Fake Doctors Are Good for Patients

That is the paradoxical conclusion of an economic model built by Berk et al.:

We model a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the standards and disclosure requirements that exist in these markets. We show that reducing the number of charlatans through regulation decreases consumer surplus. Although both standards and disclosure drive charlatans out of the market, consumers are worse off because of the resulting reduction in competition amongst producers. Producers, on the other hand, strictly benefit from the regulation, implying that the regulation we observe in these markets likely derives from producer interests.

Vice News Embeds a Sexy Girl

Vice News's report on the Charlottesville Rally.

This frivolous Old Jew's first reaction: that female reporter is very sexy.

The second reaction: These are Nazis. Quote Netaniyahu: "This is not a small thing".

I have no dog in this fight, yet for this Jew there is no choice, my side is "Black Lives". 

The meaning of the sacking of the Chief Security Adviser Bannon

Palestinian chief Abu Mazen met yesterday with Israeli Meretz party leaders to coordinate strategy. He said that he had met the American administration twenty times and has no idea what they want to do.

Israeli security expert Shiftan said that they tried to establish contact with the American Government advisers but found that the Administration is not yet in place, many positions are yet to be filled, so they have to wait till the Americans pull themselves together.

Der Spiegel writes incendiary articles against Trump, it says he is a danger to the world. The Germans cannot reconciliate themselves with American power.

The One Percent

Xenophon tells the story of the Conspiracy of Kinadon in Sparta at the peak of its power.  Kinadon was a brilliant military leader, a highly positioned citizen of the Spartan State. The ruling elite, the Spartiates, were called homoioi (the Equals). An Equal could lose his privileged status through cowardice in battle or by poverty, for example, the loss of his plot and the consequent inability to pay his dues to the syssitia,and would join the "Inferiors" (hypomeiones).

In one public meeting, Kinadon counted the number of Spartiates and they were found to be forty among the four thousand. "The privileged One Percent! They are our enemies!" he said. Apparently, two thousand five hundred years ago the Greeks had the same problem of the 1%. Kinadon's motive for the conspiracy was, as he stated in the course of his trial, "to be a Lacedaemonian inferior to no one". There was no currency in Sparta, the Spartiates's food was disgusting - pork boiled in its blood and vinegar -, they spent their lives in dangerous military missions, so the privilege of the 1% was not economic but social.

Shlomit Malka Improving (She fell off her electric scooter)

Tel Aviv is dangerous. 

People (and Israeli judges) hate ambiguity

One of the big issues that exercises everyone is leakage. Ofwat looked at this dispassionately, as you might expect. The thing is that it costs pretty much the same to fix a leak whether it’s a pinhole or a major mains burst; so we evolved a measure called the “economic level of leakage” (ELL). This was the level of leakage where it was actually cheaper to bring a new water source into supply to compensate for leakage losses than it is to actually go out and track down and repair every leak. We commissioned some research into public perceptions on this matter, and it taught me something important about public opinions. We (well, the consultants we got to do this for us) put together a focus group and asked them “Should all leaks be fixed, irrespective of cost or size of leak?” and then looked at how many people agreed with that. They were then briefed about the ELL measure, with worked examples to explain the concept in terms that anyone could understand. The focus groups were even asked if they understood what they’d been told, and nearly everyone said “Yes”. And then they were asked the original question again – should all leaks be fixed regardless? And despite everything that had been done to explain it, almost exactly the same number of people as before said “Yes”. People prefer their firmly-held beliefs to clear and incontrovertible facts.

 by Robert Day.

Volatility is No Risk

It is very common to equate the volatility (sigma) of a share with its riskiness. Quote from Investopedia:

Volatility is a statistical measure of the dispersion of returns for a given security or market index. Volatility can either be measured by using the standard deviation or variance between returns from that same security or market index. Commonly, the higher the volatility, the riskier the security.

What does it mean "commonly"? As for me, volatility is risky only for the investor that is forced to cash its share at a certain date. If the investor is free to wait out the low cycle (the price tends to regress to the mean, doesn't everything?) and he has patience - sigma is no risk at all.