Tuesday, November 25, 2014

11/25/14 Today's Inquiries

Not much to report today. Plenty of questions, few answers. Get excited for thanksgiving!


The Links:

Info on the Ferguson Grand Jury's decision. I don't really know what to make of this whole mess. The prosecutor certainly doesn't come off looking good. More here.

Household debt is rising again. "The deleveraging process has ended." And, home remodeling is on the rise again. 

Are single parent households the biggest reason for income inequality.

College is necessary but doesn't get you anywhere.
First, millions of people in developing nations are now far better educated, and the Internet has given them an easy way to sell their skills in advanced economies like the United States. Hence, more and more complex work is being outsourced to them.
Second, advanced software is taking over many tasks that had been done by well-educated professionals – including data analysis, accounting, legal and engineering work, even some medical diagnoses.
As a result, the demand for well-educated workers in the United States seems to have peaked around 2000 and fallen since. But the supply of well-educated workers has continued to grow.
Or is demographics to blame for out secular stagnation?

So, we have a recovery of sorts but it's been terribly unequal. Is 0% growth for 90% of the population really a successful economic model?

However, the trend in part-time > full-time job growth may be changing.

There is no technology worker shortage.

The Fed seems confused about why many young adults live at home with their parents. This guy thinks it's an attitude shift:
The Fed believes all they have to do is push a button, and people will respond the way they want. The Fed got housing prices up, but only 10% of the response they expected.

Attitudes explain why. The Fed can and did make money available, but it cannot dictate where people spend it, or even if people spend it.

Here is a link to all the articles where I mentioned Attitudes. There are pages of references. It would behoove the Fed to read a few of them.

Clash of Generations

Unlike boomers and gen-Xers whose primary focus was on money and "getting ahead" lifestyles, millennials have more of a depression-era survival mentality coupled with a completely different set of values.
Citylab argues that millennials have to choose between upward mobility and affordable housing.The trade off is basically that areas with economic growth and jobs have high housing costs which negate the effect of that income.



UVA has a serious rape problem. A followup by Rolling Stone. Content warning, obviously.

Gawker wants to end fraternities. I support this measure. They're among the least meritocratic and most scammy organizations in existence.

I've linked about each of the books reviewed here but I recommend reading the review anyway as it gives a good overview of the problems facing out educational system.

A 5 paragraph essay against 5 paragraph essays.

Life imitates art: There was a crappy movie about this starring Gerard Butler and that guy from Dexter. I think it was called Gamer.

The Onion: Iranian nuclear talk negotiating team openly building bomb in the room.

Sunday, November 23, 2014

11/23/14 Today's Inquiries

I love the smell of rotting flesh and C.diff in the ER in the morning. 


The links:


Wall St. culture is unlikely to change as a result of financial reforms. Yeah, but a lot of the talented sociopaths are moving to Silicon Valley for the quick buck instead of following the safe path to Wall St. 

Menzie Chinn has some comments on Wisconsin's employment outlook. With a track record on employment like Walker's, he's a shoe-in for president. 

Why workers matter. America doesn't have a party of labor anymore and, apparently, neither does the UK. 

Malls surrender in the face of, well, every single economic trend in the country. Seriously, save for a few well placed popular malls, like, maybe, Lenox Square in Altanta, how are these places not already out of business?

The number of multi-family rental properties being built is growing. That makes it a good time to be a renter as availability will drive down prices. Arnold Kling adds:
Policy makers see young people reluctant to buy homes, and they respond in the usual way, by proposing government-subsidized lenient mortgage credit. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs respond by building more apartments.
The 7th Benghazi investigation is over. There was no intelligence fault. Which is the same thing the other 6 investigations found. Thank goodness there's an 8th investigation which has yet to conclude. The truth will come out. 

More rent seeking. This time it's corn ethanol which is required to be a larger and larger part of our gasoline until 2022. Unfortunately they never imagined that people would use less gasoline and the increasing concentration of ethanol is bad for older cars. 

The NY Times has a great (and long) article on the psychology of passwords. It's a fun read and also helped me figure out why people so often pick bad passwords. 

Consumer Reports fires a shot across the bow of the gluten free foods movement. Because if you don't have Celiac disease, you don't need to eat gluten free. 

Here's a shitty documentary on NYC's sewage infrastructure. 

“The image of a female vampire skateboarding down a street, her voluminous veil flying out behind her, does the job with more poetic satisfaction and truth than any explicit monologue about the repression of women could ever do.”



Dragon Age: Inquisition is pretty awesome. But, did you know you could totally play as Daenerys?


Some folks got to test drive Toyota's new fuel cell car, Mirai. They more or less liked it but they've overlooked one significant problem:

New Jurassic Park trailer. 

Saturday, November 22, 2014

11/22/14 Today's Inquiries

2 factor authentication! Lots of reading for you to do today.


The Links:

I'm not going to write a bunch about Obama's immigration reform plan. I honestly don't think it's going to significantly change the lives of many immigrants. For example, see this:
But let’s focus on what is the truly thorny issue, which is what to do about foreigners now working in the US. The Obama promise that he’ll handle the issue “responsibly” is already a big red flag. His high concept proposal:
So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve with been in America more than five years. If you have children who are American citizens or illegal residents. If you register, pass a criminal background check and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes, you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law. That’s what this deal is.
How many people will actually pass this bar? The fact sheet suggests that the number that will qualify is five million (although the , out of a total estimated illegal immigrant population of 11 million. And the main mechanism is the expansion of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program:
DHS will expand the existing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to include more immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. DHS will also create a new deferred action program for people who are parents of U.S. Citizens or Lawful Permanent Residents (LPRs) and have lived in the United States for five years or longer if they register, pass a background check and pay taxes.
Notice this differs from past amnesty programs which required applicants to pay back taxes, an almost impossible bar (I have one acquaintance, an illegal immigrant of 15 years with his own Social Security number who has consistently paid taxes who said he’d be the only person to qualify) in requiring taxes to be paid prospectively. But how many people who have been under the radar can prove they’ve lived in the US for five years?
Of course the right wing will stay classy as always:

There's some crazy stuff going down in Mexico. More here. And do we have a modern day Marie Antoinette?
Imagine, for example, what would happen if Michelle Obama bought a multi-million-dollar mansion from a U.S. government contractor that had just been granted a concession worth billions of dollars in highly suspicious circumstances.
The giant contradiction at the heart of the US economy:
Suppose you told an economist these facts and only these facts: Long-term interest rates have fallen sharply over just a few months. Prices for oil and other much-needed commodities have been in free fall in the face of weak demand. Markets are predicting that inflation will be low in the years ahead and that the central bank will keep interest rates lower for longer.
Knowing only those facts, the economist would conclude that this country was staring down the barrel of a significant economic slowdown, and maybe even a recession.
What would that economist conclude, though, if stock prices are consistently rising toward record highs, job gains are the best in years, corporate sales and profits are rising, and business surveys and other real-time indicators of the economy point to steady expansion?
That country, of course, would seem to have a perfectly strong economic outlook. And as you have surely guessed, both these situations apply to the same country at the same time, which is to say the United States in November 2014.
The liquidity monster that awaits. Alphaville argues that the next financial crisis may stem from a collapse of liquidity following post-crisis regulation and the end of QE. However, he seems to forget that the pinnacle of the 2008 meltdown was a liquidity crisis. Major banks were failing because they nobody was loaning money. The overnight markets basically froze up and Lehman got caught short. It's not just post-crisis regulations and central bank actions that can kill liquidity.

And, Paul Krugman reviews Martin Wolf's new book, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned - and still have to learn - from the Financial Crisis.

34 states saw the unemployment rate decrease in October. Georgia leads the way (in unemployment)!

My days as a pseudo lassiez faire guy are behind me but I agree with what's been written here. Part of the reason we're having a debate about net neutrality now is we don't have a competitive ISP environment. The vast majority of people are limited to 2 choices of ISP, their cable or their phone company. It is that duopoly which allows companies like Verizon and Comcast to abuse their customers and extort content creators. Indeed, many cities are trying to start public networks and find themselves sued by ISPs or blocked by legislation written at the behest of ISPs.

Restrain Regressive Rent Seeking. If you're not familiar, rent seeking is when a company uses its political power, market power, or some other kind of manipulation to extract money from the state and/or customers which it would not otherwise be able to get in e free market. See the post above for a perfect example.

Private prisons, (another great example of rent seeking) have a lot more minorities than our already disproportionate state prison system.

Interesting commentary on Ferguson from Claudia Rankine, who just published her new book, Citizen, an American Lyric.
 I happened to be in St. Louis a week after the Ferguson protests started. So I went to the neighborhood, just to look around, talk to people, try to understand what they were feeling. I knew what I was feeling. I knew there was a simmering rage but also desired to understand what it meant to be living in the midst of that moment...
Those two interactions—they exhausted me. Because they just had a sense of inevitability. It almost felt Greek. Predetermined, and hopeless. And then you had all these police cars with white policemen and policewomen, just sitting inside the cars, looking out at you. It was like you were in a theater, and they were this encased audience. It made me think of Antigone. And so that’s what I’m working on—a rewriting of Antigone, as a way of discussing what it means to decide to engage. The dead body’s in the street. What do you do now? 
The police and national guard are out in full force ahead of the grand jury decision. You have to wonder if this will be a self fulfilling prophesy where the presence of the police creates the conditions for a riot.

Grad students are about to go on strike at the University of Oregon. I don't see this ending well for them. What possible leverage could they have?

It's not just computer science, economics has a lady problem tooAnd congress.

The shittiest places in San Francisco.

How Galileo invented the tyranny of the clock.

Hmm, if this device can turn water into gasoline, can we use it with hydrogen powered vehicles which out put water to make more synthetic gasoline?

Some guy in 1939 wrote a 50,000 word book without using the letter 'E.'

You know, the Bible is really long. I wish there was some kind of truncated version that I could read in a matter of minutes.

Tina Fey has a new show that's going to be on Netflix. I miss 30 Rock so this gets me very excited.

Mindsuckers. Nature's zombies and parasites. Lovely.

Get excited for the next Hobbit movie!

Thursday, November 20, 2014

11/20/14 Today's Inquiries

BBQ Chicken


The Links:

Not that you actually want to watch it, but the big 3 networks aren't going to carry Obama's immigration speech tonight.

Uber behaving badly. (That's 3 links about the same problem.) Overview here.

Are we in for a stock market tumble if companies stop using profits for stock buybacks?
They’re poised to spend $914 billion on share buybacks and dividends this year, or about 95 percent of earnings, data compiled by Bloomberg and S&P Dow Jones Indices show.
Wall St. and China are buying farmland all over the world.

Our climate is totally fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.
So our best-case scenario, which was based on our most optimistic forecasts for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, with all its dire consequences: shifting climatic zones, freshwater shortages, eroding coasts, and ocean acidification, among others. Our reckoning showed that reversing the trend would require both radical technological advances in cheap zero-carbon energy, as well as a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.
The skeptic's guide to institutions.

More guns = more crime.

Are progressives at war with suburbia? Possibly, but I also find it hard to argue against economic incentives tilting toward urban living: high fuel costs, mass transit, stable property markets, more jobs. Arnold Kling adds:
1. The distribution of income both within metro areas and across metro areas is much wider than it was in the 1970s. In the 1970s, Manhattan was not so much richer than State Island. New York was not so much richer than Detroit.
2. Some cities are now “colonial economies” in the sense that they are dominated by businesses owned elsewhere, with few local-owned businesses. He cited St. Louis as an example. When I grew up there, we had McDonnell-Douglas and Monsanto. Now even Anheuser-Busch is not locally owned.
3. So many venture capitalists are in San Francisco that it’s not clear that San Jose is still the capital of Silicon Valley.
4. Whatever happened to the death of distance? It seems that people will pay up to live in cities.
Long term unemployment and new hire wages.
 Overall, there is little evidence in the cross-state data that the long-term unemployed exert less pressure on wages. This finding, as well as the differences between the labor market outcomes of long-term unemployed workers and nonparticipants, suggests that the long-term unemployed should not be dismissed when considering labor market slack. The results also mean that the unusually large gap between short-term and long-term unemployment rates that has existed since the Great Recession doesn’t reduce the ability of the overall unemployment rate to track the state of the economy’s labor market
Where have all the workers gone?
In summary, the number of middle-skill jobs declined substantially during the last recession, and that decline has been persistent—especially for full-time workers. Many of the workers leaving full-time, middle-skill jobs became unemployed, and some of that decline is the result of an increase in part-time employment. But others gained full-time work in other types of occupations. In particular, they are more likely than in the past to transition to higher-skill occupations. Further, the transition rate to high-skill occupations has gradually risen and doesn't appear directly tied to the last recession.
Child homelessness is on the rise. They should get jobs.

Time for fuel cells? Count me in. Eventually.

Meanwhile Britain is powering its buses with shit. Literally.


Computer programmers are starting to join unions hire agents to get them the best jobs. I think this is evidence of falling wages in comp-sci and the highly skilled trying to separate themselves from the pack.

I am going to be building a new computer soon. Here are some of Newegg's sales for black Friday. Any suggestions?

Barbie book about programming has boys do all the coding. You can't make this stuff up.

The economics of Frozen.

Wow:


Also this:


And this:

Monday, November 17, 2014

11/17/14 Today's Inquiries

Long time, no see. I'll try to keep it up more this week but I make no promises.


The Links:

A house is not a credit card. Reinflating the bubble one bad loan at a time. This part is also important to remember:
One of the most abjectly false narratives about the financial crisis is that risky mortgages proliferated so that people who couldn’t afford homes could nonetheless buy them. Modern subprime lending was not about homeownership. Instead, the 1990s crop of subprime mortgage makers allowed people with bad credit to borrow against the equity in their existing homes. According to a joint HUD-Treasury report published in 2000, by 1999, a staggering 82 percent of subprime mortgages were refinancings, and in nearly 60 percent of those cases, the borrower pulled out cash, adding to his debt burden. The report noted that “relatively few subprime mortgages are used to purchase a house.”
Which is good because the Robo-Signers are back! Remember kids, when you create a moral hazard you incentivize the kinds of behavior you ought to be preventing.

So, not only is SCOTUS going to blow up Obama care, but now there's a huge perception problem due to Jonathan Gruber, "architect" or the plan. Tyler Cowen adds "It’s a healthy world where academics can speak their minds at conferences and the like without their words becoming political weapons in a bigger fight." Arnold Kling comments here.

Interesting policy proposals for Social Security which don't involve cutting benefits, raising the eligibility age, or privatizing the system.

A closer look at employment and social insurance.
The paper has two main findings. First, the insurance value of Medicaid is substantial, and decreasing the size of the program would entail large welfare costs in excess of one dollar for every dollar of reduced spending. Second, expanding the size of the program would offer significant insurance value only to wealthy households. The authors conclude that in terms of managing the risks of the elderly, the current scope of Medicaid seems appropriate.
How can those Scandinavians tax so much? They mush hate freedom and happiness. Okay in all seriousness I though this was the important piece:
these countries also spend relatively large amounts on the public provision and subsidization of goods that are complementary to working, including child care, elderly care, and transportation. Such policies represent subsidies to the costs of market work, which encourage labor supply and make taxes less distortionary…Furthermore, Scandinavian countries spend heavily on education, which is complementary to long-run labor supply and potentially offsets some of the distortionary effects of taxation
Meanwhile in the real threat to freedom land, DC police plan on revenue from Civil Asset Forfeiture years in advance. They even put it into their budget forecasts. Wonderful! Evidence that there's basically a quota and cops seize assets purely to fund their departments. Roving brigands!

Uber doesn't need lobbyists, they just get politicians and their staffs to use the service. Crony capitalism for all!

There is privilege and there is privilege and then there's this from George W. Bush:
No, I think you have to earn your way into politics. I don’t think that anything is ever given to you.
You know who makes the 1% look poor? The 0.01%.

The coup at UNC. Many colleges were using funds form their general tuition to increase the amount of financial aid given to low income students (and athletes who don't attend classes). UNC has now put a 15% cap on that amount. The article goes on to discuss the idea of middle class buy-in as essential for progressive agendas to succeed.

Post-mortem on Corinthian Colleges.

We haven't focused much research on the "non-cognitive" skills gaps in low income homes.
While researchers have documented an income-based divergence in the amount of time parents spend with their child, they did not measure the quality of how that time was spent. We do know that economically advantaged parents are able to offer different home environments compared to their lower-income counterparts by committing more quality time and resources to their child’s development.  As Kalil explains in her project description, these differences may “play a role in producing growing gaps in cognitive and non-cognitive skills, producing a feedback cycle that leads to low socioeconomic mobility and further growing inequality.”
How we tried to prevent incidents at hacker camp and failed.
Over the last summer, I volunteered with the safer spaces team of a European hacker camp, trying to prevent and deal with any incidents that could arise from putting approximately 1000 mostly white, mostly men in a field. 
Life imitates Wag the Dog.

1 in 5 Americans are a grammar nazi.

"LaShamanda has a heterozygous big bootie, the dominant trait. Her man Fontavius has a small bootie which is recessive. They get married and have a baby named LaPrincess," the biology assignment prompts students.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/11/14/5314339/bootie-problem-at-cms-mom-says.html#.VGnvPodh1E4#storylink=cpy

Dr. Oz's twitter train wreck. There's no place like the internet.

Smartphone use is causing parents to pay less attention to their children which is in turn causing more injuries among children. Another spurious correlation nominee?

The Onion and A.V. Club may be preparing to go up for sale. Well, it's been a great ride.

Umbrellas are boring, what if you used a laser to vaporize incoming rain droplets?

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

11/12/14 Today's Inquiries

Arctic Outbreak 2: Pig in the City


The Links:


The more recent CPS data suggest that overall wage growth has picked up during the last year and that the wage growth gap has closed a bit, which are encouraging findings. But the wage growth of part-time workers, as a group, continues to lag well behind that of full-time workers. The relatively low wage growth of part-time workers heightens the importance of the fact that the number of people working part-time—especially involuntarily part-time—remains elevated.


"The banks have been allowed to investigate themselves," one source familiar with the investigation told Reuters. "The investigated decide what they want to investigate, what they admit to, and how much they will pay."
 Walker's hustle and charisma aren't the only reasons for his fame. Walker is black. In Silicon Valley, even in 2014, a visible, successful African-American is big news. The technology industry's lack of minority representation is deplorable. Venture capitalists, startup founders, and big-time CEOs like to brag that the tech business is a color-blind meritocracy, but their boasts don't reflect the facts.

Tough times for Walmart. And here's why it seems like they never have enough checkout isles open:
Some retail analysts say these problems stem from Walmart’s failure to have enough employees in its stores to do the many chores needed, like marking down aging items, rotating milk or getting needed goods from the back room to stock shelves.
“Labor hours have been cut so thin, that they don’t have the people to do many activities,” said Burt P. Flickinger III, a retail consultant. “The fact that they don’t do some of these things every day, every shift, shows what a complete breakdown Walmart has in staffing and training.”
It looks like there's a move to focus on where teacher are assigned to teach. Basically, policy makers are starting to realize teachers want to work in good schools where there are lots of resources and little top-down management. The solution is to force teachers into bad schools. 


Indeed, a random imbalance will be detected after some time and all anticonformist individuals will tend to disalign to this trend, regardless of the fact that an increasing proportion of them do and therefore yield a clear bias towards the opposite trend. This will be detected at later times, leading to a reciprocal switch, and these oscillations will periodically repeat. Despite their efforts, at all times, anticonformists fail being disaligned with the majority.
I wonder if Walt Whitman would qualify as a hipster? At 39, he was broke, unemployed, and living with is mom. 

Wow, just wow. 

This guy might be the Frank Reynolds of Japan. 


Monday, November 10, 2014

11/10/14 Today's Inquiries

A glorious PB&J sandwich!


The Links:

More John Oliver love. Maybe it's easy to be right all the time when the world is completely insane.


I'm shocked, shocked, that casinos "accidentally" sent a bunch of promotional emails to compulsive gamblers.

Parents continue to rebel against common core testing.

Several popular food writers have an op-ed in the Washington Post about needing a national food policy. They note, however,
in February the president signed yet another business-as-usual farm bill, which continues to encourage the dumping of cheap but unhealthy calories in the supermarket.
I don't know about you but that sounds like a food policy. It's not the policy that benefits the citizens or is good for public health but it's a food policy.

The IMF evaluates 2010's austerity measures in Europe.
IMF advocacy of fiscal consolidation proved to be premature for major advanced economies, as growth projections turned out to be optimistic. Moreover, the policy mix of fiscal consolidation coupled with monetary expansion that the IMF advocated for advanced economies since 2010 appears to be at odds with longstanding assessments of the relative effectiveness of these policies in the conditions prevailing after a financial crisis characterized by private debt overhang.
Good news, we're on track to have the best year for employment since 1999. Moreover, the public sector is poised to add jobs for the first time since 2008. Good thing we just elected a bunch of republicans. We'll be back in recession in no time.

Speaking of the GOP, that whole keystone XL thing may not add up to be as good for our economy as previously thought.

All the President's Bullshit. Sullivan concludes:
This is exactly what we elected Obama to prevent, not to enable. But the war machine outlasts any president. And it has too easily coopted this one already.
Uber is recruiting 50,000 veterans as wage slaves drivers. There's nothing better than taking advantage of a vulnerable population. Next they'll be loaning them cars and garnishing the fares until the rivers pay off the vehicle.

Cloud storage is pretty much free these days and cloud computing is becoming cheaper quickly. So, are lots of tech companies going to go out of business?

A study of the economic consequences of sexual violence.
The findings suggest that sexual assault and the related trauma response can disrupt survivors' employment in several ways, including time off, diminished performance, job loss, and inability to work.
A study which argues social skills and cognitive skills are complimentary.
employment in and earnings premiums to occupations requiring high levels of both cognitive and social skill grew substantially compared with occupations that require only one or neither type of skill, and this emerging feature of the labor market has persisted into the new millennium.
The NSA is hiring graphic designers.

Breitbart doesn't let facts get in the way of a great story.

A tumblr of what various literary figures would order from Starbucks.
Jane Eyre goes up to the counter and orders a venti earl grey tea. It is raining outside. The barista is ugly and cold to her, but she falls in love with him anyway. There is a banging from the back room of the Starbucks, but the barista seems unconcerned. “It won’t affect me bringing you your coffee,” he assures Jane. He is wrong about this. 
This note card is a review of Interstellar:

Sunday, November 9, 2014

11/9/14 Today's Inquiries

Sorry for the infrequent posts. 12 hour shifts are really starting to wear me down.


Live from PMC's Emergency Department, The Links:

Matt Taibbi has yet another article detailing the utter failure of our government to regulate the financial sector. The piece is too long to excerpt but I highly recommend reading it. Just be prepared for some outrage because the "business as usual" of our outgoing Attorney General is to give preferential treatment to the bankers and wealthy. More here.

Understanding and overcoming America's Plutocracy.

Politics vs policy. Sadly, we get the government we elect and we elect people based on politics and rhetoric.

Although, voter suppression helped produce the lowest turnout in decades.

Free Exchange looks at this week's pretty decent jobs report.

A wonky report on the effects of QE and the importance of the zero-lower-bound.
n December 2008, the Fed lowered the federal funds rate to essentially zero and has kept it there since then. This column argues that, contrary to traditional macroeconomic thinking, monetary policy has not been severely constrained by the zero bound until mid-2011. The results imply that the Fed could have done more to ease monetary policy between 2009 and 2011. These findings could also help explain why the fiscal stimulus package adopted in 2009 did not bring the expected success.    
Rich countries should absorb more immigrants. Of course, we'll probably only get the H1B high skilled ones and not the broad population which would truly benefit the economy.
As an economist, I see an obvious solution: Relatively underpopulated and highly developed countries could profitably take in young Africans and South Asians — and both sides would gain. Yet it’s far from clear that all nations that could benefit from this policy would entertain it, partly because of persistent racial and cultural bias. There is also the legitimate question of how quickly immigrants can adjust to new environments, especially if they are arriving with weak educational backgrounds as the job market demands ever-stronger skills.
Obamacare might be toast because SCOTUS is going to hear King v Burwell. The assumption seems to be that 4 justices are absolutely convinced the law is wrong and Kennedy and Roberts aren't easy to read. More here.

Challenging the market for professional master's degrees. I think these kinds of programs are more likely to succeed than full on MOOCs.
The obvious next target for boot camps is the expanding market for professional master’s degrees. This is really a case of one for-profit business competing with another—master’s degrees are market-priced revenue generators for “nonprofit” colleges and are treated as such. If more employers send the signal that “college degrees are not the primary qualification,” there could be a great many more students who decide that $8,000 for three months of intensive work is a much better deal than $50,000 for a master’s degree of questionable quality.
Female academics ought to dress conservatively and other forms of gender repression.

Why do some people long for the Islamic caliphate?

Commercial security at the birth or writing, arithmetic, and religion in ancient Sumer.
It is five thousand years ago, and you pace fretfully in your office. Located in the temple of the great goddess Inanna in ancient Nippur (now in Iraq) you are buried, not in a blizzard of paper, but an avalanche of clay. You fret. You have entrusted a valuable cargo of sheep, barley, and beer to a crusty group of sailors from the Baba Temple in the nearby Lagash[5]. These navy types are far from pious devotees of the goddess Inanna and the great god Enlil with whom you are familiar.The sailors' job, and your payoff -- take the goods down the Persian Gulf and across the sea to Mohenjo-Daro, in the valley of the Indus River (in modern Pakistan). There they will be delivered to your old friend, a trusted agent of Inanna, and sold to the locals for a very substantial amount of silver.
Will the sailors get hungry and eat the sheep and barley? Party and drink the beer? Get nasty and poison the lot, throwing disrepute on the great goddess Inanna? Perhaps they will get clever and water down the beer -- or get still more clever and resell your high-quality goods under the name of their crude god.
You needn't worry so much. Long-distance commerce may be a novelty, but you have the clay.
Harvard secretly installed cameras in classrooms to see if the 1% were going to class.

Some guy is blogging his playthrough of Fable and it's pretty fun to read.
Age: 10
Alignment: grudgingly generous
Family: entitled and gullible
Today is my sister’s birthday. I know this not because I have some superhuman memory for trivial facts but because she hasn’t shut her stupid mouth about it for a month. She keeps reminding me that I forgot last year, which is factually inaccurate. I didn’t forget, I just didn’t get her anything. Dad wants to know what I’m getting for her this year.
A mule has made it to the US dressage finals for the first time ever. At least there is equine upward mobility.

Movieflim awesomeness:


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Now on Netflix!

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Didn't they do this with that Doom movie?

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Oh the memories!

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Thursday, November 6, 2014

11/6/14 Today's Inquiries

Another glorious day in Appalachia.


The Links:

The country continues to digest the election results. Obama vows to work with the GOP. Great, we now have a republican House, Senate, and White House.

Maybe overstating it a bit: the 2014 midterms were a Red Wedding for the Democrats. 

The message in republican victory speeches. And, will they axe the ACA?

Republicans also gained historic majorities in state legislatures.

Who are the 1% of voters who said the economy is in excellent shape during exit polling?

The Cleveland Fed notes the slow recovery in wages and salaries despite improving job growth.
It may seem counterintuitive that wages and salaries are growing the slowest in industries where jobs are growing the fastest, but it actually is not. It is primarily due to the wide variance in jobs in the service sector. Some service jobs, such as high-tech professionals, health service professionals, and engineers, have higher barriers to entry, including the need to acquire more training and credentials. Many others, such as some jobs in leisure and hospitality and wholesale and retail trade, have much lower barriers to entry than the high-skilled, high-tech positions that are being created in the skilled manufacturing and construction sectors. And because these high-skilled jobs continue to increase in demand, average wage and salary rates have risen faster than they have in the lower-skilled sectors.

How does the shape of a city affect the economic prospects of its residents? She studies cities in India and comes to many of the same conclusions that we find in the US, especially San Francisco.
Cities with more compact shapes are characterized by larger population, lower wages, and higher housing rents, consistent with compact shape being a consumption amenity. The implied welfare cost of deteriorating city shape is estimated to be sizeable. I also attempt to shed light on policy responses to deteriorating shape. The adverse e§ects of unfavorable topography appear to be exacerbated by building height restrictions, and mitigated by road infrastructure. 
The FBI, who are legally allowed to spy on US citizens, is trying to change the way warrants work.
The provision, known as Rule 41 of the federal rules of criminal procedure, typically allows judges to issue search warrants only within their judicial district. But the government has asked to alter this restriction to allow judges to approve electronic surveillance to find and search a computer's contents regardless of its physical location, even if the device is suspected of being abroad.
One education startup us trying to train teachers like designers. Are there any designers that have a starting salary of $32,000?

The Crash Course series of 10 minute educational videos is going to be produced and distributed by PBS now. If you haven't checked them out, they're a really great tool for introducing or reviewing a variety of subjects.

A comic that explores the dark side of gold farming in MMOs.

And, 90 seconds of Skeletor insults:


Wednesday, November 5, 2014

11/5/14 Today's Inquiries

Wasn't there something I was supposed to remember about today?


The Links:

Election results. It wasn't a good night for the democrats who lost control of their senate majority.



New Republic says the electorate is being shaped by irrational fears.

A tale of two voting precincts. Bel-Air vs the rest of America.

The political bias of workers in various professions.


A Reddit thread on corporate darwin awards. I liked this one:
Eddie Lampert, the CEO of Sears is one of the best contenders for the Corporate Darwin Award. He’s an Ayn Rand-loving, free-market ideologist who attempted to take his non-reality-based style of life out of the lobbyist/Congress rigged world of hedge funds and into retail. He laid off, cut, and trimmed back everything he could and forced departments, managers, and employees to fight against each other for resources and pay under the delusion that the company would benefit from a survival of the fittest atmosphere. Since that time, Sears has lost half its value in five years and has closed more than half of its stores, not to mention just about destroyed one of the oldest and most trusted brands in the history of the United States.
Income inequality across cities.
Our findings {s}hows that negative labor market conditions, concentration of skilled workers
and racial segregation are positively associated with the level of income inequality. The level
of inequality in these cites also tends to rise grow at a faster pace. While differences in the minimum
wage level do not seem to have any association with income inequality across cities, we find some evidence that differences in unemployment insurance benefits and greater unionization lowered increases in the income inequality.
Paul Krugman wants to know why we don't see more economic populism.

Good map:

Secular Humanism is ruled a religion by federal district court judge. Is this really a good thing for atheists? Can I be an atheist and not a secular humanist?

There are big cities in the US where a third or more of the households don't have internet access. Nationwide the gap is about 20% without internet access. Just think of how much our society expects it's productive members to use online services!

Understanding those pesky terms of service.

Ridley Scott is going to make 3001: The Final Odyssey.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

11/4/14 Today's Inquiries

I think the trees officially have more barren branches than fall colored ones. Oh, and go vote.


The Links:

Tom Magliozzi, co-host of car talk, has died. Ray reportedly says "don't die like my brother."

The benefits of two of the greatest public health victories of the last 50 years, car safety and reduced smoking, are being completely undone by obesity and drug abuse. USA! USA!

Inequality in countries transitioning from the former Soviet Union to market economies.
Most people’s expectations on November 9,  1989 were that the newly-brought capitalism will result in economic convergence with the rest of Europe, moderate increase in inequality, and consolidated democracy. They are fulfilled most likely in only one country (Poland), and at the very most in another, rather small,  two. Their total populations are  42 million, or some 10% of all former Communist countries. Thus, 1 out of 10 people living in “transition”  countries could be said to have “transitioned” to the capitalism that was promised by the ideologues who waxed about the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.
The capitalism question.
That's a cheap shot. But it's consistent with a wider and more important trend, embodied in talk of secular stagnation and an end (pdf) to growth - that capitalism has lost its dynamism lately.
Hand to Mouth and the rationality of the poor. Discusses this interview:


The head of GCHQ says that US tech companies are the command and control center of global terrorism. Let's invade Silicon Valley.

Old white guys are buying today's midterm election.

See also, John Oliver:


I really need to buy some marijuana and marijuana distribution stocks. As more states legalize, there's going to be a ton of growth.

I'm a fan of the Civilization games. It's nice to finally know why Ghandi is such an asshole.

This is the internet. Cats must be linked. "With fur measuring more than 10 inches long, Sophie now holds the Guinness World Record for longest fur on a cat, a title that previously belonged to Internet sensation Colonel Meow."

Monday, November 3, 2014

11/3/14 Today's Inquiries

Live from my basement!


The Links:

Is the Pope Catholic enough for conservatives? Bears no longer shitting in the woods.
Last weekend Australian Cardinal George Pell unnecessarily reminded his congregants not only that Pope Francis is the 266th Pope, but also that “history has seen 37 false or antipopes.” Antipopes? Does Cardinal Pell intend to hint that Francis isn’t a true Pope? 
Nifty .gif
source: http://tipstrategies.com/geography-of-jobs/


The Inheritance Economy. More sad in our future.
Even as most younger Americans struggle to obtain decent jobs and secure property, the Welfare Institute concluded, America is moving toward an “inheritance-based economy” where access to the last generation’s wealth could prove a critical determinant of both influence and power.
How an eBay founder changed from an average democrat into the leader of an insurgency.

What Shakespeare can teach you about the collapse of feudalism and emergence of capitalism.
If you interrogate Shakespeare through his texts, and ask, what is different between the past and now, the implicit answer is “ideas”. Human beings value each other more; love is more important than family duty; human values like truth, science and justice are worth dying for far more than race or nation...
But we also need Marx. In a materialist view of history, what’s different between feudalism and early merchant capitalism is not just “ideas”. Social relations have changed. The market has begun to dictate how society functions. And at root, the change is driven by new technologies.

Life imitates art, namely Dave Eggers.

Also, Arnold Kling is mostly correct, again. The only area of disagreement I have is his blame on the "affordable housing lobby."

Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant, has something in common with Enron.
Alibaba uses what is called a variable interest entity (VIE) structure, which has its roots in the collapse of the energy giant Enron in 2001 and could likewise be the downfall of investors in Alibaba and other Chinese stocks.
Teach for America, meanwhile, has something in common with Scientology. They actively suppress criticism of the organization. You know, for the kids.
According to its last three years of available tax filings, Teach For America has spent nearly $3.5 million in advertising and promotion. As the strategy memo indicates, much of this promotion goes toward attacking journalists, including ones previously published in this magazine. The memo details the numerous steps TFA’s communications team took in order to counter Alexandra Hootnick’s recent piece for the The Nation, “Teachers Are Losing Their Jobs, but Teach For America Is Expanding. What’s Wrong With That?
That guy in the elevator with Obama got fired.
ATLANTA — Kenneth Tate toiled for years as a construction worker and corrections officer, and he has no doubt that his last job — working as a $42,000-a-year private security guard at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — was the best he ever had.
The high point was an afternoon seven weeks ago when he was assigned to accompany President Obama, who was visiting the agency’s headquarters here for a briefing on the Ebola epidemic. It was not only that Mr. Tate’s bosses had entrusted him with staying close to such an important dignitary. It was that, as an African-American born in Chicago, he was going to meet the nation’s first black president, a man he deeply admired.
But by the time Mr. Obama’s visit was over, Mr. Tate was on the way to losing his job.
More on neo-fascism in Silicon Valley. It's starting to sound a little shrill and conspiratorial but then I remember recent events.

American Machiavelli: A grand unifying theory of post-war conservatism.
These appear to be a variety of different and even paradoxical problems—how can our politics be both too extreme and too consensual? Yet one writer’s work pulls all this into focus. He was one of the key thinkers of the postwar conservative movement, though his thought is badly neglected on the right today. The man whose mind explains our politics today and suggests a diagnosis—if not a cure—for our condition is James Burnham. Once a Marxist, he became the American Machiavelli, master analyst of the oligarchic nature of power in his day and ours.
What if people's incomes appeared around them as cash in real time? How much would you need to make to be in real trouble?