Economic Rigor

And once again, the arrogance of the NRL player is in full effect. This time it is Valentine Holmes stepping up to the plate to shank it. Been looking at his pre-season stats and again, he isn't even as good as Hayne. Lets look at the stats So these are the two pre-seasons head to head. For Valentine Holmes (who is supposed to be a RB) to have 11 carries for 9 yards is rubbish. And remember, this is against the part-time defense. Even Hayne did better than that to at least average 7 yards a carry. When it comes to receiving, it is a better story. To average 10.6 is respectable, but still poorer than Hayne. But he isn't there as a receiver. And this brings me back to my original point. For an NRL player to try and break it into the NFL as a positional player (i.e not a punter) is a fool errand. It is a highly technical game that requires years of experience to master. If you want to do it properly, you need to do your apprenticeship in the college system, not just...

Wow, what a game. Ben Stokes is the man. Shows he is England's most valuable player at the moment. Been looking at the stats as always, and Stokes, after an average First TEST (a Z-score of basically 0...the average player), has outperformed in TEST 2 (Z-Score of 2.78) and this TEST (Z-Score of 2.62) For Australia, Labuschagne has been a good addition to the team (Z-Score 2.89) and Warner finally had a good game (z-score 0.62) after a couple of shockers. In the bowling stakes, again, Archer is proving to be a handful. In two tests, he has had Z-Scores of 1.1 (in the 2nd Test), and 1.95 (in this one). Already 13 wickets for the series... Bowling for Australia...Hazlewood (z-scores of 0.11, 1.35) is certainly a better option than Siddle (z-scores of 0.26, 0.09). Siddle will always give you an average performance, but he doesn't have the capability to out perform. Cummins (z-scores of 1.99, 1.44, -0.09) had his first average game after blowing England away in the first 2...

Well there you go. I sort of picked the fact that the polls could have been deceptive. Should have put some money on it! :-) Anyway, lets see how we did. Averaging the last set of 9 polls, we get the following primary votes Coalition : 38.05 Labor : 35.38 Greens : 9.81 ON : 4.65 UAP : 4.41 Others : 7.70 Now the election result looks like the following Coalition : 41.38 (3.33% difference from poll) Labor : 33.88 (1.5% difference) Greens : 10.05 (0.24% difference) ON : 2.99 (1.66% difference) UAP : 3.36 (1.05% difference) Others : 8.34 (0.64% difference) So all up, not too bad. With the exception of the primary votes for Co-alition, the other results are within 1.66% But missing the Coalition vote by 3% is huge and really was the difference in the 2PP result

Election is due next Saturday. Be interesting to see what will happen. Labor definitely in the box seat, but a path does exists for ScoMo and his merry Coalition nutters to come from behind and take the biscuits. Based on the average of the latest 7 polls over the last two weeks, we can have a go at predicting what the primary votes will be Looks like Liberals/Nationals: 38.1% Labor: 35.4% Greens: 10.4% UAP: 6.2% One Nation: 5% Other : 4.9% Based on preference flows from last election (Greens giving 83% to Labor. ON giving 47%, and UAP giving 48%, Other giving 50%) translates to a TPP to Labor of  52/48 which will be enough for a Labor victory. However, there are a few rogue elements in the mix. Firstly, UAP has a formal preference deal with the Liberals (which they didn't have before). Should hopefully mean more preference flow to Coalition so hopefully less of the UAP vote will go to the coalition. Also UAP is contesting all 151 seats in the lower house. And the ...

Bill Shorten, future Labor PM it appears, released a new policy last night regarding Cancer treatment in Australia. He is proposing paying for Out of Pocket expenses via Medicare for Cancer treatment. Costed at 2.3 Billion Dollars over 4 years. Now that seems a little low for me. Most people report paying around $7000 a year in out of pocket expenses for Cancer treatment. So the first thing to work out is how many people are living with cancer in the Community. To find that out, we need the following info 1. A starting point (i.e a year where we know how many people there are with cancer) 2. Growth in New Cancer rates 3. Growth in Cancer Deaths 4. Obtain a rough estimate of how many cancers go into remission a year. Then we can answer our algorithm of Cancer people (Year N) = Cancer People (Year N-1) + New Cancers - Cancer Deaths - Cancer remissions In regards to Point 1 - Cancer Council stated that in 2012 there were 421124 people who had cancer. So we have a starting p...

Started reading Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature", which is a bit of a monster. Claims that violence of all kinds has actually been decreasing. This includes all violence including sexual assault and rape. Now, this is an interesting premise, as from how the feminists speak, you would think that there is an epidemic of sexual violence currently underway in the western world. And even some crime statistics seem to indicate sexual crimes are actually increasing. So I figured, I would go to the stats and see what is happening in Australia. So the earliest ABS record I can find about experiences of sexual violence would be "Women's safety survey 1996". The other relevant release is the "Personal safety survey, 2016" which has replaced it. So they are our two bookends to determine if sexual violence has increased. First, in 1996, from the women's safety survey, the amount of women who have experienced sexual violence...