Worth the read. The quote from Dr. Alchian, as he relates the story of his 1954 paper, is priceless:
"We knew they were developing this H-bomb, but we wanted to know, what's in it? What's the fissile material? Well there's thorium, thallium, beryllium, and something else, and we asked Herman Kahn and he said, ‘Can't tell you’… I said, ‘I'll find out’, so I went down to the RAND library and had them get for me the US Government's Dept. of Commerce Yearbook which has items on every industry by product, so I went through and looked up thorium, who makes it, looked up beryllium, who makes it, looked them all up, took me about 10 minutes to do it, and got them. There were about five companies, five of these things, and then I called Dean Witter… they had the names of the companies also making these things, ‘Look up for me the price of these companies…’ and here were these four or five stocks going like this, and then about, I think it was September, this was now around October, one of them started to go like that, from $2 to around $10, the rest were going like this, so I thought ‘Well, that's interesting’… I wrote it up and distributed it around the social science group the next day. I got a phone call from the head of RAND calling me in, nice guy, knew him well, he said ‘Armen, we've got to suppress this’… I said ‘Yes, sir’, and I took it and put it away, and that was the first event study. Anyway, it made my reputation among a lot of the engineers at RAND."
This is from the early days of modern operational security. This would be far more difficult today. If only the bomb makers had talked to the ketchup people at Heinz. Rumor has it that Heinz regularly purchases extra ingredients, disposing of the extra bits on site, so that nobody can infer their secret recipes by counting what goes into the factory. Given the security budget for protecting nukes, it should have been simple to double-order both lithium and thorium.
No. If your magic superweapon needs a small amount of red fairy dust and there is only one person making the red dust, it is a good idea to also buy some blue dust to conceal which type is the necessary ingredient. Nobody depresses any stock price, rather you give some false business to another source too.
Cold War business idea, half a century too late: manufacture a cheap, unremarkable substance and sell it at an extremely high price to the U.S. government, to confuse Soviet intelligence. Shroud the production in secrecy and compartmentalize knowledge of the manufacturing process, so that everybody involved in production thinks that in a different section of the plant something secret is being done to create an end product that is special and useful in some way, but in reality you're creating exactly the cheap, boring stuff you say you are. The government could drive truckloads of it into nuclear weapons production facilities, shuffle it around from one warehouse to another, and eventually relabel it as waste.
This certainly looks like good practice to me, but it could be undone by insider trading, which could ignore the blue dust supply chain. The article flirts with the possibility of there having been insider trading here, but does not seem to come to any definite conclusions. Given the weaker reporting rules of those days, it may be impossible to say.
I've always felt the F-35 would be the perfect program is hide away a few extra black projects. Obviously their is a known black budget but let's be honest, that's not everything.
This reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon”. One of the themes, and I have no idea if it really happened, is that mathematicians worked with the Allied armed forces to bury the signals of their future actions. They end up doing things like launching fake paratrooper landings in Norway to cover the signs of the impending D-Day attack - all mathematically calculated to generate maximum entropy.
My second thought : I’m a little surprised that the use of lithium in nuclear weapons represented enough of an increase in the total demand to boost the stock price that much.
At that time lithium could have been rarely used and expensive to mine. Although right now lithium I has high demand so it could have gone under the radar due to volume of transactions.
So, from the Wikipedia entry, it seems that the use of lithium in nuclear weapon engineering was indeed a volume driver - in part, because only specific isotopes are used, meaning that lots and lots of lithium had to be mined and then separated, to deliver the needed isotopes (primarily lithium-6 and lithium-7). However, it seems that a lot of the demand comes from the fact that lithium-6 can be irradiated to generate tritium, which is used a a “booster” - do indeed the use in lithium deuteride might be a red herring.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium
Oof. If only the data actually looked like that. They quietly ended the placebo group during Christmas break after 2.5 months (about 2 years earlier than planned)! We will never know the true medium term efficacy of the vaccine, nevermind the long term. That made me so sad, and an indefensible decision IMO.
Luckily I think there's enough people who acquired immunity the hard way to save us.
First, thanks for digging up the source chart. You are right that the source matches the essence of the xckd chart. Very helpful and a pretty interesting and well made chart. I was loving these FDA reports and was so bummed when they ended the placebo group early.
"Always try to get data that's good enough that you don't need to do statistics on it."
Don't need to do statistics on that to see that xkcd added strong bias.
But more important than that, the problem is the right arrow on the X-Axis implies the placebo experiment is ongoing and did not come to an abrupt end.
You're saying we should have kept giving placebos to a bunch of people after the trial has calculated 90%+ protection for a widespread infectious disease? Would any review board actually clear such a study?
~30,000 volunteers with just a placebo against a disease with a >99% survival rate vs having NO CONTROL GROUP for a new class of vaccines that we inject in over 1,000,000,000 people. We have diseases with fatality rates of 50% that we still keep placebo groups for. This was not a hard decision.
We had a very clear scientific way to judge the long term efficacy of the vaccines but they dropped it. It was not to save lives—the math doesn't add up—it was because they made the sale and didn't want to "sell past the close".
Lets just presume you somehow sell that idea to the review board. How do you actually recruit for such a study? Who are these people that are willing to enter a lottery to receive the vaccine or placebo and won't just pop on over to the vaccination center and just get the vaccine for sure?
I don't get it. If there's a blanket of total secrecy, then why does the company who makes the secret fuel have its stock price boosted so much? Obviously the information already leaked - to the people buying the stock! - before the increase of the stock price caused further attention.
This is the subject of the paper. People were clearly "insider trading" although probably they didn't have to leak much information just "based on defense purchasing I think it would be a good idea for you to buy stock xxx".
"We knew they were developing this H-bomb, but we wanted to know, what's in it? What's the fissile material? Well there's thorium, thallium, beryllium, and something else, and we asked Herman Kahn and he said, ‘Can't tell you’… I said, ‘I'll find out’, so I went down to the RAND library and had them get for me the US Government's Dept. of Commerce Yearbook which has items on every industry by product, so I went through and looked up thorium, who makes it, looked up beryllium, who makes it, looked them all up, took me about 10 minutes to do it, and got them. There were about five companies, five of these things, and then I called Dean Witter… they had the names of the companies also making these things, ‘Look up for me the price of these companies…’ and here were these four or five stocks going like this, and then about, I think it was September, this was now around October, one of them started to go like that, from $2 to around $10, the rest were going like this, so I thought ‘Well, that's interesting’… I wrote it up and distributed it around the social science group the next day. I got a phone call from the head of RAND calling me in, nice guy, knew him well, he said ‘Armen, we've got to suppress this’… I said ‘Yes, sir’, and I took it and put it away, and that was the first event study. Anyway, it made my reputation among a lot of the engineers at RAND."