is “anything I don’t like”.
Yes, traffic cameras work, but it's a myth that people hate them! Survey after survey shows that most people support automatic enforcement (and often want more of it). This is a false controversy, fed by a minority of disgruntled drivers & journalists seeking narratives with conflict.
It wouldn’t be reflective of US dynamics, especially in the coming high-tariff world that will progressively cause economies to decouple from each other.
I am puzzled at *every* market movement. It's not like a few thousand fewer jobs or Apple missing an arbitrary "target" of iphone sales are going to shave 1% off the net present value of the US economy, yet that's the magnitude of the movements you see every single day.
Caballo and Rigobon turned their project into a successful private company that continues to sell statistical products reporting aggregate macro indicators in many countries. My money says they will have a Us version up in no time. www.pricestats.com
I spend my days calculating aggregate statistics for sixteenth century Europe with much, much, much worse data. It takes a lot to move the needle, results-wise.
You don’t need giant amounts of high quality data to come up with serviceable accurate indices of prices, employment, etc. Sure, you would lose precision after the second decimal point. That’s not what the important decisions hinge on.
Cavallo and Rigobon’s Billion Prices Project was one of the most salient sources. The level of “onlineness” of the US’ economy would make replicating it quite feasible. thebillionpricesproject.com
This exact same thing happened in Argentina when Ms. Kirchner made the statistical institute a nest of her cronies. Several academic and private sector providers stepped up, including from outside the country.
The real question is how will it change referee selection. Nothing crowds out “you did not cite me enough” reviewer #2 behavior.
The opinions of @theglobeandmail.com’s editorial board are not really opinions. They are “the truth”.
There is a scenario in which caring a lot about Epstein results in a good outcome on tariffs.
I drove past it today. It is actually in the bike lane.
Unsurprisingly, the review board that decided to discontinue the drug has medical ethicists on it (as well as physicians, pharmacologists, and economists). The government just steamrolled all of them.
Weirdly, a lot of climate activists also believe externalities are bullshit, in the sense that they can only envision command and control solutions for them.
It's a massive problem. "Do your own research!" sounds like excellent advice, but most of us are simply not competent to research complex questions of medical science. So the question becomes, how do we establish forms of authority to which it is rational to give free consent? [...]
Heck, the damage public health has done to *to itself* by ditching scientific principles and becoming political is somewhat irreparable.
Given that the statu quo was 0% both ways, in general equilibrium this is bad news for everyone. It's only good news for some groups relative to the threat of 30%, which had little credibility given the TACO track record.
RIP Tom Lehrer. (Glad we didn't all go together). tomlehrersongs.com
Bang-on thread on the disease affecting Canadian universities.
He literally linked to three actual studies documenting it actually happening in there actually actual countries.
The BC government just dragged a panel of experts through the mud for making the tough calls they were appointed to make. I am so glad to have coverage decisions made by politicians without medical expertise reacting to social media mobs. MAHA on the left. vancouversun.com/news/member-...
I’m not sure if this is a commentary on AI or on history departments.
Thing I am an absolute complete total reactionary about: there has not actually been invented a better model of conveying information in a learning environment than the basic structure of a traditional lecture. A speaker standing in some sort of unique focal point for the attention of listeners...
Wait until he finds out what the R in BRICS stands for.
Check out this thread by @justinwolfers.bsky.social bsky.app/profile/just...
Get price survey teams on the ground, quick! #econsky www.fox2detroit.com/news/helicop...
My side effects from the second dose of the shingles vaccine were “bad” -like a bad flu for two days. I’ve also had shingles twice, in a “mild form” (no lasting neuropathic pain, though the second time it got real close to the eye). I will take the side effects of the vaccine every damn time.
Yes, yes, trade wars are bad, and these oranges cost more, and some people cannot afford them. But US oranges, like most food there, are bred to be overloaded with sugar. Oranges from the rest of the world actually taste like oranges.
Trade war already resulting in benefits: local fruit stands are carrying Egyptian and Peruvian oranges, rather than the usual Florida crap.
Nobody: Condo management company: "Here's your new AI-powered digital assistant, which will double the time it takes to get anything done!" Also, it's called HODA, which in Spanish reads as "fooling around" or "fuck". HODA can help you! Text HODA! Talk to HODA! Your life is better with HODA!
Chimichurri is not hot (what Argentines call “ají molido” is not spicy at all; think paprika, not sweet). The rest tracks. The function of chimichurri is to make overdone meat palatable. One day argentines will learn how to properly cook our amazing beef. Until then, we’ll always have chimichurri.
Of note, this is not a statement of culinary intolerance. But when I see a mix of cilantro, apple cider vinegar, maple syrup, and habanero peppers… well, no, that’s not chimichurri.
Are you talking chimichurri, or whatever random concoction somebody outside Argentina chooses to call chimichurri?
Full screen mode. Zoom in. Keep zooming in.
Gasp… are you suggesting that LLMs are, I don’t know… just like any other technological advance in history? Not a society-destroying, world-ending, cataclysmic satanic creation? And you are doing this on Bluesky? Gird your loins, friend!
Still, name and shame! 😁
Unless you require international roaming, prepaid carriers like Chatr are cheaper and do not require credit checks. For travel there are always eSims.
Hmmm? I just ported three lines to a different carrier in under 30 minutes. Visiting student got prepaid service in 10 minutes flat. All this at a pop-up cart in a shopping mall.
Not only has @washingtonpost.com become a mouthpiece for fascism, it can't even do basic math.
Cataract surgery removes the lens of the eye. They replace it with an artificial lens sculpted to your precise prescription. The primary objective is to replace a cloudy lens, but they fix the refraction as a bonus. LASIK sculpts the cornea.
Cataracts surgery eliminates your prescription, but it is done one eye at a time. Between surgery in the first and the second eye, you have perfect vision out of the fixed eye while still needing correction for the other. You address this by wearing a blank on the good eye.
This person could have just had cataracts surgery in one of their eyes, and are now waiting to have the other one done. The operated on eye would have no prescription, but they would still require one for the other eye.
It’s not a logical dessert; why should it have a logical name?
I was thinking that this will have dynamic effects. Few who taste an equally priced French, Italian, Spanish, or Argentine wine will ever go back to buying American.
Hopefully the tariff bullying and 51st state bravado was worth destroying one third of US wine exports. And that's just a single industry. www.ctvnews.ca/business/art...
They are, indeed, very docile and friendly.
“I’m sorry Mr. Jones, it appears that my llama has chosen your front lawn as its bathroom. We will be here every morning for the next 25 years.”
There are practical problems with keeping them as pets though. The most salient one is that they need to be walked several miles every day. Relatedly, they poop and pee portentously, always in the exact same spots along their walks.
Some rather disturbing details in this article, particularly regarding an interview given by a French government minister. Academic freedom is not just something whose absence elsewhere is to be regretted, it is non-negotiable in any free society.
The anti-vaxxer playbook: - Fire Chief Medical Officer and leave position vacant. - Appoint anti-vaxxer ministers. - Actively campaign against vaccination. - Complain that no one is getting vaccines. - Cancel public funding for vaccinations. www.ctvnews.ca/calgary/arti...
To be fair, a large latte in Toronto would have the same volume as a medium in Minneapolis. Then again, the coffee in Toronto would be an order of magnitude better.
Thousands of other similarly ill-thought out decisions, concerning everything from vaccinations to infection control, fly under the radar. We are well past peak health, and on our way to becoming a sicker society.
…but what’s coming out of practitioners, increasingly divorced from scientific best-practice, is observationally equivalent to that.
This was so outrageous that even politicians, always ready to jump on cost saving recommendations, could see something was amiss, and paused the work of the task force instead. Of course, the last thing we want is public health decisions subject to political whim…
Dozens of millions of excess deaths later, the lessons have not been learnt. A Canadian task force so misread the evidence on rising cancer rates in women that it recommended *eliminating* screening for the 40-49 age group.
Groupthink, deference to authority, a fundamental lack of scientific understanding, and sheer lack of curiosity by practitioners have hollowed out public health structures at all levels. This became blindingly obvious as a result of the COVID pandemic.
A brilliant deep dive into the ossified and dogmatic structures behind the widening gap between public health and scientific evidence. canadahealthwatch.ca/2025/04/18/t...
I get the sentiment that underlies this. I too think we should strengthen ties with the EU. Economically, militarily, socially. But EU *membership* would be a very bad thing. The basic reason is we are not in Europe. Geographically, economically. (Also legally. Article 49 says must be European.)
youtu.be/HHhZF66C1Dc?...
Dude, let me tell you about the cage fights of the 1990s…
Not satire.
It's kind of insane that for the first 10,000 years of agriculture all grain was hand ground on saddle querns. Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, all hand ground grain for 4-5 hours a day to feed a family.
Did you really want to wisen everybody up to the fact that we do not actually read old texts?
Positively medieval. And literally nineteenth century (the first pertussis vaccine was developed in 1912).
You can’t possibly be talking about the pain and suffering of the economic historian having to spend months collecting data in medieval castles perched in the middle of wine country, can you?
(And, of course, underpaying public servants increases the risk of attracting someone who will make up for the shortfall in shady ways).
I don’t know whether the current manager is of the former or the latter type. Just comparing salaries, however, gives a very partial picture.
A better question is whether those salaries are enough to attract and retain competent managers. Paying $500k for someone who gets the job done on time and on budget is a lot better than paying $250k for someone who wastes millions.
My Canadian university, Queen's, is offering TWENTY 4-year funded PhDs (40k CAD/yr) for a student of ANY citizenship who has been accepted at a top 100 US university but have had offer rescinded OR are reconsidering offer due to US policy. Details found here👇 www.queensu.ca/grad-postdoc...
Make Japan Great Again! www.dpreview.com/news/6233456...
I use this exact example in my very first ECON 101 lecture. I now have AV content.
Free parking at Vancouver Hospitals led to enormous overuse by people who were not accessing medical services. Diamond Centre, 12th & Oak, all-day free parking? Sign me up! You can get around this with a validation system (like grocery stores), but that's another layer of admin on health workers.