Paris Werewolves

Our spirit guide through Vienna's Zentralfriedhof cemetery. Wiener Zentralfriedhof is pretty new by the standards of European burial places. Established in 1863 to accommodate the future needs of Vienna's growing population, the cemetery immediately took flak from conservative religious quarters for interring Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, and Jews on the same grounds (in separate sections, of course). Because the new friedhof was planned with space to expand in mind, it was also located pretty far from town--about half an hour today by tram. This was still a bit à province for fashionable, sophisticated Viennese to contemplate depositing their mortal remains. After all, unlike in the US, in Europe, you don't buy a burial plot. You rent it and hope that your family continues to pay for its care and upkeep in perpetuity. The last thing you want is some distant, as-yet-unborn cousin to slack off for the sake of inconvenience. To sweeten the pot, friedhof p

Kapuzinergruft , Vienna Vienna is the most beautiful, elegant, sophisticated place for contemplating what awaits beyond the veil of death and in the darkest corners of our nightmares. Amidst the baroque architecture, string quartets and bustling coffee houses serving schnitzels and tortes to tourists and locals alike, you will find more skulls, trolls, and demons per square kilometer than any other place I've ever been.   Anti-war and Anti-fascism monument, Vienna In some respects, this makes perfect sense. The Habsburg Empire, in its many iterations from roughly the 11th century until the end of WWI, encompassed huge swaths of Balkan, Carpathian, and Transylvanian eastern Europe. They likely absorbed the folklore of these lands, which was rife with fantastic beasts and horrific, undead revenants, as subjects and treasure were funneled back towards the seat of imperial rule in Austria. Still, that's not much of an explanation. Monstrous creatures are part of folklore around the

Chevreuse, à province My latest favorite French expression is à province , which generally denotes everywhere in France that is not Paris. Example: "Habite-il à province?" (Does he live outside of the capital?) "Oui, à Marseille." (Yes, in Marseille) To say " à province" is like referring to rural areas in the US as the boonies or the sticks. Except that in France, it basically applies to the entire country, with the exception of 0.019% of France's European territory (105 km2 out of 543,940) where about 3% of its population lives.  For a factual statement (a person or thing is or is not in the capital), it therefore packs an impressive and revealing degree of snobbery. No place else is in the world can capture the imagination or simultaneously embody so many different things--fashion, culture, gastronomie, industrial innovation, royal excess, revolutionary zeal, intellectual courage, imperial overreach, faded grandeur--as Paris. But why rub it in? 35

Excel charts make for an ugly blog. So why not a gratuitous photo of Sugar in front of a mid-1960s Facel-Vega III? IEM VS: IEM vote share contracts; WAF VS: Werewolves Adjustment Factor applied to IEM VS At the end of September 2024, IEM voter share contracts averaged $0.56 for the Democratic presidential candidate (Harris), and $0.47 for the Republican presidential candidate. By applying the Werewolves Adjustment Factor (WAF) to account for traders' historic over- and under-valuations of Democratic and Republic vote shares, at the end of September 2024, a good guess might be 53% of the votes for Harris and 48% for Trump (which adds up to more than 100% of the vote share--but hey, the smart money had spoken, if not amongst themselves). Maxim Lott and John Stossel's Election Betting Odds  site tracks presidential bets made on commercial gambling sites. On September 30, their method gave Harris a 52% chance of winning. In the case of both Lott-Stossel and WAF VS, there's ab

The Excel chart image from the previous post on political forecasting left the webpage ugly. Let's pretty it up again with a vintage Aston Martin, done up mildly for bridal photos.

Note: red sparkline bars indicate aggregate losses on IEM vote share contracts by month. Blue sparkline bars indicate aggregate gains.  Since my last post  about the discreet charms of gambling on election outcomes, I was kindly directed by IEM to its historical vote share contract prices for the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. The table above shows that with these additional data, traders had still tended to overvalue Democratic candidates from August through October, while undervaluing Republican candidates. The extreme overvaluations of Hilary Clinton in 2016 still exert an influence, but it is much less pronounced. Excluding 2016 prices, Democratic candidates would still be overvalued in each month, but never by as much as 2%. Republican candidates would not be undervalued at all, except in August by about 3%.  Hence from a gambling perspective, the IEM market appears reasonably accurate to the extent that there are not many information gaps left to exploit. Let me reiterate