prior probability

Why throw away a perfectly good Christmas tree when you can “repurpose” it for the NFL playoffs season? Thanks to Adys Ann who helped me decorate the tree. (We began this tradition in 2016.)

Happy Extended Holidays!

That is the title of this excellent essay by Josh Barro, via New York Magazine. Here is the opening paragraph:

In 2016, Marriott Hotels, which had 19 hotel brands, merged with Starwood, which had 11. They didn’t abolish any brands in the merger, and so the company faced a challenge: How to explain to customers, or even to its own employees, what makes all 30 of these brands different from each other. So shortly after the merger, the company produced this cutesy matrix:

Say what? Is the apparent anomaly in this recent NPR/PBS poll (see screenshot below) evidence of a historic electoral paradigm shift or just evidence of too small a sample?

Hat tip: Tyler Cowen

Check out this fascinating report by Michael P. Regan (hat tip: Drudge) about the Jamaica Stock Exchange (JSE), the world’s best-performing stock market. Here is an excerpt: “Jamaican stocks have surged almost 300 percent [over the past five years], more than quadrupling the next-best-performing national benchmark and septupling the S&P 500’s advance…. What explains these gains? A Caribbean economic miracle the world has overlooked? Not exactly: Real growth in Jamaica has averaged less than 1 percent the past four years, and it’s expected to come in at 1.7 percent for 2018. The bull market is partly a matter of math. It doesn’t take much investment to make a tiny market boom, and the total value of the 37 stocks in the main Jamaica index is less than $11 billion, smaller than the valuation of Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. But it’s also a story about Kingston’s nascent attempts to reinvent itself as a financial hub, even as it works to reduce the heavy debt load that brought the country to the brink of crisis a decade ago.”

Source: Bloomberg|Quint