Readit NewsNow it seems that the purpose of the focus group, rather than gathering information about consumer response to the snack-cake, is to improve the design of future focus groups. Schmidt, however, informs the reader through glimpses we are given to his thoughts during the session, that the focus groups have no material impact: rather than using the collected data to make inferences about consumer preferences, it is desirable to end with a nebulous analysis which could conclude one outcome or another based on which direction the client company is already planning on moving in: the focus groups can only confirm a decision which has already been made: a deviation on this will result in the termination of the marketing firm.
[1] http://westoncb.blogspot.com/2012/12/interpretation-of-david...
Science provides both a way of calculating what is going on, and also, apparently, explanations (up to the limits of our knowledge) for what happens. To eliminate the notion of time's flow from discussions of physics, would we have to abandon the concept of causality from our explanations?
If the incidents are not the result of "alien activity" perhaps the US Military does have supremely advanced technology under wraps and is demonstrating this technology to ambiguously create the idea that it could be "aliens".
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1710274/000114420419...
It seems this new thing is a mix of UFO hokum and music-related sales. Definitely some financial engineering shenanigans in there.
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What advancements? Both iOS and Android have for a few years reached maturity, not much exciting with each new update. At least not without new hardware, as most updates are to support something physical (notch, fingerprints, face scan etc).
I used to hate my phone not being updated, so switched to a brand of Android that kept them up to date. But lately I don't really mind. Only reason I upgraded to Pie this weekend (after being bugged by the updater for months) was because of a few emojis I couldn't see properly when being sent to me. The update hasn't done anything big. Things are a bit rounder, the clock is now in the wrong corner. Some BLE issues as well, making me regret the update.
and added Night Light to compensate for breaking Twilight/BlueLight etc.
The changes in CPI calculation (continuous consumer basket adjustment, etc.) are well documented, well known in econometrics, and is considered a sane thing. (After all you can't really equivocate a TV from the 50s and a TV now.)
And while it's always possible to make better adjustments, shadowstats does not argue for this, it just argues against a strawman conspiracy.
https://moneymaven.io/economonitor/emerging-markets/deconstr...
"For example, a can of tomato sauce that cost $.25 at Piggly Wiggly in 1982 cost $.79 at my local market in early 2015. Starting from the 1982 price, the CPI predicts that it should cost $.61 in 2015 while ShadowStats predicts that it should cost $2.64. Starting from the 2015 price and working backwards, the CPI predicts that it should have cost $.32 in 1982 while ShadowStats predicts that is should have cost $.08. Based on these calculations, we see that the CPI underestimates inflation, as measured by the Tomato Sauce Index: The ratio of the 2015 predicted price of $.61 to the 2015 actual price, $.79, is .77, an underestimate of 23 percent. The ratio of the ShadowStats prediction to the actual price is 3.32, an overstatement of 223 percent. For tuna, both indexes overestimate inflation, the CPI by 34 percent and ShadowStats by 478 percent, and so on."
also: http://blog.jparsons.net/2011/03/shadow-stats-debunked-part-...
And to address the "they miss it part". Well, probably most people don't buy stocks, and most people don't buy private equity limited partnership chunks, so ... CPI-U does not measure "asset bubbles".