Rick's Blog

"100% of all climate change models have been wrong" Yes, in the same way that 100% of the directions of every airplane is wrong and does not lead exactly toward the proper destination. Flight is a constant adjustment and readjustment to a perfect, hypothetical flight plan from origin to destination which is to say that the actual flight plan is, by definition, a model . The actual flight plan based on that model is always wrong - due to wind, wind speed, weather patterns, the rotation of the earth, etc - which is why constant adjustment is required to reach the destination. Clearly, the general direction of the model is correct, evidenced by the fact that airplanes operated by professional pilots almost never mistakenly land at an improper destination. Likewise, no climate change model is going to be 100% accurate in its predictions, but clearly as every chart of any meaningful data shows, global atmospheric and oceanic temperatures are rising, the rise is caused by an unn...

I calculated this originally as a comment to a friend's Facebook post, but I have come to think it is a good enough explanation of the economic problems in our country that it deserves a wider audience. 80% of the population has roughly 7% of all the wealth 1% of the population has roughly 40% of all the wealth 0.1% of the population has roughly 22% of all the wealth Let's look at that wealth distribution in terms of poker. In the 2015 World Series of Poker Main Event, there were a total of 192,600,000 chips in play to start and 6,420 entrants. If we started the Main Event not with all players having the same 30,000 in chips but rather with a chip distribution matching that of the wealth disparity in the US today, here's what the tournament would look like: 64 of the 6,420 participants - 1% of the field - would have roughly 77,040,000 chips among them, an average of 1,200,000 chips per player 5,136 of the 6,420 participants - 80% of the field - would have rou...