If you’re not afraid to use your brain, I recommend watching this documentary (45 minutes) about “quants”, a slang term for quantitative analysts.

Although the documentary covers many subjects, it directly addresses some of the topics I’ve been writing about lately, namely the inability to predict the future using (current) statistical modeling. I am not a mathematician, professional or otherwise. But this film interviews several people who are and they talk about the same damn fallacies (in predicting the future) that I’ve discussed at length.

If nothing else, watch the first five minutes about the price of 1 bottle of beer versus 100 bottles of beer, probably the most concise and understandable description of non-linearity I’ve seen.

Why does any of this matter? Even if it’s confusing and complicated and “unpleasant” to think about, Romania is in the “interesting” position of being the country with the most money borrowed from the IMF. The way things stand now, every last child, woman, peasant farmer, retired person and gypsy would have to cough up 25 million (old) lei just to pay back the principal. God only knows what the final sum will be when all those interest payments are added up.

Let’s put this into human terms. If you borrowed money from me and the only way to repay it would be to literally sell me everything you own, from the clothes on your back to every scrap of furniture, every dish, every paperclip, every crumb of food in your pantry, do you think you’re ever going to have a good life? Do you really think Romania has (more than!) 13 billion euros to repay this loan?? From where?

It’s already established that some of the members of the Romanian government are so stupid that they are writing legislation mandating the standardization and regulation of “summoning demons”. Do you think we should trust them to handle the wide-scale looting of this country in order to service this debt? Really?

Maybe we need to spend more time with the older generation and ask them how much fun it was to stand in lines for food rations. I’ll get back to cat pictures and silly slang words soon enough – in the meantime take a break from gawking at LOLcats and get engaged in what’s happening to this country.