🧆The🧆best🧆Muppet🧆dialogue🧆ever🧆

Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe. A 🧵.

[9/9] Looking forward to seeing what we can do with this new gadget. Around the world, does link concentration differ at different levels of economic development? How does increased link concentration affect other economic indicators? Is it something regulators should track?

[8/9] It's not often that you have a more-or-less law of nature with a well-defined, measurable parameter. Here's my paper going into great detail on this simple point:

[7/9] Same with real estate and equipment rental: the density of such entities with thousands of children rose a year into the pandemic: by link count, which in real estate is associated with property count, more megacorp real estate owners.

[6/9] Yes, the business network follows a power law; γ is well-defined. We have a measure of the concentration of capital flows in an economy! E.g., post-pandemic, γ fell for the health care industry: consolidation across the board, in which conglomerates with many subs got more.

[5/9] For the Swedish sexual network, for men, γ=2.31; for women, γ=2.54; so density-wise there are more men with a great many sexual partners than women with a great many. [citation doi: 10.1038/35082140]

[4/9] A power law distribution has one parameter, call it γ, that indicates how much the links are concentrated toward the well-connected, where lower=more concentrated.

[3/9] You may know that many networks, like Internet links, marine food chains, corporate boards, follow a "power law distribution", where there are some hyper-linked hubs and a long tail of nodes with few links. It's so common people sometimes call it a law of nature.

[2/9] E.g., 60.7% of the entities are all connected to each other by some chain of owner/sub links, the longest such chain being 46 steps long. A few thousand cases where A passes all income to B, but B passes all income to A, or longer self-ownership cycles.

[1/9, but lots of interesting info, plus a new paper alert] A typical "corporation" isn't really a single entity, but a collection of independent business entities. There are 2 million entities in the USA, forming a network of owners/subs. It's a wild network. #EconTwitter

The #1 thing I got out of a few weeks in Japan: how much everything changes when street parking isn't a thing.

In the 1700s, the British imposed their religious rituals and beliefs on their American subjects—but no more! Today, on Independence Day, we celebrate freedom from the Imperial system!

If you didn't read our article about the origins of agent-based modeling because of the paywall, let's see if this link works:

I love it when nerds get their due. Here's a piece about the person who designed and ran the first agent-based model---with a checkerboard, in his dissertation about his time in Japanese-American internment camps. https://t.co/g32gUlyJSO #selfpromotion

You know how Mastodon accounts are really ActivityPub nodes, which can interact with any other ActivityPub node? Same for WordPress sites:

I'm increasingly exhausted by news efforts to imply financial or macro disaster. Here's a grim looking plot from the NYT showing the market tanking. But check the timestamps: the S&P is back to its level mid-morning yesterday, about where it was on the 9th, pre-SBV's collapse.

Complete this work that I began with hope.

Havana Syndrome is back in the news. The leading theory is that it's caused by the bite of a certain lizard: the Havana gila. https://t.co/odXhj241oN

One of the pitches for BTC is that it has low correlation with traditional investments, but here's BTC versus TQQQ, an ETF whose daily return is 3x the NASDAQ return. In the last year, they've tracked closely. BTC isn't a hedge for your stock portfolio, it's tripling down.

Imagine applying the Blurred Lines copyright infringement standard to whether GPT3 or Stable Diffusion infringe the copyrights of their training data.