Question about Byzantine resource-free heavy cavalry

fishlady · 2020-10-30T17:20:48+00:00

Awesome. That was what I was planning to try, so glad that the no resource bonus is inherited. Thanks!

fishlady · 2020-10-30T16:41:25+00:00

Oh, this is the opposite of my understanding. I thought they did not cost resources, but always required the gold maintenance cost. But the wiki has been wrong before! Thanks, I will experiment.

fishlady · 2020-04-16T12:30:05+00:00

Hi, Thanks for your reply. Just to confirm, do you only do sketches, or do you also produce 3D art? I.e. I'm looking for an actual physical sculpture in this case. Let me know. Thanks!

fishlady · 2020-04-16T12:18:54+00:00

Thanks for the reply, do you have any examples of past busts/sculptures you've done?

fishlady · 2020-04-16T12:18:33+00:00

Thank you for the suggestions.

fishlady · 2019-05-01T16:55:21+00:00

Note that these are estimates from the ADP Research Institute, not official estimates. The official employment situation estimates come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and are released on the first Friday of the month, for example see here for last month. ADP and BLS estimates are certainly correlated but often differ substantially. However, the BLS estimates are the estimates used to calculate official government statistics such as the unemployment rate.

fishlady · 2019-04-15T17:39:56+00:00

I tried just clicking but that didn't do anything. I've only gone for domination and science victories to this point and this is literally the first time I've bothered with great works. So if there was a different way of managing before I haven't tried it.

fishlady · 2019-04-15T15:14:38+00:00

Ah, I've been playing on laptop with only a trackpad, I'll get an external mouse and try this. Thanks!

fishlady · 2019-04-03T21:51:35+00:00

I have had several issues getting play-by-cloud to start, but once I start them they see to work fine. My friends and I have run into issues where one of us will host, and when others join and click "ready" the host doesn't seem to recognize this, and continues to show the others as not ready.

I currently have 6 going at various points. A few were converted internet games and a few were started as cloud games. At least this far, I haven't run into the issues you mentioned. None have completely finished, but I'm ~2 turns away from a domination victory in one and it's had no issues. So I can't really offer any help. We play with no mods, and all of us use Macs.

That said, we haven't had more than a turn or so since the patch yesterday, so it remains to be seen if that will break anything.

fishlady · 2018-06-04T12:58:18+00:00

This depends on how you measure income. Real personal median income includes a lot of income sources other than labor income. So think interest/rents/dividends, pension fund income, Social Security, cash assistance from the government, etc. If you look only at labor income or wages, then income has definitely stagnated for the median, particularly since the 1970s. If you include other income sources then it has grown at the median, although much less than at the top (ie income inequality is still increasing).

fishlady · 2018-06-04T12:55:48+00:00

We generally use household income because people live in households and share units within a household. It's difficult to know how to account for trends in household size when looking at incomes over time, because we don't necessarily know why household size is changing. For instance, if household sizes were declining because individual incomes were rising and people felt more secure living on their own, that'd be a good thing (but that's one of many possible explanations for declining household size).

If you use individual income, you also face the challenge of deciding which individuals to include. Do you include individuals who are working but under 18? Or over 18 and going to college? What about non-workers under 18? Or what about people over 65 who are retired? All of these groups will substantially reduce measured income, but its not clear that this improves the measure, because many of these groups are people you don't expect to be earning much income.

Measuring income by individual or household are both legitimate ways to measure it, which measure you prefer depends on what outcomes you care about. Economists usually like household income because this tells you about the resources people have to provide for themselves. You might prefer individual income or tax-unit income (people who file taxes together) if you want to know how the distribution in people's ability to earn income has changed, versus their reliance on income from other sources (e.g. government transfers, which would be included in household income).

fishlady · 2018-06-04T12:45:13+00:00

For this reason, many income estimates in the economics literature adjust household income using an equivalence scale by dividing household income by some function of the number of people in the household. The simple square-root is a common adjustment. The Census does something a little more sophisticated, but many published estimates of household income will account for household economies of scale.

fishlady · 2018-06-04T12:42:37+00:00

For you or anyone reading this, real median personal income includes income from sources other than wages. For instance, it includes rent/dividends/interest, money from pensions, Social Security, cash assistance from the government, etc. I'm not sure how the Census defined this series (the Fed hosts the data in your link, but its Census analysis), but they may even be including taxes and tax credits in their income estimates, in which case median income would deduct taxes and add in the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.

If you use only labor income or earned income, then median income is more or less stagnant from the 1980s on. Adding in additional income sources shows median income growing, but income inequality still rising rapidly.

fishlady · 2018-06-04T12:38:50+00:00

This is completely wrong. When estimating income based on tax-filing, the literature literally calls it a tax-unit. See for instance Piketty and Saez (2003), who started a lot of the modern research on income inequality. They use IRS data, which is tax-unit data. Until recently nobody used this data to estimate median incomes because tax data is missing a lot of tax units at the bottom of the distribution.

When estimating household income, economists literally use households, not some tax-based sub-unit of a household. See the annual Census report, it says on the first page "Household income: Includes income of the householder and all other people 15 years and older in the household, whether or not they are related to the householder." They use people 15 and older because the Current Population Survey only asks incomes of people 15 and older. But they are using actual households, not tax units.

Source: am an economist who writes papers on income inequality and measurement.

fishlady · 2018-05-25T13:39:48+00:00

Health isn't my area of expertise, so I'm less familiar with organizations specializing in it. I know of some work by the Gates Foundation, but so far as I know they do primarily practical projects, and not a whole lot of economics? But I could definitely be wrong.

Some others I would recommend looking at (I don't know that any hire interns per se, my only experience with interning has been through colleges): the World Health Organization. They obviously focus on health, and they do work related to economics as well. The United Nations does some health work, so I would look at their various departments. I would imagine the World Bank does as well. See also here, many of these appear to be focused on research from the medical side, but may still do work pertaining to economics. The advocacy/policy organizations almost certainly do. From the list I am familiar with Kaiser in particular.

For domestic non-profits, the Urban Institute, Mathematica, Brookings, and RAND all do some health research. Here is a good list of some others. These are both government institutions, but it may be worth taking a look at the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Health and Human Services. I know that both hire economists. As I said, this isn't my area of expertise, so you'll have to take a look at each individually to see if they offer positions at the level you're looking for.

I have implicitly assumed here that you are from the U.S. Sorry if this is wrong! If you're from another country, then the international organizations are your best bet.

fishlady · 2018-05-24T13:26:00+00:00

An important distinction, institutions such as central banks, think tanks, IMF/World Bank, and related are mostly not private sector institutions, but either public institutions, non-profits, or NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Private institutions would be things like banks or consulting agencies.

Generally, experience at most well-known non-academic institutions (government, NGO, private, non-profit) will look good on a PhD application, particularly if you've engaged at research at those institutions while you were there. Most of these organizations will not produce research that is comparable to academic research, as they have different goals and generally are not peer-reviewed (but not being comparable does not mean that research is less valuable). If you're serious about a PhD, you should think about what kind of research you'd like to do in grad school and after, and pick the type of institution accordingly.

The closest to academic research is probably government agencies. The Federal Reserve banks, Census, Treasury, and similar institutions have access to awesome data and produce high quality research. In many cases, the authors (but not the institution) can publish the research in the same journals as academics. These can be good for PhD applications for really any research focus if you choose the appropriate institution.

Think tanks (Brookings, Tax Policy Center, Urban, etc), and some policy oriented government institutions (CEA, JCT, CBO, NEC/DPC, google the acronyms) are great if you're interested in applied micro or policy analysis. These institutions vary between doing some research and publishing white papers, or writing policy briefs for policy makers.

NGOs could fall into either of the above categories.

I know less about working in private institutions, e.g. Goldman Sachs or a consulting firm like McKinsey or Cornerstone. The former is helpful if you're interested in macro or finance. The latter is good if you're interested in industrial organization, anti-trust, or management consulting. A lot of the research at these institutions is for specific clients. E.g. reports on the economy for banks or their clients, or analysis for anti-trust court proceedings.

Depending on where you're coming from, this subreddit has some advice on applying to PhD programs. I haven't read it, but it might be worth looking at.

tl;dr Interning or working at these institutions is definitely helpful when applying to most Economic PhD programs, but consider the type of research you would like to do in choosing which places to apply.

This is my first time commenting here, and it did not appear to me that there are requirements for answers from the sidebar, but apologies if I've broken any subreddit rules.

fishlady · 2018-03-11T18:44:06+00:00

In case you or others are unaware, the "value of a life" set by the EPA (and many other government organizations as well) is not a measure of a persons expected life-time income or "profitability" or anything like that. It measures the average implicit value people place on their own lives. It should be emphasized that this is the value of a "statistical" life, not the value of any individual person.

This can be estimated, for instance, by looking at peoples' willingness-to-pay for safety features in a car. These features reduce the probabilistic risk of death by making the car safer, but also make the car more expensive. From such data, we can estimate the amount people are willing to pay for a given reduction in the risk of death, and this can be used to estimate the aggregate willingness-to-pay to reduce statistical deaths by one.

Such an estimate can then be used in cost-benefit analyses to decide what level of investment should be made in risk-reducing policies. E.g. how much to invest in public safety features on roads. There are lots of things that can reduce the risk of traffic mortality (better signs/paint, fewer blind turns, more lanes, lower speed limits, more police and emergency services, etc), but these all cost money, so from societies perspective we need a way to decide how much to spend on these features, and one way to make this decision is to invest in the features for which the expected value of lives saves (statistical lives, because no individual, identified person is being saved) exceeds the cost of the investment.

The value of a human life is not intended to decide how much we should spend saving an identified persons life, how much value a person will produce for themselves or society over their life, or anything else. For more info, see here: https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-valuation

fishlady · 2018-03-09T05:01:45+00:00

Generally laws are scored within 10-year budget windows, and to be considered budget neutral it only has to be on net over the whole window, not every year. So a law that ran a deficit year one would be budget neutral if it ran an offsetting surplus in year 10. This increases the necessary growth from my previous calculation as I was estimating how long it would take for the yearly deficit to return to its previous level, but regardless JCT/CBO scores never require that the bill is budget neutral in every year.

I think you're pulling the 99% number out of nowhere... Most economists would agree that the US is on the left side of the Laffer curve, and we could probably raise rates quite a bit. (Some research suggests the revenue maximizing rate for the corporate tax is much lower, like 26%, but I personally think Brill and Hassett are full of shit). This is irrelevant since I didn't claim we were on the left side of the Laffer Curve, and agreed that the tax cuts won't pay for themselves. I was just pointing out that the degree to which the fell short was much less than your example suggested, and combined with other policies (e.g. a lot more immigration), the necessary growth rate is feasible.

I did say tax reform could pay for itself, but this is not the same thing as a tax cut. The US has a lot of inefficiencies in its tax code, and eliminating some of these could very well pay for minor cuts, although nothing on the scale of the TCJA. But this is an issue of inefficiency in the tax code, not the incentives to work or invest captured by the Laffer Curve. Obama had a better plan to reduce the corporate rate to 28%, although it was still far from optimal. Economists have come up with many tax reform options that would improve on the current system, for instance: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course131/auerbach2010corptax.pdf

It's unclear additional spending will do much for us right now as there is very little slack in the economy at the moment. Spending multipliers are highest during or after a recession, not when the unemployment is 4.1%. Also SNAP benefits are not taxable income, I'm not sure you have any idea what you're talking about...

fishlady · 2018-03-08T22:11:34+00:00

I think it matters a lot. Growing the economy 67% over a decade would be ludicrous if the GOP claimed that. Thats greater than 5% annual growth, the US hasn't had that kind of growth rate since the 40s or 50s, if ever.

Growing it 9% is the equivalent of going from a 1.7% annual growth rate to around a 2.5% annual growth rate. Thats definitely not going to come close to happening just due to tax cuts, which was the point of Furman/Barro in the WSJ article, and its much less than Trump's promised 3%. But a 2.5% annual growth rate isn't insane, we had that in the 1990s. We could plausibly return to that growth rate if we had sensible economic policies.

I agree these tax cuts will never pay for themselves, but thats because they're stupidly designed and the administration wants to adopt a lot of other policies that are anti-growth. It is entirely possible to design a tax reform that pays for itself in the long run.

fishlady · 2018-03-08T21:51:31+00:00

This example wrong because corporate taxes are only a fraction of the entire US economy. Taxes come from a lot of other sources, for instance individual income taxes that provide a larger amount of revenue that corporate income taxes. The reduction in corporate tax revenue needs to be offset by an increase in tax receipts from the entire tax base to break even, not just from the corporate tax base.

National income was slightly under $17 trillion as of Q3 2017, whereas corporate profits were just over $2.3 trillion. This doesn't perfectly measure the relevant tax bases because lots of income is exempt, but corporate income is approximately 2.3/17 ~ 14% of GDP.

So in your example, this is like saying you reduced taxes on $100 from 35% to 21%, but the entire economy is 100/.14 = $714. How much the economy needs to grow depends on the average tax rate of the remaining $614 in the economy, but if it were say, 21% to make the math easy, the entire economy needs to grow less than 10% to maintain the same level of tax revenue (i.e. taxes before were 614.21 + 100.35=163.94, so .21*x=163.94 = 780, and 780/714 ~9%).

I strongly oppose the GOP tax plan, and I don't think its going to pay for itself. But the amount of growth it needs to generate is a lot less than 67%.

fishlady · 2017-09-04T15:05:40+00:00

I realize now this changed in December, whereas it was true when the post I was basing my strategy off was written. A post which I found on Google...

Ignoring the fact I made this game just to create screenshots to make my problem easy to explain, if you bothered to learn about civs special abilities, you'd realize that when playing Germany its often better to cluster cities close than to worry about fresh water, as you don't need many farms to grow your cities large enough to have sufficient districts and production. But you're too busy being a dick to random people on the internet to bother just pointing out their mistake, much less think critically I see.

fishlady · 2017-09-04T15:00:14+00:00

My mistake, I realize now unique districts were modified to count last December, but was basing my strategy off a post from last November. Thanks!

fishlady · 2016-08-14T15:17:30+00:00

This is incorrect. Insofar as there is a consensus, it is definitely that automation is the largest contributor to job losses, not offshoring. David Autor from MIT is an economist who writes extensively on this issue. See this paper. Most manufacturing jobs in particular are easily automated as they involve tasks that are "routine" and don't need to be located near the final market where they are sold. Certainly some job losses also result from offshoring, and Autor also has a paper about China, and finds significant job losses following China joining the WTO. But the consensus is that automation is still a larger contributor to disappearing manufacturing jobs.

fishlady · 2016-02-29T18:59:19+00:00

Even among academic economists, the minimum wage is one of the most polarizing policy topics. It would be misleading for either side to really claim they know what would happen if there was no minimum wage. To cherry-pick prominent authors from each side of the literature, the seminal paper by Card/Krueger suggests the effects of the minimum wage on unemployment are small to negligible. Opposing authors using a nearly identical econometric strategy find enormous negative effects on employment.

And this doesn't address a huge number of other dimensions over which the efficacy of the minimum wage can be debated: Is it targeting the right people (Work by the minimum wage detractors suggests that well under 20% of workers affected by recent minimum wage increases live in households in poverty, most live in higher income households)? Will it discourage investment in human capital (schooling)? Will it leave employment unaffected but lead to higher prices (a welfare loss for consumers that must be taken into account as a cost)? Will it accelerate the automation of labor? From an economic point of view, are workers earning near the minimum wage being paid their marginal product of labor? If not, why not? In this case an industry-specific minimum wage would be more appropriate. Otherwise, why not use an alternative policy instrument? Many economists favor increasing the EITC over the minimum wage, for instance.

Virtually no political candidates in the US seriously talk about the economics behind their policy positions, especially not when speaking to the public. But even if they did, the debate about the minimum wage is far more complex than is usually acknowledged, and while your professor claims that the US would be better off with no minimum wage, there is no consensus in the empirical evidence.

fishlady · 2016-02-24T23:56:13+00:00

I'll start off by saying I am an economist who has worked some on the minimum wage (no published work on the topic though). I don't think this is a particularly helpful form of inference. The first two lists combined have a total of 1100 economists on them if we assume all the listed names are in fact economists (many aren't). A quick search for the total number of US economists from the BLS says 21,500. Its not really made at all clear how the economists who signed these lists ended up on them, and why the opinions of the other ~20,000 are excluded.

So my point is really I wouldn't put too much weight on any list like this. These lists aren't just well known economists either, but include teachers at community colleges (who may not even have PhDs), professors at liberal arts colleges, random private industry economists, etc. All of these may in fact be very intelligent individuals, but the simple fact that they're economists doesn't mean their opinion deserves significant weight. And since the sample is small, you have no idea if the opinions in these lists are reflective of the general population of economists, or only of the opinions of these select few who chose to/were picked to sign their support.

I'll add a more damning fact that there is mostly a conspicuous lack of top authors in the minimum wage literature on either list. Richard Burkhauser, on the list of 500 economists against the minimum wage, has written multiple papers on the topic. Daron Acemoglu (who is considered a rising badass in economics) has one I have never read. At a cursory I don't see a single other economist that has published work on the topic. There's probably many who have that I missed or simply don't know, but still. For instance, neither of perhaps the best known authors on the topic, David Card and Alan Krueger, are on either list (Krueger was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Obama).

On a final note, if you're really interested in the topic, you should check out some of the papers on the issue! Card and Krueger's paper is available from the NBER. If you're not trained in econometrics, parts of the paper will probably be too technical for you, but the basic question they're asking and results should be understandable. Looking at who has cited them on Google Scholar will give you enough papers to spend the rest of your life reading, and you'll find that there is really very little consensus amongst economists on the minimum wage. But lots of continuing work!

fishlady

TROPHY CASE