Posted on 08/10/2010 3:32:06 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Garbage In, Money Out
Warren Meyer, 07.23.10, 02:03 PM EDT
How much money are taxpayers willing to bet on computer models?
Wall Street firms, which have made substantial investments based on complex computer models, are rethinking the limits of these models as they have watched a number of their peers sink into bankruptcy. Most experienced CEOs of non-financial firms would not invest $2 based solely on computer models prepared by one of their divisions seeking funding. The seasoned executive has seen too many hockey-stick market forecasts that oversimplify complex market dynamics to be anything but skeptical of such models.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Congress has already spent nearly a trillion dollars using computer models of similarly dubious accuracy. And if the Democrats have their way with cap-and-trade, we may find ourselves spending trillions more based on the same fallacies relative to climate.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
P!
I think we are in for a lot of this kind of mind control. It is an assault on our eschatology. It is an assault on the scientific method. It is the most dangerous tool in the hands of the demagogues like those who we now know, betrayed by their own e-mails, seek to bend the minds of Americans to elect Barack Obama or prove global warming. In the hands of a ruthless operative like a Rahm Emanuel it becomes something terribly powerful and sinister. This is a tool that Goebbels would have cheerfully murdered for. That this is in the hands of these kinds of people is terrifying. As one potential example, consider the census done under this kind of computer modeling, massaging bogus data collected by brownshirts of the administration.
The climate models are used for the opposite effect, to overestimate risk. They contain various parameters to create climate catastrophe since they lack the resolution to model actual climate-controlling weather (meso-scale convection). Another difference from financial models is the global focus of climate models with subsequent poor resolution and performance.
This is why we need Harry Truman's 'one armed economist'.
"We didn't truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market," says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency -- the Commodity Futures Trading Commission [CFTC] -- who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country's key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis. "They were totally opposed to it," Born says. "That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?"
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