NumberSix

Saving your sanity from Doomsday News

Is the seemingly never ending torrent of Doomsday News worrying you, distracting you, keeping you up at night or even worse?

The first figure, the bar chart based on the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey shows almost the same expenditures in Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles, California, with somewhat higher overall expenditures in Atlanta and somewhat lower housing expenditures relative to transportation in Atlanta.

However, Zillow gives a median home value of about $220,000 in Atlanta: https://www.zillow.com/atlanta-ga/home-values/

Median list price per square foot is $219

Median home list price is $310,000

Zillow gives a median home value of about $663,000 in Los Angeles: https://www.zillow.com/los-angeles-ca/home-values/

Median list price per square foot is $478/sq foot in Los Angeles

Median list price of homes is $750,000

That is a radical difference in housing prices that does not seem to show up in the figure in the article. Presumably salaries and budgets are proportionately lower in Atlanta than Los Angeles.

Is this really an accurate and adequate explanation? I know people who have moved from Atlanta where they could afford a house and had to downsize to a smaller apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area which is somewhat more expensive than Los Angeles, but in the same ballpark.

Is Los Angeles really more affordable than Atlanta?

[ADDED]

The US Census reports:

Fulton County, GA (Atlanta area)

Median Household Income (2012-16): $58,851

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $39,101

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fultoncountygeo...

Los Angeles County, CA

Median Household Income (2012-16): $57,952

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $29,301

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescount...

Note that Fulton County, GA (Atlanta) has a higher median household income than Los Angeles County, and much lower median home prices according to Zillow.

It is unclear what the consumer expenditure report is computing. It may be the percentage of total expenditures NOT INCLUDING SAVINGS AND TAXES, rather than gross income:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/calculation.htm

Hence people in Atlanta may be saving more but spending a similar percentage of TOTAL EXPENDITURES to people in Los Angeles.

Asteroid is discovered in deep space heading for Earth. Astronomers watch the asteroid approach Earth. Asteroid hits New York City. Millions die. Astronomers and media report:

"Asteroid from deep space kills millions. Asteroid causes death of millions."

No experiment is possible. Causation is clear.

The article is misleading if not false. Neural nets were hot in academic AI research 30 years ago (1988). The original Perceptron had fallen out of favor in part because of arguments that it could not implement a exclusive or (XOR) in Minsky and Papert's book Perceptrons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptrons_(book)

Neural nets fell out of favor in the 1970's but came back and became hot in the early 1980's with work by John Hopfield and others that addressed the objections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hopfield

Practical and commercial successes were limited in the 1980's and 1990's which led to a reasonable decline in interest in the method. There were some commercial successes such as HNC Software which used neural nets for credit scoring and was acquired by Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hecht-Nielsen

I turned down a job offer from HNC in late 1992 and neural nets were still clearly hot at that time.

Some people continued to use neural nets with some limited success in the late 1990's and 2000s. I saw some successes using neural nets to locate faces in images, for example. Mostly they failed.

AI research is very faddish with periods of extreme optimism about a technique followed by disillusionment. One may wonder how much of the current Machine Learning/Deep Learning hype will prove exaggerated.

Also, traditional Hidden Markov Model (HMM) speech recognition is not rule based at all. It uses a maximum likelihood based extremely complex statistical model of speech.

It doesn't read like a joke. It reads like a mistake or perhaps he is assuming his audience won't be aware of who the Jacobites were and will find it funny.