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Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
Category: Bad Economics
Against my better judgement, I've ended up writing a lot about the financial mess that we're currently going through. If you've read that, you know that my opinion is that the mess amounts to a giant pile of fraud....
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:21 PM • 171 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
I'm glad to report that electricity has been restored to the Chu-Carroll household. So now I'm trying to catch up. During the outage, I got a bunch of questions about the latest news coming out of the big financial...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:16 PM • 22 Comments •
Category: bad math
An alert reader just sent me, via "Media Matters", the single dumbest real-life video clip that I have ever seen. In case you've been living under a rock, Bill O'Reilly is a conservative radio and TV talk-show host. He's...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:27 PM • 70 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
This morning, my good friend Orac sent me a link to an interesting piece of bad math. Orac is the guy who really motivated me to start blogging; I jokingly call him my blogfather. He's also a really smart...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 12:51 PM • 38 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
Remember the post I made a couple of weeks ago, flaming the wall-street idiots for a bad graph? They were comparing the value of financial firms before and after the current mess. But they way that they drew it...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:46 AM • 44 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
It's economics time again. I hate economics. I find it hopelessly dull. But apparently my style of explaining it is really helpful to people, so they keep sending me questions; and as usual, I do my best to try...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:53 PM • 22 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
A lot of people, reading the reporting on the current financial disaster, have been writing me to ask what people mean when they talk about incentives. The traders, the bankers, the fund managers, and all of the other folks...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:36 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
Watching news reports about President Obama's proposed tax changes, I've seen a number of variations on a very annoying theme, which involves a very stupid math error. A typical example is this story on ABC news, which contains a...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:42 AM • 63 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
I wasn't going to write about this, because I really don't have much to add. But people keep mailing it to me, so in order to shut you all up, I'll chip in. As everyone knows by now, we're...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:10 PM • 50 Comments •
Category: Bad Economics
I'm behind the curve a bit here, but I've seen and heard a bunch of people making really sleazy arguments about the current financial stimulus package working its way through congress, and those arguments are a perfect example of...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:45 AM • 19 Comments •
