Friday, August 29, 2014

8/29/14 Today's Inquiries

I won't be posting any links over the long weekend. Enjoy your labor day.


The Links:

CO2 production is going up because the world is building more power plants than the west is shutting down. We're going to burn every bit of coal, oil, and gas before we ever get serious about renewables.

The WHO warns that Ebola cases could go parabolic unless more coordinated approaches are taken.

Science Magazine notes the heavy toll Ebola has taken on front line researchers.

So, rates of Autism aren't going up. In fact, they're pretty much flat. Who knew? (Links to .pdf of the study)
In 2010 there were an estimated 52 million cases of ASDs, equating to a prevalence of 7.6 per 1000 or one in 132 persons. After accounting for methodological variations, there was no clear evidence of a change in prevalence for autistic disorder or other ASDs between 1990 and 2010. Worldwide, there was little regional variation in the prevalence of ASDs. Globally, autistic disorders accounted for more than 58 DALYs per 100 000 population and other ASDs accounted for 53 DALYs per 100000 
Elizabeth Warren finally gets pinned down by reporters and has to answer some questions about foreign policy. Unfortunately they aren't the answers I like.
"I think the vote was right, and I'll tell you why I think the vote was right," she said. "America has a very special relationship with Israel. Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren't many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law. And we very much need an ally in that part of the world."
Pennsylvania is going to accept the government's Medicaid expansion starting next January. Interestingly, they are going to use the funds to straight out buy insurance plans from private companies.

Rhode Island's state pension fund, as I've mentioned here several times, shifted their money into Wall St. private equity firms. They've "lost" more than $300 million though underperformance so far. Have fun covering all those retirees.

The same thing is going on in New Jersey, as I noted yesterday. Chris Christie lied about it on live TV. So that's cool. How many other states are in this same predicament?

As if you're not feeling bad enough about retirement, Bloomberg points out that the huge hit to Baby Boomer wealth caused by the housing collapse is potentially very bad for the US economy.
The increase in mortgage debt may influence labor-force dynamics as some older Americans find they’re unable to completely retire, needing extra cash to keep up monthly payments. It also diminishes home equity and wealth, making these households more susceptible to swings in the economy and curbing spending on things such as vacations and visits to grandchildren.
Subterranean pent up wage deflation blues.
So does pent up wage deflation mean that US interest rates should be rising soon, after all? There are two reasons for saying no.
The first reason is theoretical. We have seen that under conditions of downward wage rigidity, wage levels are higher than they should be during recessions...
The second reason is empirical. If pent up wage deflation is a significant factor, it would be expected to have the greatest effect in those parts of the economy where the recession had been most severe. 
Generation X, you know, the ones just above us in age, are still up to their eyeballs in debt.

Brad DeLong wants us to stop calling it the Great Recession or whatever and start calling it The Greater Depression. Based on measures of cumulative output lost, it's actually worse on a global scale than the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Baking the Data Layer. The browser cookie turned 20 this week and this article takes a short look back at that history from a big data and advertising perspective.

Story Time: How I shorted cookies and ended up long Google.
It was early March of 2000. I was in 8th grade and part of our math class was linked with part of our social studies class and we were learning about capitalism and the stock market. So, like many children throughout the country, we all played The Stock Market Game. The premise is you get an imaginary $100,000 to invest over a 6 week period. The winner gets an A. Everybody else gets, well, probably still a good grade but not a 100%! My strategy was simple: I don't know anything about stocks and my dad was Big Mr. Wall St. Guy so the other kids probably know even less than I did. Therefore, rather than make a series of uninformed decisions and risk losing money, I'd just sit on my $100,000 and see if I came out on top.

We were nearing the end of the six weeks, spring break was approaching, and my strategy looked like it was going to fail miserably. Some kids were making money hand over fist because the tech stocks like Amazon and Cisco were going crazy. Yeah, I was ahead of like 2/3 of the class but they don't count. I wanted to win by being clever and I just wasn't clever enough. Then, on the radio I heard about something terrible! Literally, the worst thing anyone in the world could imagine. Internet companies were spying on us by implanting secret files onto our computers and then tracking every website we visited.

I had one week left in the game and developed a plan to short the evil company, Doubleclick. If the stock went down I'd make money and I felt sure the stock would go down because invasion of privacy was, like, the cardinal sin of the universe, or something. I remember getting into school early on Monday so I could go to my teacher's room and get on the website to make the trade happen (we didn't have internet at our house). I then learned the worst thing in the world: I was not going to win the stock market game. Due to the peculiarities of the game, a short sale lasted 1 week. That was 1 day longer than I needed it to last because the game ended that Friday. No short sale. No pyrrhic victory. I wouldn't suddenly shoot to the top of the class and be that weird kid nobody knew who won the whole thing. Seriously, ask Justin. That's the kind of person I was.

Later that week, maybe that very night, I remember nearly coming to tears telling my dad about the whole thing. He was a big supporter of my "just hold it" strategy even though I didn't make any money; he said that the other kids probably only made money because of luck and not because they knew what they were doing. He was also pleased with my idea to short Doubleclick and thought the invasion of privacy was sure to kick their stock down a little. So, taking a page from the Oligarch-American Training manual, he opened a brokerage account and gave me some real money to buy stocks with. Like $1000, so lots for a 14 year old kid. I put on my short sale of DCLK and then we went away for spring break.

While on vacation, the stock market crashed. March 10, 200: It was the tech bubble bursting and burst it did. By the time the bubble ran its course, almost $5 trillion in value had evaporated from the economy. It was just about as big as the Great Recession 8 years later. My short sale made a lot of money. I can't find a historic price chart but the price of the stock went from about $30 to about $5. Not that I was correct in my reasoning, mind you, but the luck of the timing was such that I succeeded wildly. If the stock market game had lasted just 1 more week, I'd have won. Those kids with their fancy tech stocks would have been wiped out Cisco lost 88% of it's value in a single day. Amazon was trading above $100 at open and at close it was at $7. Dad was so impressed by the whole thing he gave me more money to use in the brokerage account and I bought a bunch more stuff while on vacation. I came back to school from break and promptly forgot most of this. I obviously still have it seared into my memory but at the time I was busy getting out of 8th grade and into high school. Plus, nobody cared that I would have won the stock market game. Hell, most of the kids didn't even know there had been a crash.

I didn't much pay attention to that brokerage account for a few years. I had like 600 shares of this Doubleclick company that I acquired at like $5 a share because of the short sale and, for some stupid reason, 100 shares of UPS (the company with those brown trucks that deliver your Amazon orders). I just kind of held onto them for several more years. In 2007, Google bought Doubleclick and all those shares I owned magically became about 100 shares of Google. And there you have yet another irony of the whole thing: I initially wanted to short this company because of their evil invasion of privacy and I ended up owning the company that has done more to erode privacy than any other. And I made money doing it. All it took was ignorance and an uncompromising commitment to compromising my principles.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

8/28/14 Today's Inquiries

Get excited for Thor's day.

The Links:

Big Shot CEO literally kicks a puppy.

Follow the money on all the mortgage backed securities lawsuit settlements and you'll see that the litigants aren't paid very much. Indeed, most of the money goes to Fannie/Freddie and the FHA.

FT-Alphaville checks the numbers on the long-term unemployed. It looks like this recession is not really different after all.
First, about 10 per cent of men who are laid off en masse are never employed again. Intriguingly, the overall health of the economy at the time of getting laid off does not seem to play much of a role, although age does
Second, the long-term employment effect of being laid off is remarkably constant across the four recessions for which we have data
An optimist would see that chart as a demonstration that the labour market performed about as well as it always has given the magnitude of the downturn. The pessimistic interpretation is that many of the people who lost their jobs during the crisis and remain “non-employed” will never work again for almost no fault of their own. 
Teen jobs don't pay well. We kind of knew that already but we didn't know that Teen jobs pay poorly on a historical basis too. That and they have to compete with all those underemployed English majors taking the good part time work.

Ode to a f*cked generation. Whiny and accurate! It's oaky millenials, we're just going to euthanize the old people in about 20 years.

Most STEM majors don't go into STEM jobs, although healthcare is not counted as STEM and it's the biggest employment sector receiving "life sciences" graduates.

Re-cap of the summer from hell. It sure seems like every summer is worse than the last. Let's not forget the largely fun World Cup!

America's most important freedom costs taxpayers $500 million a year. Not to mention all those brave people who sacrifice themselves for the second amendment and the ammosexuals.

Republicans made a little video game where you guide an 8-bit elephant through Mario-like levels to aid the GOP in taking the Senate this November. Unfortunately the game doesn't work. In fact, it seems like a scam to get access to people's contact information so they can send you email.
Fw: Fw: Fw: YOU WONT BELEIVE WHAT OBOZO IS UP TO NOW!!! Obama takes guns from infants and gives them to homeless Kenyan anti-colonialists he's importing across the border. Plus, hot investment tips from convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy!
Okay I made that email up, but you get the idea.

As an Oligarch American, I feel constantly threatened by the increasing number of violent poors inhabiting my city's streets. Thank goodness BMW makes Security Edition vehicles:

Also, I found Houston's next car project: Security Wagon.

There's something deeply rotten in video game culture. The article is a run-through of the harassment of Zoe Quinn that's forced her to leave the industry entirely.

Meanwhile Feminist Frequency's Sarkeesian has been driven from her home by violent threats. She's been forced to contact the police and go hide with friends for an indefinite period of time.

The DailyDot profiles several redditors who are asking for more help in policing their communities for trolls and harassers.

75% of the images in the IKEA catalogue are CGI. I'd never have guessed.

You may remember the the UKGS made an accurate map of Britain in Minecraft a few months back. Well, they've returned with a more up-to date version which includes the underlying geology! The map is available for download but they're planning to continue making updates, so maybe hold off until they add more.

Here's a bunch of photos that somebody said were unbelievable and put into a list. The good news is, they're not in a slideshow.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

8/27/14 Today's Inquiries

Opportunity costs non refundable.

The Links:

More on the blue to red migration: state income taxes have little to do with it. Pretty much blow up that whole talking point when the data show it's more about low costs of living than anything else. Also, does that mean it's an unstable trend? My reasoning goes like this: a certain amount of the higher cost of living is due to blue state social services, schools, and other government services which red states rarely pay for. These things are generally good for communities that are upwardly mobile as they can, in a sense, pay of themselves. If the economy continues to recover, will the migration ebb or even reverse as people in red states begin to want those services again?

James Bessen, writing at the Harvard Business Review, says the skills gap is real. However, he has a nuanced argument. People aren't really lacking in basic math and literacy. There really isn't a shortage of STEM folks either. What's lacking are the skills that the education system and labor market haven't had time to create yet. He uses graphic designers as an example. Of course he completely leaves out the possibility of companies training employees.

The composition and sector break down of part time employees courtesy of the FRBA.

The Republican civil war over taxes is coming, so says Wonkblog.
But the supply-side Jacobins are having none of it. "I'm a classic growth conservative," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told John McCormack of the Weekly Standard, who "believe[s] that the best way to help families, the best way to help the economy is to reduce rates across the board" rather than expanding the Child Tax Credit instead. Daniel Mitchell of the Cato Institute downplays the idea that giving middle-class families more money even helps them, and says Republicans should keep focusing on cutting tax rates. And Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal thinks that the Lee plan is just a "capitulation to the left's inequality and middle-class talking points" that ignores the timeless lessons of, you guessed it, Ronald Reagan.
Also, why is Paul Ryan ashamed of Ayn Rand? Maybe he realized that, like Rand Paul, he needed to shed some of his more extremist trappings to remain palatable for the general public.

Speaking of libertarians, Pew finds that only 11% of people it surveyed for identifies as libertarian and accurately understood what the term meant.

Ohio legislators seek to limit the teaching of the scientific method. I suppose that the next step after banning evolution is to try and stop a process of reasoning that would arrive at that conclusion. Although we need to be honest: the only way to learn to think is to learn programming.

Glenn Greenwald points out that we're now effectively fighting on and agains all sides of the Syrian civil war. Forever war, we're gonna be forever war....

Yet another Pew research report. This one is on the chilling effect of social media. Apparently, social media makes you less likely to speak out about political topics. Apparently I missed that memo.
Overall, the findings indicate that in the Snowden case, social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues. Further, if people thought their friends and followers in social media disagreed with them, they were less likely to say they would state their views on the Snowden-NSA story online and in other contexts, such as gatherings of friends, neighbors, or co-workers. 
Sue Halpern reports that colleges haven't improved access to minorities or poor people in the last 30 years. As if that's a desirable outcome!

Samantha Allen thinks we need to talk about Silicon Valley's racism. I agree.
In light of the increasing political clout of Silicon Valley, the fact that black entrepreneurs continue to face barriers to access is even more concerning. In 2011, CNN’s series “Black in America” drew attention to the underrepresentation of black people in the tech industry. At the time, CNN reported that less than 2 percent of entrepreneurs receiving venture capital were black. The documentary sparked a national conversation on race in the tech industry with entrepreneurs like Angela Benton and Vivek Wadhwa drawing attention to the racism implicit in tech investment’s practice of “pattern-matching,” undisclosed techniques that investors use to determine whose projects to back. Pattern-matching supposedly favors inherently successful candidate traits but, in practice, as CNN notes, it tends to favor “white computer-science graduates of Stanford University or a similar elite school.”
You know that old trope where black people's skin is described like food? Yeah, it's racist. Buzzfeed did a quick turnaround and decided to describe white people's skin like food to show just how stupid it sounds.
She took off his shirt, his skin glistening in the sun like a glazed doughnut.
Lastly, I don't usually expect MAD Magazine to be at the forefront of, well, anything but this cover playing off the Norman Rockwell painting The Runaway is pretty ingenious.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

8/26/14 Today's Inquiries

Get thee to a nunnery!

The Links:

Back to school and inequality. We did a great job building an educational system that perpetuates inequality rather than alleviates it.

Al Jazeera reports on the small number of people who did make wage gains in the past decade. It's the same old story, folks.
Most astonishing is how much of the overall increase in wages earned by the 153.6 million people with a job in 2012 went to this narrow band of very well paid workers: Just 7 percent of all jobs pay in this range, but those workers collected 76.9 percent of the total real wage increase.
As usual, it looks like the masters of the universe Harvard grads have it all figured out. Most graduates, no matter what the major, go to work in finance. Why? Because that's where the money is. Well, maybe not:
Nor does the explanation reside in some generational change that has caused huge numbers of bright young Millennials to adopt Michael Milken or Mitt Romney as a role model. In fact, like Nichols, many if not most students who find themselves working on Wall Street tend to have much broader interests that they have set aside. Consequently, as Kevin Roose has written in his new book, Young Money, many wind up hating their jobs. Incessant Excel and PowerPoint drudgery, being on call to superiors at all hours of the night, putting in eighty to a hundred hours of work per week, traveling constantly, in the case of consulting, and feeling, overall, like a cog in a meaningless machine—all work against a balanced, productive life. The search for exit strategies becomes a preoccupation of many who take these positions.
Meanwhile, New Jersey is funneling it's pension money directly to Wall St. As I've noted several times before, states have the last full benefit pensions systems left in America and they're moving very quickly towards bankrupting that system.

Also, retirees are finding out that their Social Security checks are being garnished to pay for old student loans. When you're on a $1,200 fixed income, that $200 loan bill is going to hurt. Retirement is over.

Responding to the recent articles about automated staffing at major part-time employers, Amy Merrick notes that "flextime" is not usually good for businesses. The drawback becomes loss of skills and productivity among the staff who rarely work. Moreover, they don't feel connected to their work and don't care much if they do a good job.

The 1% in California are easily able to avoid the drought. Perhaps that's why they can keep dumping buckets of water on their heads.

The Gaymer conference, billed as a inclusive alternative to usual gaming conventions, is coming back in 2015 and need help funding the show. If you're interested, check out the press release.

Speaking of gaming and inclusivity, here's Feminist Frequency's next installment of Women as Background Decoration:


Jason Jones asks, Are the X-Men Terrorists? This post goes to 11. Also, I think Jason's conclusion, that he doesn't know if they're terrorists, is part of the near meaninglessness of the term terrorist. A terrorist these days is a political term used to identify anyone who isn't acceptable to those in power.

Weird Al does a great job with the Game of Thrones theme song and even pokes some fun at George R.R. Martin. Skip to 1:35 to see the GOT part.



However, it's still not as good as my preferred theme song rendition:


Monday, August 25, 2014

8/25/14 Today's Inquiries

These links may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.

The Links:

Paul Krugman responds to yesterday's article about the blue state "diaspora" by nothing that housing costs are the largest reason people are moving to red states. See also, 43% of new homes being sold are over $300k and only 8% are under $150k.

Susan Dynarski thinks lower interest rates on college loans is the wrong way to help college students.

But, Harvard, Yale and Princeton could afford to make tuition free for all their students.

And, the case for an undergraduate law degree. I can't wait to tell Laura her degree ought to be awarded to an undergrad! Perhaps a more European system of professional education is in order?

Joseph Randall, a 21 year old from Chicago, explains why he dropped out of college. Probably for that sweet sexting app money.
If college would have given me training in online business, marketing, investing, and financial literacy, I would have religiously devoted my time to it. However, things didn’t pan out that way, nor were they designed to at a community college.
Speaking of colleges, this Maryland college is getting surplus military gear. Glad to see colleges aren't being left out of the militarization movement.

What if Facebook and Twitter were part of your job? Well, I probably couldn't get hired. One of my favorite questions to ask people when they ask me to join Facebook is to ask if I still need to be a college student to join. I also don't use Linkedin. Wow, I may never have another job if I don't start wasting more time on social networks.

Burning Man is closed due to rain. Ha ha.

Vox, a site launched last spring, is apparently not living up to it's hype. The criticism is valid but I find myself enjoying it quite a bit. I only wish there were more of the cards and less of the articles.

Learning economics form The Simpsons. That unpossible.

And we get this from XKCD today:



Sunday, August 24, 2014

8/24/14 Today's Inquiries

Hola. It seems sundays are going to be light on the links.

The Links:

Here's today's lesson in why we study colonialism. Tyler Cowen, economics professor, public intellectual, blogger, and author writes about lessons from old India. He makes the case that India didn't industrialize with the rest of the world in the 19th century and that's put it behind for the last 200 years.
In 1750, India accounted for one-quarter of the world’s manufacturing output, but by 1900 that was down to 2 percent. The West became more productive as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and India lost much of its leading export sector, textiles. While the data is fragmentary, the best estimates show that India’s living standards declined through the middle of the 19th century and that its economy retrogressed, even as it borrowed some technological improvements from the West. India just didn’t do enough to move toward production on a larger scale or with better machines.
He's correct, I suppose, that India could have seen more economic growth had they participated in the industrial revolution. However, he omits one hugely important factor in India's 19th century history. British Colonialism. India was far from being an independent nation. It was far from having the ability to support free enterprise or socialist industrialism of the late 19th century and early 20th. Why? British colonialism. The British operated with complete control over India's economy. If India didn't modernize, it's not through some flaw of India's but through a decision made by the British. The legacy of colonialism in India left a broken and dysfunctional state with few stable institutions which are prerequisite for industrialization. What Mr. Cowen presents as a cautionary tale for Americans worried about perpetual stagnation is in reality a purposeful result of policy.

The Economist's Free Exchange blog highlights some Harvard research that argues globalization decreases inequality in the 3rd world. The key to making the successful transition, however, seems to be strong education commitments.

The BBC Radio 4 is using literature to find economic solutions to Britain's economic woes. The first book: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Pew presents the results of its Future of the Internet survey. It's a mixed bag.

Key themes: reasons to be concerned

  1. Impacts from automation have thus far impacted mostly blue-collar employment; the coming wave of innovation threatens to upend white-collar work as well.
  2. Certain highly-skilled workers will succeed wildly in this new environment—but far more may be displaced into lower paying service industry jobs at best, or permanent unemployment at worst.
  3. Our educational system is not adequately preparing us for work of the future, and our political and economic institutions are poorly equipped to handle these hard choices.
The Verge thinks that our future government will look more like Amazon. Do we really want that? I get wanting an efficient and manageable state. I get that we want services to actually work as intended but Amazon's not exactly perfect.

Most smartphone users download zero apps per month. So why are these mobile and app based companies making so much money? What is their market? File this under tech bubble.

The Dish looks at the economics of creative writing. Basically, writers ought to have a day job.

I liked Vision Video. When I lived in Athens, I still went there on occasion. I have no idea how they were still in business with 2 storefronts but they just kept on trucking. Now, I find that innovative companies are turning their video stores into nonprofit organizations. Ars Technica profiles Scarecrow Video in Seattle. I hope Vision can live on forever.

Did unleaded gas, Plan B, and the internet play a part in decreasing teen birth rates? I definitely think the internet helped. For example: How is babby fromed?

Someone made a top 10 list of improvised movie scenes. While it doesn't include my personal favorite Harrison Ford line from Empire, it's still a jolly little watch.


Saturday, August 23, 2014

8/23/14 Today's Inquiries

Saturdays are the best.

The Links:

Lots from the New York Times today. Let's start with Paul Krugman reminding readers why core inflation measures have been a huge success.

An argument for structural unemployment trends being exacerbated by the great recession. All in all, I think this is the most complete story we get. Our labor market is changing and then this big event hits and explodes unemployment, masking those changes until a recovery begins. We also can't forget that many jobs lost were related to construction and real-estate. Although prices have rebounded, those industries haven't regrown all the lost jobs.

Neil Irwin thinks the robots might not take our jobs after all. Why? Because we're all unique creative snowflakes. Also, robots can't identify different kinds of chairs accurately. Yet.

Millions of people have moved from blue states to red states. Far from being proof that red state policies are superior, the new blues are making those states purple.

Teaching future doctors shouldn't necessarily require public funding. The background here is that all residency programs, the 3-5 year post-graduate programs all doctors have to go through before they can practice medicine, are paid for by the federal government. All of them. And the funding for those programs hasn't changed since 1997. That means we are graduating lot's of doctors into the same number of residency slots each year.

Arnie Duncan, secretary of Education, says states ought to get another year before they start using CC based tests to evaluate teachers. Sometimes I forget that the entire common core is just an very roundabout way of being able to fire "bad" teachers.

Alright, enough of the old grey lady.

Whites self segregate, even in their social networks. I remember education classes and discussion about self-segregation in schools. It's funny to think back on it because self-segregation was talk about as something blacks did to themselves. The logic, if I remember correctly, was that we expect blacks to be pro-integration so why are they all sitting at the same lunch tables? Or some stupid thing like that. The obvious answer was that white people don't accept any minorities into their social groups but somehow that was never the way it was discussed.
Overall, the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence. This level of social-network racial homogeneity among whites is significantly higher than among black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent).
Harper's presents, New Frontiers in Pain-Compliance. How military technology for Active Denial Systems came to be used on the streets of American cities.

More on how economic harassment is part of the problem in Ferguson and elsewhere. A big lesson I learned from the reparations discussion a few months back was how much official policy was to blame for the problems facing America's black communities. This is just another example of America's continued policy of white supremacy.

Alex Tabarrok compares Ferguson's economic harassment to debtor's prison. I really think there's ground here for libertarians to gain inroads among traditionally democratic groups. They just need to make more arguments like these.

Tyler Cowen highlights a Swedish study indicating that poverty is not correlated with proclivity to commit crimes. Maybe the above policies have something to do with the elevated crime rates?

Kevin Drum looks at Clinton era welfare reforms and the Great Recession. He pretty much argues that any "benefits" we saw from reforms were merely a lucky coincidence with the boom times of the mid-late 1990s.

Is housing holding back the economic recovery? Yes and no. If by recovery people mean a return to the pre-2006 housing pustule, then yes, we aren't recovering. But if people recognize that the housing pustule was a product of Wall St., housing policy, and low interest rates, then you'll rightly recognize that we don't want to recover that way.

The Harvard Business Review looks at record corporate profits without the added prosperity of previous generations. For some reason this makes me think of National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.

America in Decay: The Sources of Political Disfunction, by Francis Fukuyama. Though long, the article uses the US Forest Service as a case study in America's failing institutions.

Brookings presentes, Saving Horatio Alger: Equality, Opportunity, and The American Dream. Another long-form piece which looks at our failed state.
Vivid stories of those who overcome the obstacles of poverty to achieve success are all the more impressive because they are so much the exceptions to the rule. Contrary to the Horatio Alger myth, social mobility rates in the United States are lower than in most of Europe. There are forces at work in America now—forces related not just to income and wealth but also to family structure and education—that put the country at risk of creating an ossified, self-perpetuating class structure, with disastrous implications for opportunity and, by extension, for the very idea of America.
The Economist notes Janet Yellen's more hawkish rhetoric in Jackson Hole. Here's a complete transcript of her remarks.

And, why is the Fed's meeting at Jackson Hole such a big deal these days? Well there was that one guy in 2005 who presented a paper that completely called the economic collapse that happened 2 years later.

The extreme drought in the western US is so bad it literally moves mountains.

How the US created ISIS and therefore created the justification for invading Iraq for the third time in 3 decades.

This week is the anniversary of the liberation of Paris from Nazi Germany. Check out this LIFE photo collection.

Nail polish that can detect roofies. Pretty cool.

An inside look at The Onion's photoshop department.

More adult women play video games than children under 18. Glad to see the data backing up the female gamer movement. Hopefully the industry will realize that they need to make games for everyone.

Real life fruit ninja. Colin totally did this a few weeks ago with his flea market sword.


And, if you liked Nick Cage's movie Season of the Witch, I think you'll be excited about Outcast.




Friday, August 22, 2014

8/22/14 Today's Inquiries

Goes well with coffee.

The Links:

Bank of America has settled with the feds to the tune of $17 billion dollars. Still no bankers in jail for fraud. I thought this was a good point to make:
popular criticism of the modern approach to punishing bank misdeeds -- giant fines imposed on the banks, not much in the way of individual punishments and a preference for settlements rather than trials -- is that it turns the fines into just a "cost of doing business," normalizing misbehavior rather than preventing future wrongdoing. 
Wolf Street posts a reader comment about how the economy is ruined for everyone. While it's easy to look at the relative privilege of the commenter and write it off as whining, I urge you not to do so. She is right to point out that people at almost every income level are having trouble living in ways that, even 10 years ago, would have been completely normal. 
We have a reasonable good upper middleclass income and have never had a problem buying what we want, taking our kids abroad every year when they were young or buying cars or houses or pools etc. until the last few years when we looked at what was going to greet our kids when they were out in the world starting their lives and decided it was necessary to stop all unneeded major expenditures (and an awful lot of minor ones as well, like eating out) in order to be ready to assist our kids if needed.
When I wrote about Social Security a few months back, I argued that family will step in to become caretakers when/if the federal money runs out. It looks like this commenter is making the same point about how parents will care for their children if opportunities are absent.

Using Twitter to track unemployment in real time. I'd argue there's a significant selection bias at work.

Finns, meanwhile, spend about 8 years in college and most exit with a master's degree of some kind. Of course that means many are in their late 20s when they graduate, which this article argues is hiding from the labor market. I seem to recall a similar effect in the US during the great recession. 


Forbes asks, have Americans fallen out of love with driving? I certainly hope so. Besides, who wants to live in the suburbs anymore anyway?

Microsoft is leaving ALEC, the right-wing lobbying and political action organization. I hope this is  trend as businesses realize that funding the crazies isn't actually good for them because they tank the economies of every state they gain control of. 

Over at 538, do young people really like Rand Paul? The answer is no. But a vocal minority of young people do so that's the message and he's sticking to it.

The man in charge of cyber security brags about having no computer skills. Hopefully they can enroll him in Udacity for a quick crash course. 

Wonkblog looks at 12 years of data and determines that stop-and-frisk didn't really do anything to stop crime. You know what stops crime? Absurdly high property values that price all but the 1% out of the city. 

Stop refrigerating your butter. I saw this linked like 10 times so I thought I'd share it. 


The Verge has rounded up a bunch of magazine covers from December 17th, 1989 when The Simpsons first premiered. I still think Sean Connery is the sexiest man alive. If you pay for cable, FXX is running a 12 day marathon of every episode in order. 

Thursday, August 21, 2014

8/21/14 Today's Inquiries

Guten tag.

The links:

Fark, one of my longtime favorite sites, is adding misogyny to it's moderator guidelines. Amanda Hess wonders if it's even possible. I'd say yes. Fark already moderates for a wide variety if issues with "grey areas"and it's pretty successful. One big push came in the way submitted headlines were approved. Those set the tone for the whole comment thread and often set off the trolling and counter-trolling.

Female entrepreneurs and techies are beginning to out the sleazy mean who are demanding sex in order to fund their tech products. Good on them. The only way this situation gets better is if people are named and shamed publicly.

Oh good. It's time for Burning Man again. I'd only recommend reading the article if you're looking for more reasons to hate the super-rich.

Speaking of burning, a California solar plant is igniting birds in mid air as they fly through it's magnified beams.

The advantages of dyslexia. Very interesting.
One thing we do know for sure is that reading changes the structure of the brain. An avid reader might read for an hour or more a day, day in and day out for years on end. This highly specialized repetitive training, requiring an unnaturally precise, split-second control over eye movements, can quickly restructure the visual system so as to make some pathways more efficient than the others.
When illiterate adults were taught to read, an imaging study led by Stanislas Dehaene in France showed that changes occurred in the brain as reading was acquired. But, as these adults developed skills for reading, they also lost their former abilities to process certain types of visual information, such as the ability to determine when an object is the mirror image of another.  Learning to read therefore comes at a cost, and the ability to carry out certain types of visual processing are lost when people learn to read. This would suggest that the visual strengths in dyslexia are simply an artifact of differences in reading experience, a trade-off that occurs as a consequence of poor reading in dyslexia.
Nick Bunker answers my questions about the variability of spending on children. He finds that the risk spend more on their kids overall but that it is a much smaller portion of their income. Importantly, that spending seems to take place in areas which could improve their children's cognitive abilities.

Americans, unlike Europeans, think their country is more equal than it really is.

The middle class isn't buying all this talk about economic good time returning. Maybe they just need to go to Burning Man.

Perhaps it's because home ownership rates have returned to where they were in the mid 90's.

Or maybe:



A pretty cool discussion of why the Roman buried a "tech cache" while retreating from some celts.

I can't embed this trailer, but it looks pretty cool. The film is Automata and apparently robots like kidnapping humans or something. Also, 3 laws and no Will Smith.

I was going to link several more articles about Ferguson and inequality and race but I decided to show a video of the St. Louis police killing a man instead. It's kind of making the rounds but many people are choosing not to link it. I'm going to embed it below because I want you to watch it and to think about whether or not these police offices were justified in taking a life. In other civilized countries, as best as I can tell, they would be facing murder charges. When I was teaching, I had several students act similarly in the hallways and never once did I think aggressive or lethal force was the appropriate response. I suppose they're lucky that they were in school and not outside a convenience store. Anyway, don't watch the video if you do not want to see a man shot to death for stealing two sodas.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

8/20/14 Today's Inquiries

When it rains our town's internet goes out.

The links:

How America learned to stop worrying and loved bombing. Bombing Iraq is basically the only thing we do anymore.

Russia Today, Russia's state controlled media outlet, has a new advertising campaign which is edgy, to say the least.

The US had become a leader in oil and gas production. That's right, just because we're curbing emissions here doesn't mean we can't export those fossil fuels somewhere else. Suck it greens!

Sarah Kliff wants to solve the mystery of falling teen birth rates. Obviously a decade of abstinence only education had finally paid off.

Are we facing another foreclosure crisis? Hard to tell. I seems to me that we're looking at a different future where home ownership is limited to wealthy professionals.

Harold Pollack interviews Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir about their research on economic behaviors. One major thing they talk about is how being poor changes the way people think.
 Another tragic example concerns lonely people. The lonely are interesting because it’s so tempting to say: "Oh, lonely people. Yeah, those are just losers, or whatever. Those are people who can't make friends." Actually, the data suggests that the vast majority of lonely people don't lack any social skills at all. It's just they found themselves in lonely situations.
You move to a new town and you don't really know anybody. How do you meet people? It's hard to meet people. The longer that persists, now the longer you've been lonely, and then ‑‑ this is the key part with the lonely and the busy and the money and the poor ‑‑ now that you're in that state, your behavior changes, and the way your behavior changes seems to keep you in that state.  

Humans Need not Apply. Watch and feel terrible about our future.


Did workers in England see a decrease in skills as a result of the industrial revolution? Yes, depending on how you define and categorize "skill."

Barely half of workers are able to take a week long vacation. Well, that's not exactly what the post says but I think that taking a week off is basically grounds for getting fired these days.

On The Media, a public radio program and, apparently, podcast decided to see what it would be like if a black woman pretended to be a white male online.

Paul Krugman, commenting on a recent piece about election ad buys, notes that the persistent lies about Obamacare are failing to gain traction among likely voters.

John Oliver does what John Oliver does:


It looks like at least 13 journalists have bee arrested since the start of the protests on Ferguson. Here's what one of those journalists experienced.

Jeff Smith writes that Ferguson and many other municipalities depend on traffic citations and numerous small fines to fund their police departments. It makes these numbers even a more outrageous:
In Ferguson last year, 86 percent of stops, 92 percent of searches and 93 percent of arrests were of black people — despite the fact that police officers were far less likely to find contraband on black drivers (22 percent versus 34 percent of whites). This worsens inequality, as struggling blacks do more to fund local government than relatively affluent whites.
Jason Jones pens a few remarks about Ferguson. Notably, he points out that the news hasn't made it into his classroom yet. As much as we all live online, it's very possible that we can live online in completely separate universes.

The Economist reports that American police are excessively trigger happy.
Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero.
Sadly, Americans eat most of their meals alone. I encourage people to eat more socially. Perhaps in long wooden halls with a fire pit in the middle.

Readers remember less when they read on a Kindle, the closest digital alternative to a paper book. You know, I was staring at my bookshelf the other day and I really wished I was back in school reading awesome stuff again. If nothing else, getting a degree in English was a great way to have various smart people curate my reading for 4 years.

The Great Stagnation in Westeros. If you're not familiar with the term "great stagnation," it comes form economist Tyler Cowen and describes a general slowdown in innovation and technological productivity improvements since the late 1970s. This post argues the same thing happened in Westeros.

Lego updates it's Minecraft set with better pieces. This is awesome. Getting kids off the computer by having legos that mimic their games is probably good every once and a while. Also, I dislike the recent Lego trend in creating very specific themed buildings etc. This kind of returns to the old way of just getting a ton of blocks and making whatever your mind comes up with.

Jimmy Fallon plays Goldeneye against Pierce Bronsnan. Oh man, that game really takes me back...


And:




Tuesday, August 19, 2014

8/19/14 Today's Inquiries

Yee-haw! Rustle up some links and settle in on the range.

The Links:

Police militarization gets the Onion treatment. Short and sweet.

White people think the investigation and police response to Mike Brown's shooting have been appropriate. Black people think differently.

We still have a big gap in lifespans across racial groups in the US. Black people die younger than anyone else.

In a revelation which should surprise no one, the firm administering Chicago's red light camera system (you know, the one that keeps issuing hundreds of false citations a day) paid for a Chicago transit official's car and condo, and probably hookers and blow too.

Someone at the Wall St. Journal finally notices that the common element in all these "skills gap" stories is corporations completely unwilling to invest in their employees.

The Forever Recession. Yes, welcome to the new normal. Also, let's check in on the mancession.

Even data scientists are going to have their jobs replaced by robots and smart software. Or at least that's how I read the article.

Does the gender of your child change your politics? I think it would be hard to control for variables in this study.

Oh good, I live in the least happy place in the country.

245,000 reasons not to have children. Also, obviously very few families have these kinds of resources available so what happens to those kids? Where's the longitudinal study of the outcomes of kids who only get $145,000 of pre-18 investment?

Bill Gates pens a piece about what he learned from Washington's state teacher of the year.
I also asked Katie about the Common Core State Standards, the academic milestones that have been the center of some controversy lately. She started by echoing something I’ve heard in every school I’ve visited: No teacher is opposed to high standards. As Katie said, “Everyone who has read the Common Core standards says, ‘I want my students to be able to do those things.’ ”
The problem is that too few teachers get the support they need to implement the standards. Whether teachers are adopting the Common Core or something else, if they don’t get help implementing the change and the time to do it right, then they’re more likely to turn against it.
Another EdSurge piece about how to work with children of color during "difficult times."

A Libertarian Case for Parental Licensing. I can not imagine something less libertarian than requiring a license to have children, yet there's apparently a case for it. I suppose this is part of my larger gripe against the "liberal-tarian" movement in general. It always collapses right back into a kind of liberal-utilitarian wold view where there's not much that separates it from, say, a fairly paternalistic New England democrat's world view. At that point, why be libertarian at all?

Collegiate sports is taking it's first steps toward being independent of the NCAA. Hopefully they'll just franchise out teams with college names and forget this whole college sports thing all together.

The Dish asks, How do you solve a problem like Vladimir? I suppose the other thing that drives us crazy about Putin is that he really exposes the messiness of our own foreign policy for the last 2 decades. His unilateral actions and meddling in other nations' affairs for his own interests are merely mirrors of our own unilateral acts and meddling.

US News notes polls showing a shift in US opinion about intervention in Iraq. Good news everyone, we're going to invade Iraq!

The Pope endorses military action against the Islamic State. I thought we were past the whole crusade thing.

The Mountain that Lives is now the strongest man in Europe.

Finally, a way for kids to learn coding that I support wholeheartedly.

New York Magazine publishes and excerpts of Randall Munroe's upcoming book, What If.

Monday, August 18, 2014

8/18/14 Today's Inquiries

Creme filled and glazed to perfection.


The Links:

In a move reminiscent of political think-tank land, the economics profession is seeing the emergence of new statistical and measurement bodies which are linked to specific economic theories. In other words, the political people need to invent their own numbers to support their theories. I feel like economics, like many other disciplines, ought to stick to the data and not the narrative.

Here's a pair of stories from the New York Times. The first is a technology piece about the "sharing economy." There's some basic math about how much money people are really making and it's far from the panacea promised by Silicon Valley. It also reminds me a bit of the payday loans that end up getting people into more debt once they're done. Let's say that I want to be a driver straight out of high school. Step 1: buy a car and car insurance. Step 2: buy a smartphone with data plan so I can Uber. Step 3: be able to earn enough money driving people to pay for steps 1 &2 while also renting an apartment and feeding and clothing myself. Suddenly, that one $28 trip to the airport (minus gas) isn't looking so profitable. As I wrote the other day, the sharing economy has more resemblance to sharecropping than sharing.
“These are not jobs, jobs that have any future, jobs that have the possibility of upgrading; this is contingent, arbitrary work,” says Stanley Aronowitz,director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It might as well be called wage slavery in which all the cards are held, mediated by technology, by the employer, whether it is the intermediary company or the customer.”
Second, is a related article from the Times Sunday Review: Working Anything but 9 to 5. It's a profile of scheduling technology used by many companies, including Starbucks. The major premise is that this technology cares only for the company's bottom line and makes life hard for workers.
Along with virtually every major retail and restaurant chain, Starbucks relies on software that choreographs workers in precise, intricate ballets, using sales patterns and other data to determine which of its 130,000 baristas are needed in its thousands of locations and exactly when. Big-box retailers or mall clothing chains are now capable of bringing in more hands in anticipation of a delivery truck pulling in or the weather changing, and sending workers home when real-time analyses show sales are slowing.
But, you know, they can totally just work more hours to make ends meet, those lazy takers.

Pivoting off a recent New York Times Magazine article about debt collectionCredit Slips examines the idea of a national debt registry. Ah, I can see it now: Citizen, you've been spotted running a red light. $273.82 has been added to your life-debt.

Another NY Times link: Medicare is going to begin paying doctors who coordinate chronically ill patients' medical care. You might be thinking, hey, doesn't this already happen? No, not really.

So, story time, part of my job in the ER is making sure I document patient history. That means getting all of their medications and various surgical procedures and all the names of all their doctors from the triage nurse or off the computer. That's easy when the patient is someone like me with little going on health-wise but, when the patient walks in with a grocery bag full of pill bottles, documentation gets a little more tricky. These are people on literally dozens of medications from five or more doctors, often getting prescriptions filled form multiple pharmacies because there are frequent medication shortages. (Fun side story, the whole town ran out of ibuprofen once. You know, Advil, Motrin, or  those higher dose prescription versions? All gone. For like 3 days!) As the ER doc starts doing tests and what not, she has to make decisions too. That's a half dozen physicians treating different aspects of a patient's illnesses with different medications and different treatment goals. Yes, coordination is necessary.

More on Rick Perry's indictment from VICE.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: The Coming Race War Won't be About Race. Well, if it's a class war, the rich win. So I'd make it about race.

Ferguson Unrest Shows the Growth of Suburban Poverty. Yup. It's a changed world.

For example, Fayette County, Ga., where my parent live and I attended high school, is seeing two major demographic changes: Millenials and Boomers are leaving in droves. The article notes that, in general, the young are moving to high-income, high-employment cities and the old are moving to Florida.

Some teens from Parkview High School in Georgia have created an app to rate your interactions with Police. It also helps you find nearby police stations and contact emergency services.

Of course the police will probably arrest and beat you if you're filming them because they don't like accountability.

Alex Tabarrok notes a recent study about race and jury composition.
What the authors discover is that all white juries are 16% more likely to convict black defendants than white defendants but the presence of just a single black person in the jury pool equalizes conviction rates by race. The effect is large and remarkably it occurs even when the black person is not picked for the jury. The latter may not seem possible but the authors develop an elegant model of voir dire that shows how using up a veto on a black member of the pool shifts the characteristics of remaining pool members from which the lawyers must pick; that is, a diverse jury pool can make for a more “ideologically” balanced jury even when the jury is not racially balanced.
Over at Naked Capitalism, Lambert Strether thinks that robotics is looking far too utopian these days. It's not going in the labor-saving-lets-you-relax direction but the labor-replacing-means-you-starve direction. Also, some clever rewriting of Asimov's three laws to reflect a more capitalist view of robotics.

This is what happens when all the Russian oligarchs suddenly stop buying property in London.

The New Yorker looks at the economics of ebola. They state the obvious in the second paragraph but do read the whole thing.
When pharmaceutical companies are deciding where to direct their R. & D. money, they naturally assess the potential market for a drug candidate. That means that they have an incentive to target diseases that affect wealthier people (above all, people in the developed world), who can afford to pay a lot. They have an incentive to make drugs that many people will take. And they have an incentive to make drugs that people will take regularly for a long time—drugs like statins.
Richard Beck, writing at Experimental Theology, has a Christian take on psychology which is critical of the typical separation of soul, mind, and body that's existed for over two millennia. I find his discussion of mental illness especially useful given recent events and the propensity of many Christians to chalk everything up to personal responsibility or a lack of willpower or some such.

Venn Diagram fail:

And, a marxist critique of The Fellowship Of the Ring imagined as DVD commentary by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. It's good throughout and will definitely be fun when you're looking to troll some LOTR fans. A taste:
Chomsky: We should examine carefully what’s being established here in the prologue. For one, the point is clearly made that the “master ring,” the so-called “one ring to rule them all,” is actually a rather elaborate justification for preemptive war on Mordor.