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This from Noahpinion

English has no word for “the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors”. Yet it is a well-known phenomenon in the world of punditry, debate, and public affairs. On Twitter, we call it “derp”.

And

Dear Idiot TV Producers,

Please, PLEASE be aware that your damn banner may be covering up the very part of the video that your viewers may want to see!  Like, especially, during tornado season: it’s where the sky hits the ground where the action is:  we’re really not so interested in your commentary as to want to miss seeing what’s going on.

Dear Web Programmers:

When you’re asking your user to enter a lengthy seeries of numers — like a 16-character account number, or a credit card number — why not allow spaces?  You know that the user is reading these long series of numbers with spaces to make it easier to read; and it makes sense for that user to type in the spaces, making it easier to proofread. So why not just strip out the fucking spaces when the user clicks ‘submit’?  It’s only one line of code, for God’s sake!

And you, Lowe’s:  you ask me to leave a compliment on the countertop installation, and require I leave a phone number.  Will you accept something like this (with real numbers):  000-111-9999?  NO!  You cut it off like this: 000-111-99 and rudely tell me I need a valid phone number.  In other words, you can’t handle a hyphen.   IDIOTS!

(Source)

Formula :
Price Elasticity (PED or Ed) = Change in Quantity / Change in Price

Where,
Change in Quantity = ((New Quantity – Original Quantity) / Original Quantity)
Change in Price = ((New Price – Original Price) / Original Price)

Here’s Patrick Burke writing in WaPo:

I also always speak alongside a LGBT athlete,

Good for him, talking about homophobia to sportsters.  But it should be “an LGBT athlete,” since the acronym is never spelled out in speech.

That’s why I prefer the acronym to be re-ordered as “GBLT”:  because it’s also a tasty sandwich.

This is actually a pretty clever riposte to B.H. Obama’s incredulous “Get a drink with Mitch McConnell?  REALLY?”

I thought it quite gratuitous for the President to go out of his way to belittle the minority leader of the Senate.  Not how to win friends and influence people.  McConnell could have railed against the insult; he chose instead a rather clever comeback.  Or his staff did.  This was a twitter foto; does McConnell tweet?  Really?

From Wikipedia:

There are six types of quarks, known as flavors: up, down,strange, charm, bottom, and top.

From which I conclude that quarks are definitely gay.

Well, my rant about Kindle and footnotes turnfs out to have been somewhat incomplete. Brad Plumer of the Washington Post informs me that, at least in the case of the WonkBlog Book Club’s choice, Fear Itself,  there are footnotes that are linked to the text.

Footnotes are active links, yes–which is terrific and extremely handy. Not sure about the index. And yeah, the Kindle table of contents had what appeared to be page numbers, but apparently they were all wrong, which is too bad. Normally everything else is just by location.

Aha!  Paul Krugman has already noted the Advance of the Robots ()

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.

And then eventually Skynet decides to kill us all, but that’s another story

And here:

This is an old concern in economics; it’s “capital-biased technological change”, which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital….

If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality. Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society”, or whatever it is the likes of Paul Ryan etc. are selling this week, won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents. And so on.

I think our eyes have been averted from the capital/labor dimension of inequality, for several reasons. It didn’t seem crucial back in the 1990s, and not enough people (me included!) have looked up to notice that things have changed. It has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism — which shouldn’t be a reason to ignore facts, but too often is. And it has really uncomfortable implications.

But I think we’d better start paying attention to those implications.