Every time I mow the lawn I think of this

Your choice: Avoid Serious Injury or Death -- but not both!

If you've done even a little computer programming, you should already know what I'm going to tell you about AND and OR. If we're talking about two things, like "serious injury" and "death", and we say "serious injury and death" we mean BOTH of those things. But if we say "serious injury or death", we mean just one of them, one or the other. That's what the words "and" and "or" do.

So when the sticker on your lawn mower says avoid serious injury "or" death, they are saying PICK THE ONE YOU WANT TO AVOID.

If they want you to avoid BOTH serious injury AND death, then they should say "avoid serious injury and death".

Does it matter? Not if you're dead, I guess.

It matters to me, because I want to take something that somebody said and evaluate it. The guy said

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, or buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

Notice the word "or" in that sentence. The word "or" means that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." Of course, if any one of them is a problem, then all three of them together are a problem, sure.

But if the guy specifically meant to say that the combination of all three together is the problem, then he needed to use "and" rather than "or" in that sentence:

"Periods of excessive leverage, rapid credit growth, and buoyant credit market sentiment increase the risk to economic growth."

In this case, the sentence means (or could mean) it's a problem when all three things happen, but not if only one of them happens, or two out of three.

Because the guy used the word "or", I take him to mean that any one of the three things will "increase the risk to economic growth." And I want to argue against that, because it's not always true and the exception is an important one.

But I'm not sure he really meant that any one of the three is a problem, because maybe he used "or" when he should have used "and". It is a common mistake.

But it would sure be a pity if the economy went bad because somebody said "or".

Not yes

From the Private Debt page at Prestige Funds:

Private debt involves the lending activity carried out by entities other than banks. This can include both Peer to Peer lending as well as lending by more specialised entities and companies that focus on particular segments of the economy.

Well, I have to interrupt my train of thought to say debt is not lending: "private debt" is not "lending activity". It is not "borrowing activity" either. Debt is not an activity.

It seems that people with money to lend, who want to avoid going thru banks, now engage in "private lending". And, incidentally, to undermine the arguments of the many people who say excessive 'private' (as opposed to 'public') debt is a big problem for our economy, they have decided to call private lending activity "private debt". They've redefined the term "private debt" in a way that makes all prior concern about private debt irrelevant.

But I don't mean to talk about that here. I'm talking about it elsewhere. My topic here is the second sentence in the Prestige Funds quote, the one that begins "This can include both..." but I figure you might not know what the "this" refers to if I don't say. Especially since they are changing the meanings of words.

Enough of that! Focus with me on part of their second sentence:

This can include both Peer to Peer lending as well as lending by more specialised entities...

Why do people think they have to say both X as well as Y? Where the hell did that come from? If you say "both X and Y" it means both X and Y. Or you could omit the "both" and say X as well as Y. That would also mean both X and Y. Isn't it obvious?

What do they think "both X and Y" means? What do they think "X as well as Y" means? Why do they think they should merge those phrases? Drives me nuts.

What I'm thinkin is, it's like a double-negative. Only it's not negation, it's inclusion, so "both X as well as Y" is a double inclusion. Would that mean exclusion, the way a double negative means not no? I don't really think so, but I'm sure the people who use it have no idea.


Both this as well as that?

No.

What does that mean?

From an abstract, at ScienceAdvances:

Our multilevel, time-lagged regressions also indicate that tolerance for individual rights predicted 20th century economic growth even better than secularization.

What does that mean? Does it mean that tolerance predicted growth "even better than secularization predicted growth" or "even better than tolerance predicted secularization" ?

I could probably go back to the source, read it more carefully, and figure out what they mean. But if the reader has to do that, the writer is not doing his job.

To "other" or not to "other", that is the question

On ABC's This Week (5 May 2019) during the "powerhouse roundtable" somebody said Biden "is polling 20 points higher than any of his other competitors".

Other competitors? Other than who -- himself? But Biden is not one of Biden's competitors, duh.

This works:
"Biden is polling 20 points higher than any of his competitors."
So leave it.

"Write regularly"

Found this image among a page of quotes from Arnold J Toynbee at StoreMyPic.com

And not only history-writing

Mortimer Chambers, in the Introduction to The Fall of Rome: Can It Be Explained?

History-writing is explanation. That alone distinguishes it from the mere collecting of facts, accurately dated and lucidly described, in the form of chronicles. The difference between a "historian" and a "chronicler" -- between, let us say, Thucydides and Livy in ancient historiography -- is commonly attributed to the historian's deeper inquiry into causation, into the progress and change of events, and into the question Why?

I like that. But in Making them up as I go I say: "Don't explain. Just tell a story." It seems a contradiction.

By "Don't explain" I mean "Don't get bogged down in explanation". I could go on...

You know

Tim Duy quotes Fed Chairman Powell:

It’s a major challenge. It’s one of the major challenges of our time, really, to have inflation, you know, downward pressure on inflation let’s say. It gives central banks less room to, you know, to respond to downturns, right. So, if inflation expectations are below two percent, they’re always going to be pulling inflation down, and we’re going to be paddling upstream and trying to, you know, keep inflation at two percent, which gives us some room to cut, you know, when it’s time to cut rates when the economy weakens. And, you know, that’s something that central banks face all over the world, and we certainly face that problem too. It’s one of the, one of the things we’re looking into is part of our strategic monetary policy review this year. The proximity to the zero lower bound calls for more creative thinking about ways we can, you know, uphold the credibility of our inflation target, and you know, we’re openminded about ways we can do that.