roussanoff

You should check out Extreme Economies by Richard Davies. It's a book describing economic systems in extreme situations. I do not remember if it has a specific chapter on prisons though.

I used Ipe as an alternative to TikZ package for LaTeX. Ipe is a great tool that allows some manual moving of chart's components but can also be edited through code. You can insert formulas using LaTeX typesetting. It's also much easier to use for a complete beginner than TikZ. Highly recommend giving it a shot if you found TikZ to be too time-consuming.

Short answer: it's complicated.

Longer answer: what you are interested in is called the “transmission mechanism”, and the reduced workforce (and also investment by businesses) is only a part of it. The main part of the transmission mechanism is consumption: when interest rates go up, saving becomes more attractive and people shop less, preferring to spend later. They also face lower asset prices (did you notice how all bonds lost value over the past year? that's what it is) and so choose to spend less.

The inflation-unemployment trade-off that you mentioned is also a part of it. All economists know that there are trade-offs between policy goals, and you have to make judgement calls about what the society's priorities are. If only the voters could vote on “2% lower inflation compared to now” vs “1 percent lower unemployment compared to now”. For better or for worse, they don't do that.

> It is said to prove a point about the globalization of tea: words for tea that sound like chai reflect a historical spread via overland routes, the argument goes, while words like tea are a legacy of maritime trade. A 2018 viral article by the data journalist Nikhil Sonad in Quartz first put this idea on the world’s radar.

This “idea” was on wikipedia since at least 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Etymology_of_tea&...

A paper on incentive incompatibility of multiple round-robin and knockout tournaments: https://bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/1/274...

A paper on a similar topic but with much better execution: The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015, https://economics.harvard.edu/files/economics/files/ms28533..... Among other things, it spans multiple countries, and includes housing in the comparison.

Interesting how the 1920s seem to be an era of social management experiments everywhere, with basic things like calendar being questioned all over the world. Just a few years later after Eastman's push for a reform in the United States, the Soviet Union actually changed its calendar. The reform affected the definition of a week rather than the month. The reform was not successful, and the changes were only in place in 1929–1931.

My grandfather, who turned 10 in 1929, vaguely recalled how the country briefly abandoned universal weekends, which meant a mess scheduling anything family-related. Everyone had different work schedules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar

I don't think there is a single answer to "why the US built railroads", but both the railroads and the Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System certainly had something to do with the military needs.

I am not that familiar with the history of railroads, but I will speculate:

- take the railroad as far west as possible, then a stagecoach (expensive, slow, uncomfortable). The land route was created after the Gold Rush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Trail

- ship to Panama, cross by land in Panama, ship from Panama to California (cheaper, slower, risk of disease like malaria)

- ship around South America. Yep, all the way to Antarctica, through Magellan Strait. (even cheaper, even slower, risks from travelling by the sea). This route seems crazy if you look at the map. However, for goods, it was very much in use before Panama Channel was built. Sea is so much easier than land.

I am not sure what "foreign power" this quote refers to though. Panama? Chile? Maybe you could also go through Mexico?

US economic historian here. The idea that the US government funded the construction of the first Transcontinental Railroad and Panama Canal to trade with China is very, very weird.

- 1850-1890 was a period of high protectionism, highest tariffs on imports in the US history.

- A good approximation of share of traded goods in the railroads would be the share of imports+exports in the GDP. Together, exports and imports were not more than 15% of GDP. Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w4710/w4710..., Table 3.

- railroads transported a lot of agricultural products and also passengers, and were hugely profitable from that. I doubt they would recover any cost by transporting porcelain and whatever other goods China exported at the time.

- "But that answer is wrong, as can be shown by examining historical records of the time." - citation needed.

As an economist, I strongly believe this is a strawman argument. Economists have studied cooperation for decades. Methodological individualism that the article mentions is not an assumption that everyone is waging war against each other, and the war against each other does not follow from methodological individualism. Game theory was interested in cooperation, especially across many time periods, for as long as it existed. Avner Greif has done amazing work on the rise of cooperative institutions. These things are a part of standard curriculum for any economics major (although maybe not a 101 class). This is not to say that economics is free of issues, but the claims of the article reveal that the author has no idea about what economists care about and have cared about for decades now.

Agapitov later gave a long interview to Meduza explaining the decision. It's surprisingly honest. Here is an interesting quote:

In America, in recent years, both in our company and in the media, various minorities have been actively protected and people are very cautious about the dismissal of gays, blacks, and more recently, Asians. But in Xsolla, we did not give immunity to these groups, because all decisions that a human makes, from the point of view of Americans, have a risk of being biased, and our algorithmic solution is as unbiased as possible. Therefore, from the point of view of American media and American civil society, for us it is much better and more indisputable than if some manager fired someone.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https:/... (In Russian, Google translated)

A similar tool:

https://github.com/eihli/image-table-ocr

Does the autofill work well? I was considering trying it out, but, unlike 1Password and Lastpass, there are really no reviews of Dropbox Passwords anywhere.

I really like the paper that shows that higher density of associations (the way Putnam measures "social capital") was associated with higher support for the Nazi party in Germany[^1]. Things are not as simple as "trust=good".

[1]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/690949?jou...

POWs and civilians who lived in the occupied lands were often charged with treason and sent to labor camps. Many (but not all) were released in 1953 when Stalin finally died.

If you are using the Russian keyboard, it's the new default (since iOS 11). Before that, you had to long-press the " to get it (along with ˝, „ and all these other marks.

Interestingly, the computer keyboards are stuck with the old layouts. You can't buy a Russian keyboard with the right quotation marks. I am using a custom layout by Ilya Birman [1] that makes a nice remapping with «» available quickly.

[1] https://ilyabirman.ru/projects/typography-layout/

I actually have the opposite take. The use of "X" instead of «X» in Russia started with the typewriters, not the computers. Apple added the correct quotation marks in iOS 11, and you could see how people very quickly switched to using them on social media. The software helped people rediscover the correct symbols and drop the typewriter-era bad habits, all it took was a small software upgrade.