cluelessresearch.com

Gelman linked to a post by Krugman on the red state blue state research. I followed the link to find this pearl in the comments to Krugman’s post:

Maybe more people reside in the lower third of income than in 68-72, taking in for inflation and stagnant wages.

— Posted by rpo choice li

I spent a week with the wife and el kiddo visiting my folks. Very nice overall, wonderful warm weather and plenty to do. It was also an eventful week in Brazil: the Panamerican games were/are going on in Rio (not that anyone in US would know, it is barely a blip in the American Press), the longtime political boss of Bahia died, and a plane crashed in São Paulo killing about 200+ people.

Busy week indeed On my way back South I had the "privilege" of experiencing some of the so called "chaos" that has been plaguing air travel in Brazil for at least a year. Ostensibly the latter increase in the difficulties originated from the crash mentioned above. The plane couldn’t stop and some wonder if the recently reopened runway is at fault. The investigations are going to take a while, but we  know beforehand that the runway alone cannot possibly be the single cause, given the dozens of take-offs and landings throughout the day up to minutes or seconds before the crash! The blame has to be at least partly with the plane and/or pilot.

Anyway, I had a connection flight in Guarulhos (the other major airport in São Paulo) and the next flight was delayed. After pointing the passengers to wait in the wrong gate, twice!, we finally boarded with a 6 hour delay. The cause for the delay was never explained to us on the ground. What was picturesque and somewhat disturbing was what served as apologies from the pilot once we took off. He didn’t blame the weather, or the fact that the other airport was closed, or just "I don’t know". You see, for him the problem was higher up and his company had nothing to do with it. The "chief", that is the President of Brazil was the culprit!!! He even accused the government of being corrupt.

I am all for freedom of expression, but in this case I found myself very unnerved. First, the company obviously didn’t do a good job even considering the conditions. For example, our baggage didn’t come with us in the plane. In fact, I only received it today, four days later. This can’t possibly be Lula’s fault. In addition, a company whose owner is all over the news because of  extremely shady negotiations with a senator and ex-governor of the federal district involving a 3 million reais check cannot possibly  point out corruption from others with a straight face. Finally, how is one supposed to respond to the pilot? His position of authority on air makes it very hard and even unwise to attempt any answer.

Thanks for the very pleasing (for me) week, I didn’t get stressed  over the whole thing. (nor did all but a couple of the passengers) I am back, it is cold, and I already miss Salvador… 

So, I am using my macbook and suddenly it becomes really hot, and the fan starts at full speed. Perhaps I am encoding some music or video? Or am I doing some fancy statistical analysis?

Not really. It is Stata waiting for me to press a key! WTF!! It’s been like so for as many versions as I remember.

Two times already I’ve emailed Stata support to complain about character encoding issues in Stata. In a nutshell, the problem is that if a dataset has diacriticals and was created it in a windows machine the characters will be mangled up in a mac, and vice versa. I assume there are similar problems in linux. This post is fairly long, keep reading if you have similar problems.

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This year, Brazilian democracy celebrates its 20th anniversary. Meanwhile, the country faces its most severe political crisis in years. What better way to say farewell to teenage years than with an overwhelming personality crisis? That is exactly what Brazilian democracy is going through now. As an insecure ex-teen, caught short-handed after doing something really, really stupid, Brazilian democracy attempts to affirm its maturity amidst insecurities and hesitations.

Certainly, tracing parallels between personality traits and political regimes is quite tricky. We do not want render ourselves to archaic ideas of national character. Instead, regimes are formed by a plethora of institutions, ideas and interests. Variation in behaviors, creeds and expectations is the soul of democracy. Still, the analogy between regimes and personality traits is useful because it allows us to highlight two aspects of the current crisis that have not been sufficiently stressed.

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Daslu, a luxury department store for the Brazilian wealthy in São Paulo was raided by the Brazilian Federal Police and Tax agents yesterday (story at Bloomberg . One of the owners was arrested by the police, but was out after 10 hours or so. (For a background on Daslu, see this Christian Science Monitor piece )

What annoys me in the story, is the response of the FIESP (Industry Federation of São Paulo):

‘A prisão antecipada, sem sentença, seja qual for sua natureza, só pode ter lugar para os infratores perigosos que ameaçam a ordem pública, que causam prejuízos irreparáveis à sociedade e à própria segurança dos processos judiciais’

(translation: The anticipated arrest, without sentence, whichever its nature, only can have place for the dangerous infractors that threaten the public order, that causes irreparable damages to the society and the proper security of the judicial processes.)

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