The Links:
The BBC has a fascinating profile of the Yazidis, the ethnic religious minority currently being threatened by ISIS. I find tiny religions like this super interesting. Apparently it's a folksy hybrid of Christanity, Islam, and non-Abrahemic religions.
Storyline is looking at the uniqueness of rural poverty. They have a decent interview with photographer Michael Williamson and feature many of his photos.
Catherine Rampell notes that our welfare systems are better geared toward the "near poor,"those who work and have jobs that just don't pay enough to save or be functional. She includes an instructive quiz about our misconceptions of welfare programs and who benefits from them.
Matthew Wilson looks at the economic impact of belief. He cunningly connects it to people who see solar eclipses and assume they're a sign from the gods.
To demonstrate this idea, I have built a model where changes in the money supply had zero real impact on their own. But people believed that increases in the money supply would boost the economy, and they altered their behaviour accordingly. They didn’t realise that this change in behaviour was the real driver of higher economic growth.The IMF tries its hand at figuring out where US workers have gone.
Despite the recovery so far, the U.S. labor market remains far from normal. The numbers of long-term unemployed are still higher than at any previous peak since World War II.
And a sizable “participation gap”—the difference between the trend participation rate and the actual participation rate—has created other forms of labor market slack, which is when there are more potential workers than jobsThe US Department of Education has a plan to relieve the student debt crisis. They intend to change the rules governing PLUS loans to make it easier for students to borrow more money.
From the annals of really incomplete advice comes this Vox article: An Economist and a personal finance expert teach you money. What's missing from this article? Let's see, we have budgeting and setting up an emergency fund. We have helpful advice on picking out credit cards because people with no understanding of money need to have tons of credit cards. Oh, and numbers 2 and 5 seem to contradict each other. But wait, where is the information about saving money? Where do they mention investing to grow that money? They don't. So when Vox laments the lack of financial understanding among Americans, they're not helping.
Anna Clark, writing at American Prospect, thinks that republican populism is going to swing the rust belt away from blue-collar democratic voting to the right wing. Why?
“Rural voters are now much more monolithic,” says Gene Ulm, a partner with the right-leaning Public Opinion Strategies. “You had a couple of these outposts of old farming Democrats in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in western Wisconsin, in large portions of Minnesota, where they were part of the FDR coalition … but it seems like they’re becoming just like all rural voters, which is Tea Party–ish Republican.”I'll leave it to you to read between the lines there.
Deep water fracking. What could possibly go wrong? I mean we're only having earthquakes in Oklahoma due to land fracking. How could fracking the Ring of Fire go badly? File under: They Dug Too Deep.
Do you live in a major city? Do you have windows? Do you have an old smartphone? Great, this company will pay you to watch the world outside your window through your smartphone. I wonder what they'll pay for my window.
Robots can use WiFi like x-ray vision to see through walls and find Sarah Connor. Also, didn't Batman do this with cell phone signals?
These robots can fold into origami-like shapes. I'll be impressed when they can turn into trucks and racial stereotypes. Actually, maybe origami robots are already a Japanese stereotype.
This fish has been playing Pokemon Red for 135+ hours. Fish should not play Pokemon. They are really bad at playing Pokemon. No word yet on Magikarp.
No comments:
Post a Comment