Most of the people around here are familiar with the Revelation of the Cocktail Napkin of Laffer™ – the perverse idea that leads one to conclude that as tax rates approach zero, tax revenues approach infinity. That is holy writ for the Supply-Siders.

The Austerians in many areas have an equivalent in the Reinhart-Rogoff research paper on the effect of public debt. At the Next New Deal Mike Konczal writes that Researchers Finally Replicated Reinhart-Rogoff, and There Are Serious Problems.

Reinhart and Rogoff didn’t release their data set with their paper, so it has taken a while to replicate what they did to show negative economic growth when governments have a debt at 90% or above of the GDP.

Essentially what the researchers found is that the only way of reproducing the results of the Reinhart-Rogoff paper is with a range error in an Excel spreadsheet formula. Here’s the thing that gets me – it isn’t a large range, and you should have been able to estimate the answer if you had any decent math skills. Given that the answer that Reinhart-Rogoff got on their spreadsheet was near zero, it should have been obvious that something was wrong, but they published anyway.

People talk about universities as ‘ivory towers.’ If you have ever been a faculty member, especially at a research university, you know they are made of a collection of thick defensive keeps to protect the current ‘lord’. and frequent attacks on the keeps of other faculty members to wrest away their resources. The only thing that will unite a group in the same field is an attack on another ‘kingdom’ for research grants.

Reinhart and Rogoff should have known better, but there will be punishments meted out. As a group, academics do not forgive or forget, and they publish to ensure that no one else does.

Charlie Pierce lives and works in Boston, so it was natural for him to begin early to report on the bombing. In his first post he told people not to jump to conclusions because ‘nobody knows anything yet.’

Apparently his caution was too much for some people and a Blight attack has occurred.

Now he did mention Timothy McVeigh as an example of someone other than their “preferred Muslim terrorists” as a type of person who would do something like this, so that possibly set off the rabid horde.

A safer path would have been to use al Qaeda of Cambridge, Friends of Hamas, the Newer Black Panthers, or ACORN, rather than a convicted terrorist bomber. [Please note that ACORN, which no longer exists, is the only real group in that list. The others are made up. It’s called sarcasm, OK?]

Fortunately officials have stepped in to save Abdulrahman Ali Alharbi from becoming the Richard Jewell of this event. Which reminds me that Eric Rudolph would have been a closer match for the Boston Marathon than McVeigh.

The BBC is reporting that there is an ongoing botnet attack on WordPress sites targeting those who have never bothered to change the administrator’s name from the original ‘admin’.

They use ‘admin’ and then run through possible passwords.

People should have changed out ‘admin’ just after installing the system. It isn’t a simple edit. You have to create a new user, give the user administrator privileges, and then delete the ‘admin’ user. Since no two users can have the same e-mail address, you have to do some messing around, but you really should change it and use a strong password. If you are paying your own hosting fees, you don’t want to get stuck with big usage fees from this type of annoyance.